KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 19 — Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus look a lot like last year's iPhones and yes, they seem a lot less exciting than the iPhone X.

Does that mean they matter less? I'd say there's still a lot to like about these two phones and the 8 just might be the right (iPhone) number for you.

What's inside matters

Take the iPhone 8 apart and the most notable new addition is the A11 Bionic processor that all the three new iPhones have in common. This chip is a beast, no exaggeration.

In various benchmark tests run by people who are importantly not Apple, the A11 Bionic is currently the best performing chip on a smartphone right now.

4.7-inch Retina or 5.5-inch instead? Either way they're both nice to look at even if they're not OLED screens. — Pictures by Erna Mahyuni

Funnily enough, the best performing iPhone is not the X in said tests — it's the iPhone 8 Plus. Go figure.

Besides the chip which is said to be almost twice as fast as the iPhone 7 and yet more power-efficient, Apple has also created its own graphics chip to give it even more of a performance edge.

Even the camera chip gets an upgrade, but we'll talk about how good the photos are later. In essence, internally, the iPhone 8 didn't get just a tweak but more like one heck of a turbo boost.

Hello, glass of my nightmares

The glass back now allows for wireless charging, which is nice in theory.

Remember when Apple first started using glass screens and Low Yat phone repair shops wept in joy because of all the extra income? Now there's glass in the back too and apparently there's a very good reason for it even if it makes me clutch at my heart and wallet.

Having a glass back is the only way to enable wireless charging. There's also the plus point of no longer needing an ugly antenna strip. It's glass in front, glass in back and pretty aluminium sides.

Of the three colours — gold, slate grey, and silver — I personally prefer the sheen of silver. It's something like polished marble or moonstone but if you wanted black, well, the "grey” is the next best thing. As for the gold, it's more of a burnished pink to be honest.

No sexy edge-to-edge screen here though. It's that same-old home button at the bottom and the white strip on top for the front camera and if you just wanted a familiar experience, then this might work for you.

Day-to-day

The Portrait mode now works better in low-light, as you can see in this unedited but still very detailed shot of my cat Momo.

The new iOS 11 takes some getting used to. What was installed on the phone I was testing tended to be buggy — with my camera blacking out and occasionally my screen would be unresponsive.

Two updates later and the software is working fine and most of the bugs seem to have been ironed out.

Battery life has improved with each update, with the iPhone 8's battery lasting far longer than the iPhone 7. The phone lasted at least two hours longer than the iPhone 7 on standby but if you want a champion to last you the whole day, the iPhone 8 Plus is still the better option.

As for the charger, the Belkin wireless charger was nice but slow to charge. I found it faster to use the standard Lightning cable instead but if I just wanted to rest my phone on the surface, why not rest it on a surface that charges the phone at the same time right? One slight annoyance is that the new iPhones support fast charging but don't come with a fast charger — you'll need to go buy one.

I also liked the True Tone feature on the display — it adjusts the light on your iPhone to match ambient lighting. Thus your screen will light up differently outdoors and indoors, depending on what lighting is around. It's a lot easier on your eyes but you can also turn it off if you don't enjoy it.

The speakers are also louder and better sounding than last year's iPhones, which is saying something as those were pretty good speakers.

Camera, oh camera

If you want a better camera, it's obvious you should plump for the Plus.

Let's be real: the average, non-fussy person will mostly be using a smartphone to take photos of the finer things in life — pets and food. Of course, the iPhone, like most smartphones performs best outdoors with plenty of natural lighting. But there's a marked improvement in lower-light photography particularly with the iPhone 8 Plus.

Before, I like the 7 Plus' portrait mode but it was fiddly and frustrating. It wouldn't work well, or sometimes at all, in lower light and sometimes the subject would have feathering around the edges like a poor Photoshop job.

After taking way too many portraits of my pets and hapless friends/victims, I conclude the new portrait mode is a lot smarter, with less feathering around my subject's edges. In other modes, detail and contrast has also improved.

Hair in particular is captured better, with better sharpness while skintones as always are rendered pretty accurately. I have a soft spot for Apple's approach to skintones — there's more colour accuracy especially with darker skintones.

In contrast, most East Asian phonemakers keep trying to make everyone look fairer in selfie photos which is rather annoying.

The new feature, Portrait Lighting, makes even the dullest of portrait-mode photos look better lit. It's also the feature most likely to make people go "ooh” as it is rather impressive to be able to emulate different lighting modes in a picture without actually having to physically set up said lighting conditions.

Why the 8 Plus over the 8 if you want a better camera? Well, the 8 Plus has a telephoto lens which means you get some optical zoom -- as in 2x. Still, the iPhone 8 does come with optical image stabilisation (OIS) so your pictures will be less shaky.

Both models also come with an improved True Tone, slow-sync flash which means your flash-lit photos will look a little more natural, instead of looking like your funeral photos.

What I wish

The glass backs are supposed to be super-durable but best not test that out.

I'd love for the next iPhone to be actually waterproof and not just dust/water-resistant. Or at least have the Home button work when my hands are damp after a shower or from washing the dishes, Apple.

A fast charger would be nice too and perhaps, someday, splitscreen on iOS, at least on the iPhone 8 Plus because heck, why not.

Otherwise, the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus incorporate many of the things that would have made the iPhone 7 near-perfect.

Big question is, though: is it worth upgrading from the 7 and 7 Plus? For anyone using phones older than the 7, it's a no-brainer upgrade. But as for the 7 and 7 Plus, it's a tougher sell though I could see someone trading in the 7 for the 8 Plus, if the 7 Plus wasn't enough to entice last year.

The phones will officially go on sale in Malaysia from October 20 and can be purchased on the official Apple store at the following prices:

iPhone 8: RM3,649 (64GB) and RM4399 (256GB)

iPhone 8 Plus: RM4,149 (64GB) and RM4,899 (256GB)