Apple iPhone 16e review: The best value iPhone

I love a good budget phone and the Apple iPhone 16e is one of the best around. It may not come with all the latest bells and whistles, but for most people, Apple’s latest low-cost handset is all the smartphone they will ever need. Not only is it fast, it includes a cracking camera and has a lovely design, but it also fixes the one big problem that has prevented me recommending the iPhone SE (the 16e’s predecessor) in recent years: battery life.

For those who have an unhealthy lust for Apple hardware, but not the bank balance to match, this is a big deal. Even the best iPhone SE for battery life – the 2020 model – would struggle to last a full day of use without requiring a top up. The iPhone 16e, on the other hand, is a phone that will deliver stamina more in the range of a standard phone. It still won’t match the longest lasting Android handsets or the longest lasting iPhones, but it’s much, much more usable than the old SE models.

Check price at John Lewis

Apple iPhone 16e review: What you need to know

Despite Apple retiring the SE name, the iPhone 16e is basically the same product. It sits at the bottom of the iPhone range and is the most affordable phone that Apple now makes.

Surprisingly, though, it very much looks like a modern iPhone. The chunky forehead and chin bezels of the old SE have been replaced by a 6.1in edge-to-edge display, surrounded with equidistant bezels wrapping around the whole phone.

Cast an eye towards the top edge and you’ll spy an old-style bathtub notch, which we haven’t seen on an iPhone since the iPhone 14, and a glance at the bottom will reveal that the Home button and Touch ID sensor has been binned in favour of Face ID unlocking.

At the rear of the phone is a single camera lens, as before – the same 48-megapixel f/1.6 camera as the current generation iPhone 16. And inside, Apple has implemented the A18 processor, again the same as the chip inside the pricier iPhone 16, albeit shorn of one GPU core.

So what other differences are there? The iPhone 16 has the slimmer, more compact Dynamic Island front camera surround, an extra ultrawide camera on the rear, a dedicated camera shutter button and MagSafe wireless charging. The iPhone 16’s display is superior with a refresh rate of 120Hz vs 60Hz on the iPhone 16e, and you can also buy the iPhone 16 in a variety of bold colours, where the iPhone 16e is only available in black or white.

Apple iPhone 16e review: Price and competition

The iPhone 16e isn’t, alas, quite as cheap as the old model, although that’s to be expected really, given that the iPhone SE 3 was released back in 2022. You’re also getting a much more modern phone here, with twice the amount of storage, far better battery life, a superior camera and much faster performance.

The base iPhone 16e phone starts at £599 and, for that money, you’re getting 128GB of storage, 8GB of RAM and the 6-core Apple A18 processor with a 4-core GPU. The iPhone 16 is £100 more expensive for this same core spec.

If it’s a current range iPhone you want, the 16e provides the biggest bang for your buck in my opinion. You could opt for a refurbished iPhone 14 in perfect condition for around £470, which has the same chassis as this phone, plus an extra ultrawide camera on the rear. Bear in mind, though, that the iPhone 14 comes with a slower A15 processor, doesn’t support Apple Intelligence and won’t get OS and security updates for as long as the 16e – although it’s likely to provide support until at least 2028.

If you’re not an iPhone diehard and you’re just looking for the best value for money, however, it’s well worth considering a few other options from the world of Android phones:

• Top of your list should be the Google Pixel 8a. For £100 less, you’re getting a great phone with great battery life, an ultrawide camera to go with its superb main wide camera and seven years of OS and security updates. Rumours suggest this will be replaced by the Pixel 9a soon, though, so you might want to hold onto your cash before splashing out
• For even better value, though, why not consider spending a mere £329 on the Nothing Phone (3a), a phone with a bigger 6.8in screen and not one, or even two, but three cameras on the rear, including a 2x telephoto lens – a feature that’s pretty much unheard of at this price

Check price at Apple

Apple iPhone 16e review: Design

There isn’t much to say about the design of the iPhone 16e that hasn’t been said before. Physically, it’s essentially an iPhone 14 shorn of its ultrawide camera, but there are some other subtle differences here that are worth taking note of. Number one is that the iPhone 16e is equipped with USB-C where the 14 was still stuck with Lightning.

That’s obviously great for convenience, as you can use most any cables and chargers you might have lying around. Alas, in this case, charging is no quicker – it will still get to only 50% in 30 minutes, which is sluggish by today’s standards – and although the iPhone 16e does have wireless charging, it isn’t MagSafe, so you’ll be missing out on 15W speeds. Qi charging on the iPhone 16e is limited to 7.5W.

The other difference is that the old mute switch has been replaced with the new Action Button. By default, this does exactly the same thing, except you press and hold instead of flicking a switch – but the bonus extra feature is that you can customise what you do with it, according to your needs. So if you’d rather use it to quickly toggle the torch on and off or to launch the camera, then you can do that. A positive change for the better.

Measurements wise, though, the iPhone 16e is no different to the 14, 15 and 16. It measures 72mm wide, 147mm tall and 7.8mm thick (not including the camera bump). It weighs 167g, and protecting the screen at the front glass is scratch- and scuff-resistant Ceramic Shield glass. The rear has a smooth, matte finish glass but it’s not as tough as the Ceramic shield glass on the front, so it’s probably advisable to purchase a case of some kind. But you were going to do that anyway, weren’t you?

READ NEXT: Best budget smartphone

Apple iPhone 16e review: Display

Underneath that tough glass at the front is a display I’ve become familiar with over the years: a Super Retina XDR OLED panel with a resolution of 1,170 x 2,532 and a peak brightness rating of 1,200cd/m² when playing back HDR material.

It’s a good looking screen that performed well in our tests, reaching peak HDR brightness of 1,123cd/m² as far as I was able to measure it. Contrast is naturally perfect, thanks to the OLED display’s self-emissive pixels, and colour accuracy is excellent, too. With standard dynamic range content and the DisplayCal calibration software I measured deltaE (error) levels at below one, which is superb.

Eagle-eyed iPhone followers will also have spotted that this is one of the older style displays that refreshes at only 60Hz, which is a compromise that I don’t think Apple should have made. It’s immediately noticeable the moment you pick up the phone – scrolling, UI animations and screen to screen transitions look juddery next to the iPhone 16 Plus I’m comparing it with – and it takes the shine off what would otherwise be a basically flawless performance.

Check price at John Lewis

Apple iPhone 16e review: Software

Where Apple hasn’t scrimped, oddly enough, is the software side of things, although I’m not sure it’s made the right choice here. Apple seems to have pushed hard to get Apple Intelligence into the iPhone 16e and that’s understandable. Generative AI is an arms race right now and Apple wants every possible user exposed to it.

However, I haven’t found myself overly impressed so far with what Apple Intelligence delivers. I like the new, more natural sounding Siri and its ability to interface with ChatGPT and what’s on screen but it’s still a bit painful to get it to do anything useful or deliver useful answers. You have to know what it’s good at and what it works with before you can even begin to get anything workable from it and even then, there’s still a lot of digital shoulder-shrugging from Siri.

I like Apple Intelligence’s writing tools, or at least the idea of them – particularly the proofread tool, which can rid your text of typos – but these only work in Apple apps such as Safari, Notes and Mail – when you can hop from Mail to Gmail to Outlook and WhatsApp in quick succession, replying to emails and crafting messages, you want your AI tools to be able to do the same. That they can’t means I’ll use them less than I otherwise would have.

Other Apple Intelligence tools are simply behind the curve. For instance, you now have the option to summarise long email chains and to have priority emails appear at the top of your inbox. Those are useful tools in certain situations, but we’ve been able to do this in the Gmail app for years now and, again, you can’t use it in third party applications like WhatsApp.

Apple’s Visual Intelligence feature is here, too, which lets you take pictures of things and search for them via Google image search. It works well enough but, again, it isn’t super consistent. For instance, I took a picture of the rear of the iPhone 16e and it thought it was the iPhone SE (2020); our phones editor, Ben Johnston had better luck with Google’s own Circle to Search feature, which worked perfectly on the actual iPhone SE.

One of the most useful features in Apple Intelligence is Clean Up – but again, this feature is available on other smartphone platforms and has been for a while now. It does a reasonable job of removing distractions from your photos but it fails as often as it succeeds. And while the transcription features in Notes, Phone and Voice Memo apps could be useful, I’ve found the text they produce is often unreadable and totally garbled. You certainly wouldn’t want to rely on it to produce intelligible notes or accurate quotes for you in an interview situation – think of it like an index you can scan to get to the right place in your audio, it’s no more useful than that.

Apple iPhone 16e review: Camera

Just like previous iPhone SE models, the iPhone 16e comes with just one camera on the rear. It’s a 48-megapixel f/1.6 camera with phase-detect autofocus and OIS (optical image stabilisation) and it can shoot 4K Dolby Vision video footage at up to 60fps, fully stabilised.

It’s a great camera. No doubt about that, and it looks like it uses the same hardware as the iPhone 16 range; I’ve been using the iPhone 16 Plus as my daily driver for the past few months and I haven’t had any issues with it – apart from the fact that it lacks an optical telephoto camera.

Except that the photos produced by the iPhone 16e are quite different, even with the same settings as the iPhone 16 Plus. To the untrained eye, the photographs the 16e produces are all but identical to those the 16 Plus captures, but close inspection reveals that the iPhone 16e’s photos have a warmer white point and have been processed in a different way.

If you look close, you’ll see some very odd sharpening artifacts appearing in certain parts of photos. This chap’s face looks like it’s been filtered with a stippled paintbrush effect, and you can see the same phenomenon in other images. This doesn’t affect photographs captured with the iPhone 16 Plus.

Largely, though, when you’re not pixel peeping, images look pretty impressive. They’re sharp, packed with detail and colours, and low light imagery is just as impressive.

As for video footage, there’s still nothing at this price point that can quite compare with the iPhone 16e’s 4K Dolby Vision capture. If you own an Apple TV and a decent Dolby Vision capable TV, home movies look simply stunning captured with this phone.

Check price at Apple

Apple iPhone 16e review: Performance and battery life

Just as with the camera, there are differences between the iPhone 16e’s performance levels and the iPhone 16, despite the fact that both phones are running Apple’s A18 processor.

That’s because the A18 in the 16e only has 4 GPU cores, while the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus have five. You can see the difference by looking at the GFXBench scores in the charts below. Will that make much difference in the overall scheme of things? Probably not.

I never felt the phone lacked for out and out power and since the display is capped at 60Hz, it’s not as if you’ll be able to make the most of a faster GPU anyway.

As for battery life, that’s a lot better than previous iPhone SE models  and it even manages to surpass the iPhone 16. In fact, in my tests, the iPhone 16e lasted 22hrs 38mins in our video playback test while the iPhone 16 went for 25hrs 46mins. That’s not as good as the iPhone 16 but still a good result in the context of previous iPhone SE phones, and easily good enough to last a full day of moderate use.

Check price at John Lewis

Apple iPhone 16e review: Verdict

The Apple iPhone 16e is, as I said at the top of this review, Apple’s best value smartphone. Yes, it misses out on some core features, and yes there’s a good choice of Android phones that are better equipped than it.

I’d certainly recommend you at least consider the Google Pixel 8a or its impending replacement before laying down your cash. You’ll get a phone with a higher refresh rate display, equally good battery life and a more flexible array of cameras.

However, if you’re desperate for an Apple handset, this is a much better bet than the old SE models and offers superior value for money than the iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Plus.