Special event: here are the iPhones 8/8 Plus, with new glass design and wireless charging

Tim Cook’s words: Nothing in the industry has put as much power in people’s hands as the iPhone. Difficult to contest, isn’t it?

These ten years of innovation have brought us to the moment we live in today – starting with the new iPhone 8. Let me know if you’ve seen it before.

iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus from behind in golden color

The new iPhones 8 and 8 Plus, presented by Phil Schiller, have a new design, with glass on the front and back; and the colors we already know – silver, space gray and gold (the latter with a new finish). The glass in the new devices is not just any glass: according to Apple, it is the most durable glass ever placed on a smartphone. The screens – which remain, respectively, 4.7 and 5.5 inches and the same resolutions – bring True Tone technology for the first time on an Apple smartphone.

Golden iPhone 8 and silver iPhone 8 Plus viewed from the front at an angle

Within the new devices, we have a new processor, called A11 Bionic. It is a six-core design – two high-performance and four high-efficiency, which work independently and allow the chip to perform 40% higher than the A10X. The graphics chip designed by Apple itself – goodbye, Imagination Technologies! – is 30% faster and optimized for complex graphics games and apps.

Games running on the iPhone 8 A11 Bionic chip

On the iPhone 8, we have a brand new 12 megapixel sensor with an improved Image Signal Processor for low-light photos, with more pixel sharpness and noise reduction in photographs. On the iPhone 8 Plus, as the costume says, we have the dual camera system – here, there are two 12 megapixel sensors, one with f / 1.8 aperture and the other with f / 2.8. The portrait mode of the larger model has also been improved, with a new mode called Portrait Lighting which detects the face photographed with machine learning technologies and allows the different elements – face and background – to be edited separately, even long after the photo is taken.

Silver iPhone 8 Plus seen from behind

Augmented reality (AR) on iPhone 8

As the future is wireless, as Schiller himself said, here we have the latest wireless communication technologies – in addition to good Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0 and everything else, we have, as speculated, support for wireless charging.

Unfortunately, it’s not yet this time that we’ve seen unprecedented contactless charging technology, but luckily Apple has adopted the Qi standard for charging – which is the most widely used worldwide (meaning, yes, you can charge your iPhone 8 on existing chargers designed for Android smartphones). Apple is working with the Qi consortium to spread the technology even further – on coffee tables and restaurants, in cars or in airport waiting rooms, for example.

iPhone 8 wirelessly charging on a generic white base

The iPhone 8 comes in 64GB and 256GB models, starting at $ 700; the iPhone 8 Plus, in turn, comes in the same capacities and starts at $ 800. The pre-sale will start this Friday, the 15th, while the official launch will be on Friday, next week, the 22nd.