As for the LCD screen itself, it’s fine. It gets bright enough to use outdoors, but competitors such as the Google Pixel 5A 5G ($450) and the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G ($500) (soon to be replaced by the A53 5G) use OLED panels that deliver punchier colors and darker blacks. The latter even has a 120-Hz screen refresh rate, which Apple reserves for its expensive iPhone Pro models.
Battery life on the SE is just OK. Most days, I ended up with around 30 percent left by bedtime. (That’s with roughly six and a half hours of screen-on time.) On busier days, like when I used the camera a lot, relied on the SE for navigation, and used it as a hot spot for my MacBook, it hit 15 percent by around 5 pm, though the phone did survive on low-power mode long enough for me to get home. Still, when the aforementioned Samsung and Google phones can last nearly two days on a single charge, I’m left…
