While this control box isn’t an offering of full manual control like some smartphone cameras have — devices like the Nokia Lumia 1020 and HTC One M8 — it’s enough to make both amateur and enthusiast phone photographers (is there even a professional phone photographer?!) happy, as it can increase the quality of a basic shot.
Tested in daylight, the image quality is excellent, even though the megapixels haven’t taken an increase, with solid colours, relatively crisp and sharp details, with the camera roll available to most of your apps from inside the that part of the app.
We say “most” because Apple seems to be having some troubles with Instagram, and for some reason won’t send the photos straight to Facebook’s retro-inspired social photography network, but you can open the images straight from Instagram if you want to use them here, so that’s a workaround until that bug is fixed.
At night, the image quality is still impressive, and Apple’s use of optical image stabilisation shows up with some often sharp details and decent colours, while keeping the shadows solid and the image relatively balanced.
On the front side of the phone — you know, the one with the screen on it? — there is also another camera, but outside of a lens change, this one doesn’t feel like it’s moved particularly far, with the 1.2 megapixel shooter feeling noticeably weaker than some of the other offerings out there.
Not a huge deal, once again, because in daylight, the front-facing selfie camera is still fine — just like it was in the iPhone 5S — but if you’re looking for more light to take selfies of you and your mates at the club on a Saturday night, this one won’t help you much, plunging you into the pixilated shadows.
Video has changed, too, though, like it did on the 6 Plus, with slow motion modes for 120 and 240 frames per second, which can help you get creative with the world around you, snapping things in slow motion that you might not normally think about, while a time lapse mode will compress sequences down for you so that the world looks like it is zipping by.
Full HD video is also possible, though we’re a little surprised there’s no support for 4K Ultra HD here.
Perhaps Apple doesn’t think smartphones are there, or perhaps the storage doesn’t really cut it for big apps, games, music, photos, AND big videos shot in 4K, which is fair, especially since the iPhone 6 Plus is locked to specific sizes, namely 16GB, 64GB, and 128GB (we’ve already said something on this matter in the iPhone 6 review, but frankly, if you’re thinking of buying one, don’t bother with the 16GB as you can’t expand it and the storage size is way too small to be useful).
Beyond this, there are the little things that help make the iPhone 6 Plus stand out, such as Touch ID, which first appeared in the iPhone 5S and is finally being used for more than just unlocking the phone and paying for apps and music, as other services begin to take advantage, too.
A landscape mode is also included, allowing you to control the phone’s menu in the horizontal form, and even pull up the mail or writing apps with an extended interface or slightly larger keyboard, though be warned, even though Apple includes a rotation lock, it’s only for portrait mode, and won’t provide you with a way to keep using the iPhone 6 Plus in landscape only.
Then there’s the app ecosystem which is still the among strongest in the world, with games and apps aplenty, as well as magazines that actually boast interactivity, which is one area where Android is struggling to catch up in.
The Bluetooth is also fairly strong, and we noticed fewer dropouts on the iPhone 6 Plus with Bluetooth headphones than we did on most of the Android phones we’ve played with.
We’re even intrigued by the inclusion of “Continuity” in Mac OS 10.10, the latest version, now called “Yosemite.” Together, the two devices talk, sending your phone calls and messages to the desktop, making it possible to answer the phone using your MacBook or iMac (or Mac Pro, even), and even respond to an SMS far more quickly using the keyboard of your computer.
This is one feature that greatly impresses us, and while Samsung has tried to implement it for Samsung phones on its Galaxy Tab S, and LG has tried a similar version in its own tablets, neither nail it in the way Apple has done here.
And yes, there’s that lovely design, which so few phones manage to nail, making the iPhone 6 Plus feel brilliant, even though it’s obviously very big.
But there are also moments when that design gets to you.
Sure, it’s typical Apple, with soft metallic curves and a screen that follows the flow of the design all the way around the body in a way that just feels excellent.
But it’s also so wide and so flat that there isn’t enough of a gentle curve at the back to make the phone fit comfortably in your hand.
So when you take the phone out of your pocket, if you don’t buy a case for it, you get to feel that awesome metal back that we love so much on Apple’s and HTC’s products, but unlike the aforementioned HTC, you don’t manage to have a phone that curves into the hand, but rather slides out of it, and that’s because there is no curve, no palm facing slope, as it’s just flat, wide and flat.
No curve means your palm can’t nestle the phone, and like the iPhone 6 — which is smaller yet cast from a similar mould — the phone can fall right out of your hand.
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