Apple iPhone Air review

6.5-inch LTPO OLED panel with all the bells and whistles

The iPhone Air features a 6.5-inch LTPO Super Retina XDR OLED screen with ProMotion tech, which is what Apple calls the variable 120Hz refresh rate. Feature-wise, it's exactly the same one used by 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max, but slots in right between them in terms of size. Resolution is 1260 x 2736px, with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio.

As before, the display supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision. The True Tone functionality is also here.

When it comes to brightness, the iPhone Air is seemingly less bright than before, but in practice, sunlight legibility is exceptional. In manual mode, the panel reached 780 nits, while in Auto mode, the screen reached to 998 nits.

Under strong, direct light on a smaller white patch, the display almost achieve 3,000 nits of brightness Apple promises, albeit only for a short while. So the company's claims are correct, even if like the majority of makers they are only possible when a very small part of the display is lit up.

Even though the panel isn't programmed to sustain high levels of brightness for longer than a few seconds, the new anti-reflective coating helps improve sunlight legibility significantly.

By quickly alternating between different size patches we managed to push the display to just over 1,700 nits on a 75% white screen, but that only lasts for a second or two. The system then dialed down the brightness to approximately 1,000 nits. It appears then that the display can actually run brighter, but it's just not feasible as it's very tricky to achieve.

Battery life

The iPhone Air comes with a mere 3,149 mAh battery, but the slightly cut-down A19 Pro chip and the 6.5-inch LTPO OLED ProMotion display are impressively efficient, because the phone earned a respectable 12:44h Active Use Score, which is way more than the battery capacity would lead you to expect.

In fact, the video playback and gaming runtimes are better than some Android phones with 5,000mAh+ cells on board.

Sure, the call time and the web browsing scores are hardly impressive, but the Air isn't going to be a phone you need to charge multiple times a day, which is all Apple set out to achive with this one.

Obviously there are iPhones that can run for much longer, but as we said the Air's task is not to compete with its siblings, but to claim new territory.

Charging speed

According to Apple's official specs, the phone can reach its peak charging rate with a compatible 20W Power Delivery charger, which in turn means that it doesn't support the new PD 3.2 + AVS charging of the other iPhones in the family. During our testing we never saw the charging rate exceed 18W.

This was enough for the phone to charge from 0 to 33% in 15 minutes and 57% in 30 minutes. A full charge took 1 hour and 33 minutes. This is in line with the iPhone 16 Pro from last year, but slower than the iPhone 17 lineup.

The iPhone Air's charging is slow by modern standards and even though it has a very small battery to fill it takes longer to do it than the majority of competitors.

The software offers an "optimized charging" toggle, which works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, it would stop charging altogether at around 80%, usually at nighttime, or slow down charging in certain scenarios, depending on your usage habits. The end goal is to provide fast charging when needed and slow down when the phone senses it's going to be on the charger for a long time. Your experience may vary, and we found it to be a hit and miss affair.

Speakers

The iPhone Air features just one speaker and it's not even where you expect it to be. There's no speaker at the bottom, and the only one available resides in the earpiece.

Understandably then, the Air is quiet and delivers unsatisfactory audio quality. The phone earned an "Average" -29.8 LUFS loudness score, while the tracks sound thin and lack bass. Vocals are clean, but overall everything sounds flat.

This is most likely due to the space constraints inside, and there's not enough room for proper echo chambers.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.