Is the iPhone 17 Pro a good business phone?

This is the iPhone 18 Pro, but is it a good business phone? Now the foldable iPhone duo may have grabbed the world's attention, but the 18 Pro is still very much worth our time. Not least because it has some genuinely exciting camera upgrades, an unbelievably long battery life, but also because still, after 19 years, this is the big draw in the smartphone market. Apple quite explicitly targets small businesses with its marketing and aftercare sales, it doesn't necessarily offer any business needs. The price to start from £1,199 or £4 on the base model. You can get up to 12GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, but there is no difference between buying it as a consumer and a business. Design wise it looks exactly the same as the iPhone 17 Pro, there's just no orange, blue, silver, black or a rather fetching burgundy. As a business publication we've gone for more professional. Now it is noticeably heavy, it feels like a very dense handset, one that's more likely to crack the ground than it is the screen. Now I still have the iPhone 17E, which is what we are filming on, and the weight difference is massive. It's got 6g on the iPhone 17 Pro, which doesn't sound that much, but in the hand you can feel the extra weight. Without much change to the design and the fact that it has the exact same dimensions, we can safely assume that all that extra weight is gone. Here you have a new chipset, the Apple A20 Pro, a longer, bigger battery and also some camera upgrades. There's also a new vapour chamber, which is where the extra weight is. Now it's still a beautiful device, but it is a bit of a chunk. You get a super retina display, a 6.3 inch OLED, which looks exactly the same as the iPhone 17 Pro. So we've got 120Hz refresh rate, HDR capabilities and some very thin bezels. Most of the new elements are due to the smaller dynamic island, which is the cutout at the top of the phone. This is where you find your infrared sensor. It's smaller because Apple has managed to move the infrared camera underneath the OLED panel, with a tweak to the way it presents pixels in that section of the display. Essentially, Apple has created more space between pixels in that area, so infrared light can come through. You won't notice it because those pixels overcompensate with more brightness. It's a clever way of improving how the dynamic island sits on the screen. One that doesn't compromise the brightness and quality of the display. Another generation of iPhone almost certainly means a new chipset. For the 18 Pro, you have the Apple A20 Pro, a 2nm processor with a hexa-core architecture. This is matched with 12GB of RAM and 2TB of storage if you have the cash. Benchmarking for iPhones and indeed MacBooks and so on has gotten a little silly. The results are inevitably impressive on paper, but they don't really tell the full story. Just that it's strong with single and multi-threaded workloads. On-device AI tools and AI capabilities are starting to become a good way to showcase a phone's power, so we didn't really have a straightforward way of expressing it. But if you take the battery, you can almost see what I mean. In our lived video test, the iPhone 18 Pro lasted 26 hours and 58 minutes. This is frankly marvellous. And in real terms, I had it for a week and I only charged it twice. Now you may have seen the joke running around that this is the coolest iPhone ever. That's largely down to a new vapour chamber, which dissipates heat evenly across the phone. In my time of using it, it did get hot during setup, but I didn't notice it getting hot during my tests or certainly in any of my uses. It is indeed a very cool phone. Now onto those cameras. Resolution-wise, you have the same triple camera setup on the iPhone 18 Pro as you did on the 17 Pro. So three 48MP camera lenses, one wide, one ultra-wide, and a periscope telephoto lens. You get a four-time optical zoom on the 100mm periscope telephoto lens and a 3D sensor shift to help steady zoomed-in shots. The big addition this year is the shutter controls. There's even a little shutter mechanism on the main lens. Now you can still use the automated point-and-shoot settings, but these Pro settings give you that DSLR-style photography. Now these Pro controls are in the menu in the six spots and you can customise your options in your taskbar. Now much like an actual DSLR, you only really need to worry about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. iPhones tend to have a 4x3 aspect ratio by default, which is something I have to constantly change. And other useful tools include the focus slider. Now the variable aperture is only for the main lens and it does sometimes produce grainy images, particularly indoors, no matter what you do with the brightness levels. Now the overall experience is great, partly because that aperture is fun to play with. I spent ages trying to get blur on shots, I took loads of terrible photos, but when I did get a good photo it felt generally wonderful. And that is the point of this, you get used to those kind of controls. I also translated the video to a degree you get to shoot up to 4K at 120 frames per second. It's not so great for low shutter speeds. Additional features, the two main ones, are two new physical buttons. So you get this sort of indented button on the side which launches your camera, and you get another action button which you can customise to whatever you want. I've chosen to go silent, but you can have chrome or the torch light. And they are quite fun useful additions to the iPhone. Siri is also getting better, you can now add your own chat GPT account to it to make Siri even more knowledgeable. As a business application, I would like it to work with more third-party apps, so I can use it to open Slack, but I can't send messages on Slack like I can on WhatsApp. The smaller dynamic island is the same as before, it works well with certain apps, and you can customise it. I like that after a week of using it, it populated with the apps I use myself, which is a nice organic way of organising. For a phone that looks largely the same as the year before, there was a lot more going on inside than I expected. From that cool vapour chamber, to that snappy processor, there is more on this than we'd realise. But the star of the show is the camera setup and that aperture control, which is just perfect. Now this is by no means a replacement for a proper professional camera, but it's a fun gateway into that world. Make mistakes, take terrible shots, and after a while you will learn about the controls, and it's just gloriously fun to use. As a business phone, it is a solid choice. It's packed with great features, it synchronises with your MacBook very well, and the battery life goes on and on and on. This is truly an iPhone worth remembering.