The smartphone is the direct successor to last year's iPhone 8...
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APPLE'S new iPhone XR is available to buy in the UK today, and we've rounded up the best deals, contracts and offers available right now.
The colourful handset is separate from the core iPhone XS series, and is designed as a cheaper option, rocking a less premium LCD screen and six paintjobs in total. Here's everything you need to know.
The phone is available in the following colours: White, Black, Blue, Yellow, Coral, and (Product)Red. Pricing for different storage variants is as follows:
Pre-orders opened on October 19, and the phone went on sale October 26 – yes, today!
There are loads of great iPhone XR deals and contract offers floating around right now.
Here's our favourite deal...
You can get the iPhone XR for £34 a month.This costs just £190 upfront and gets you a 15GB data allowance. You also get unlimited minutes and texts.
The total cost of the contract over its 24-month run is £1,006. That's around £350 more than the phone's cost outright, but it's actually a big saving.
O2's closest SIM-only deal is 12GB a month (less data) for £19 a month – or £456 over two years. Add that to the phone's price and you get £1,205.
So you're actually making a saving of £199 with this deal:
The absolute cheapest contract we've seen so far is a Vodafone offer that costs £18 per month.
You pay a hefty £451 upfront fee, but the total cost over 24 months is only £883 – not much over the phone's outright price.
This gets you unlimited texts and minutes, plus 1GB of data.
If you'd rather have zero upfront fee, the best we've found so far is an EE offer.
You pay £53 per month and nothing upfront, totalling £1,272 over 24 months.
This gets you a very generous 50GB of data per month, plus unlimited minutes and texts.
It's likely you'd rather pay a reasonable upfront fee and not have huge monthly payments.
In that case, EE has a great all-rounder deal that costs £38 per month – with a £175 upfront fee.
That works out at £1,087 over 24 months, getting you 20GB of data and unlimited texts and minutes.
Despite being a more budget model, it's got many high-end features – including the swanky all-screen design introduced with last year's iPhone X.
That means it also boasts Face ID facial recognition, just like the pricier iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.
One of the biggest compromises is that it doesn't get the ritzy OLED screen its siblings have.
It also misses out on a premium stainless frame – instead, it's got cheaper aluminium edging.
The iPhone XR has a large, notched 6.1-inch screen, with a very respectable 1792 x 828-pixel resolution.
That works out at 326 pixels per inch on your screen.
The phone is rated IP67 for water and dust protection, which means it's waterproof to depths of 1.5 metres – rather than the 3-metre depth the iPhone XS is rated to survive at.
It comes in six colours, and will be offered in three storage sizes (64GB, 128GB and 256GB).
Excitingly, the iPhone XR features Apple's new A12 Bionic processor, which is the same chip inside the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.
The chip promises to be 50% faster than last year's iPhone processor, which is a pretty sizeable jump.
This is possible because Apple has built its new chip on a "7nm manufacturing process" – which means the transistors on the chip are just 7 nanometres apart.
Transistors are tiny electronic switches that allow computing to happen. The more transistors, the more computing you can get done.
For last year's A11 processor, the transistors were 10 nanometres apart – but this distance has been reduced to 7 nanometres. That means Apple is able to squeeze more transistors into the same amount of space, boosting computing power and energy efficiency.
Apple has made some announcements – here's when to mark your calendar...
One of the big downsides to the iPhone XR is that it doesn't come equipped with the iPhone XS camera.
Rather than a dual-camera set-up on the rear, you get just a single shooter on the back.
It's a 12-megapixel wide-angle camera – the same one that makes up half of the iPhone XS's shooter.
The good news is that it can still provide the "bokeh" blurred background effect the iPhone XS offers with its Portrait Mode, although it requires some camera trickery to achieve this.
On the front, you get a TrueDepth camera, which is an upgrade from last year's iPhone 8.
This 7-megapixel camera supports Face ID face-scanning, as well as features like Portrait Mode selfies, and animated Animoji and Memoji emoji.
It's also got the same improved Face ID scanning system as the iPhone XS, meaning your phone should unlock even quicker than last year's iPhone X.
Were you surprised by the iPhone XR announcement? Let us know in the comments!
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