iPhone XR vs. Android’s best: A razor-thin margin of victory

The new iPhone XR might not be a flagship, but it’s really good. So good, in fact, that I called it Apple’s best iPhone ever in my review—not because of its specs (which are technically inferior to those of the XS and XS Max) but because of its value proposition. That’s pitting it against other, pricier iPhones, though. I wanted to see how the iPhone XR would fare against three of Android’s best phones: the Galaxy Note 9, Pixel 3 XL, and OnePlus 6T.

We’ll walk through all the major factors we review in a phone, discussing each phone’s pros and cons and picking a winner.

DISPLAY

Ask any screen geek about the difference between the iPhone XR’s LCD and an AMOLED screen, and they’ll tell you that there’s no comparison. Text is crisper, colors are brighter, and whites are more brilliant on the OLED displays, and blacks are as deep as they can get thanks to the ability to turn off each individual pixel completely.

LCDs have their strengths—they’re much cheaper to manufacture, and brighter and easier to read in sunlight—but they’re inherently inferior to OLED due to the need for constant backlighting. That makes them thicker, less malleable, and less power-efficient, with duller colors.

All of the screens here are very similar, but somehow the 6.2-inch iPhone XR looks tiny compared to the 6.3-inch Pixel 3 XL, and 6.4-inch OnePlus 6T and Galaxy Note 9. In addition to its size, the display in the iPhone XR’s resolution is 1,792x828, or 720p, versus the 2K displays on the Note 9 and Pixel 3 XL, and the 1080p one on the OnePlus 6T. The XR’s effective ppi is just 326, again a far cry from the Note 9 (516), Pixel 3 XL (523), and OnePlus 6T (402).

However, unless the phones’ screens are compared side by side, most people aren’t going to see a difference. It’s tough unless you know what you’re looking for. Scaled-down HD content still looks great, text is crisp and easy to read, and even blacks looks good. True Tone is an absolute delight.

Apple calls the screen on the XR “Liquid Retina,” a fancy marketing term to draw attention to the rounded corners and “all-screen design.” But I also found it extremely color-accurate, and I preferred the shape of the XR’s corners to those of all the comparison phones. The Note 9’s are a bit too boxy for my tastes, and the