Apple iPhone 16e review: Branching out from the Apple tree

When Apple introduces a more “budget-friendly” iPhone, expectations are naturally high — after all, it’s still an iPhone. The iPhone 16e enters the scene with a familiar design, a 6.1-inch OLED display and a single 48 MP rear camera, but it also brings some of Apple’s latest AI-powered features. With the A18 chip under the hood and a starting price of ₹59,900, does this device offer enough to justify its cost, or does it fall short in a sea of premium mid-range Android alternatives? Let’s dive in.

Design

On the rear panel, there’s not much difference between the last iPhone SE (3rd gen, launched in 2022) and the new iPhone 16e. There’s a single camera module on the top corner and the logo bang in the middle. On the screen though, the home button has been bid goodbye to. The OLED display spans 6.1-inches, and the phone overall looks sleek and compact. Weighing 167 grams, it’s a lot lighter than the iPhone 16 Pro, which weighs almost 200 grams. It also comes only in two colours, black and white. So if you’re hoping for a funky colour, you’ll be disappointed.

New hardware additions include the Action Button, which a lot of iPhone users have gotten used to by now. The customisable button allows for quick access to pre-selected functions and the USB-C charging port continues to make life easier for both connectivity and charging across locations.

Display

The 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display offers vibrant colours and sharp visuals. However, it is capped at a 60Hz refresh rate, definitely a stepdown from Android flagships and even mid-range phones that offer adaptive 90 Hz or even 120 Hz refresh rates. Reading browsing, endless scrolling is smooth enough on the device. One thing I did not miss is the camera notch, which retains its place on the iPhone 16e. The device comes with Face ID for logins, but a major omission is the Dynamic Island which, over the last three years, has become a quintessential part of the iPhone experience.

The stereo speakers deliver some well-rounded audio for a smartphone this size.

Camera

The iPhone 16e features a single 48 MP rear camera, which can capture photos both in 12 MP as well as 24 MP. Each time I open the Camera app to snap away, I realise the ultra-wide lens is conspicuous by its absence — I don’t remember the last time I used or reviewed a smartphone without one.

A decent bokeh rendered in portrait mode

The best quality photos I snapped was when I chose to have the HEIF Max resolution on. It’s neither on nor visible on the camera app by default. Users will have to enable it in ‘Resolution Control’ in camera settings first. Daylight pictures were vivid, with a fair bit of detail around the subject in focus. Anything further away in the background would always look a little compromised in terms of sharpness and details.

Well saturated colours even in night mode

According to Apple, 48 MP pictures can only be captured at 1x, while Night mode and photos taken with the flash on will always be saved at 12 MP. Night photos and even photos taken indoors with less than perfect lighting conditions often turned out a bit noisy with the iPhone 16e. However, colour accuracy is fairly decent across lighting conditions. The smartphone offers some decent depth of field with Portrait mode as well. Video recording is supported by Dolby Vision, and you also get to finetune the audio quality in the video recording while post processing to preserve the speaker’s voice clarity.

Apple Intelligence

An undeniable fact about the Apple iPhone 16e is that it’s the “cheapest” gateway into Apple Intelligence. While some of the features are already on board, there are a few more which will come to the device only in April 2025. For example, in April, users will be able to update their primary iPhone language to Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu or Urdu. The iPhone 16e has ChatGPT integrated to help users craft messages, notes, emails, and even stories. Clean Up, the AI-enabled object eraser, works fairly well. And, in messages, you get to play around and make fun, cute renditions to send to loved ones with Image Playground.

A point and search also helps identify objects that you need more information about, for example, pointing it at a bouquet will help identify which flower it is, and you can quickly look up how to care for it and what weather suits it best. The same goes for pointing at large chunks of text and getting AI to summarise and simplify it for you.

Tech Specs

Under the hood, the iPhone 16e is powered by Apple’s latest A18 processor. Apps runs without any lags and multitasking is a breeze too. The latest high-end processor on this smartphone is definitely one of its USPs. Apple, as usual, doesn’t advertise its battery capacity but the battery drain is slow even while watching multimedia on the smartphone. On a typical day, I’d watch YouTube videos for about an hour, play casual games for an hour or less, browse websites, check emails and take photos, and the iPhone 16e would still have about 30 per cent charge left when I hit the bed at night.

Verdict

The iPhone 16e is the relatively more affordable iPhone that holds the potential to lure in new users. Having said that, in a market like India where a premium (not flagship) smartphone in the ₹50,000–₹60,000 range offers on average a three camera setup, a host of AI features, decent battery life and maybe even a bigger display, it’s going to be interesting to watch consumers switch to the iPhone 16e experience. Overall, the iPhone 16e does make for an interesting choice when it comes to having a bunch of meaningful AI-enabled functionalities on board, along with decent multimedia capabilities, decent battery life and the whole iOS/iPhone experience.