Geoffrey Fowler, writing for The Wall Street Journal:

I wouldn’t want to use it as my everyday phone, but as many as 20% of Americans would prefer a 4-inch phone. Apple says it sold 30 million older, slower (and cheaper) models at that size last year. Yet remarkably, no other major manufacturer offers a high-end phone at this size in the U.S.

And:

The new phone is nearly indistinguishable from the three-year-old iPhone 5s, which is a hair thicker and less pleasantly rounded than Apple’s more recent designs. (The SE even fits in most existing 5s cases.) The SE will come in Apple’s newer rose-gold hue, but it lacks design improvements you’ll find in Apple’s competitors, such as waterproofing and expandable storage.

And:

The standout news is battery life. Unlike many other recent Apple products, the iPhone SE’s is a significant improvement over its predecessors’. In my lab stress test, which cycles through websites with uniform screen brightness, the SE lasted 10 hours—more than two hours longer than both the iPhone 6s and iPhone 5s, and nearly three hours longer than the Galaxy S7.

This feels like a quietly important upgrade, designed to keep the smaller form factor active and capable of working with the latest version of iOS.