Even though the iPhone 16 Pro is a modest upgrade over its predecessor, it offers many new features and advancements you won’t find in the latest flagship Android phones. While some could be attributed to the A18 Pro chip, others exemplify Apple’s engineering prowess.
1 MagSafe-Like Fast Magnetic Wireless Charging
Apple debuted MagSafe wireless charging with the iPhone 12 back in 2021. With the iPhone 16 Pro, MagSafe gets even better with 25W wireless fast charging support.
MagSafe stands out not because of wireless charging but due to its magnetic power profile. It ensures you don’t have to bother about your phone aligning with the wireless charger for the power transfer. More importantly, it allows accessories to snap on an iPhone’s back, making them easy and quick to install and remove.
Once you start using a MagSafe mount in your car or bike, you won’t want to go back because of its convenience.
The Qi2 wireless charging standard debuted in 2023, promising to bring MagSafe-like magnetic wireless charging to Android devices. Fast forward a year, and not a single flagship phone from Samsung, Google, Motorola, or OnePlus supports Qi2 charging.
HMD (formerly known as Nokia) launched the world’s first Android phone with Qi2 magnetic wireless charging in 2024. But given its limited availability and inferior specs, it’s unlikely to find many takers. Plus, it only supports 15W wireless charging, unlike the iPhone 16 Pro, which supports 25W speeds.
2 A Customizable Action Button
Apple replaced the Ring/Silent switch on the iPhone 15 Pro with a customizable Action button in 2023. A year later, the entire iPhone 16 lineup features the Action button. Yet, no Android phones ship with such a customizable button that you can map to any action you want.
On most Android phones, you can tweak the power button’s double-tap behavior to open the Camera app, but that’s all. On the iPhone 16 Pro, you can use the Action button to trigger shortcuts, quickly toggle Flashlight, open a specific app, and more.
The ability to run shortcuts is a powerful functionality, as it opens the floodgates to any task you want to do, like quickly adding a new calendar event or taking a note.
3 Capacitive Camera Button
The iPhone 16 Pro marks the debut of the Camera Control button. As the name indicates, pressing this capacitive button will open the Camera app. You can swipe on it to toggle through various camera functions, like adjusting the exposure, zoom level, and tone, and switch between photography styles. And if you don’t prefer the iPhone’s stock Camera app, you can also use it with supported third-party camera apps.
Some Sony Xperia phones ship with a physical camera button on the side. But they don’t offer the same flexibility as the iPhone 16’s capacitive Camera Control button. The latter is a lot more powerful and can control several camera functions.
Even better, it can provide haptic feedback using the Taptic Engine despite being a capacitive button. Android phones from Samsung, Google, OnePlus, and Motorola don’t even sport a physical camera shutter key.
4 48MP ProRAW Support With No Shutter Lag
The best Android phones can click RAW pictures at 50MP or even 200MP resolution. But unlike pixel-binned 12MP photos, there’s a noticeable shutter lag when taking pictures in RAW. This limits the number of images you can take back to back, which can be an issue when capturing fast-moving subjects.
Thanks to a faster sensor readout and powerful ISP, the iPhone 16 Pro can shoot RAW pictures with almost no shutter lag. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you frequently click RAW photos on your phone for greater editing flexibility, this is a significant improvement.
You can click back-to-back RAW images of a moving subject to try and get the best frame possible. Later, you can enjoy higher flexibility in dynamic range and details when editing.
5 4K/120 FPS Video Recording in Dolby Vision
Like previous iPhones, the iPhone 16 Pro can record 4K videos in Dolby Vision HDR. More importantly, it can record 4K/120FPS videos in Dolby Vision.
Unfortunately, only some Android phones from Chinese players like Xiaomi can record 4K/60 FPS videos in Dolby Vision HDR. Even the best camera phones from Samsung and Google only support HDR10+ instead of Dolby Vision and are limited to 4K/60FPS.
6 Super-Thin Bezels
Many Android phones sport big, beautiful OLED displays with curved cover glass from all four corners to achieve a bezel-less look. On the other hand, Apple uses a flat 120Hz OLED panel on its Pro iPhones; the company has reduced the bezels slightly with each new generation.
Apple claims in its iPhone 16 Pro announcement that it has “the thinnest borders on any Apple product.” The display bezels are thinner than all Android phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. This helps give the iPhone 16 Pro an almost bezel-less look and the feeling of directly holding the screen in your hands.
7 Click Spatial Photos and Videos
The iPhone 16 Pro can capture spatial photos, video, and audio. The iPhone 15 Pro series can already capture spatial video, with Apple’s newest iPhone adding support for spatial photo capture.
When viewed in Vision Pro, these images appear in 3D, giving the feeling of being present at the scene where the picture was taken. Meta’s Quest headset already supports spatial videos from iPhones and should soon add support for spatial pictures as well. Sadly, no Android phone on the market currently can take spatial videos or pictures.
Admittedly, AR/VR headsets have not become commonplace, so the inability to record spatial photos and videos on Android phones is not a big deal.
You may find the iPhone 16 Pro’s exclusive features minor or meaningless especially if you’re an Android user. While that might be true for some of them, it still shows the superiority of Apple’s flagship iPhones over its Android competitors.
