But owners of the iPhone 6 have one advantage over those with the 6 Plus, and that’s grip: with a body that isn’t as wide, the iPhone 6 is so much easier to make sure you’re holding, while the 6 Plus feels like you’re holding a wide metal notepad — remember those things you used to write so much in with a biro? — one that doesn’t like to be held so much.
Maybe it’s not an overly emotional phone, because holding it with one hand seems a little passé.
Rather, you’ll want to hold it with two, and this confuses us, as it smacks the original Apple mentality in the fact that a phone could and should be held and used with one hand, giving your thumb enough of the phone to make use of without having to drag your other hand out of its pocketed resting place and put it to work, or heaven forbid have it do something else.
Unfortunately, the iPhone 6 Plus doesn’t really follow this philosophy, and generally requires two hands to use comfortably, with one to hold and one to operate.
It’s not a bad thing, either, and there aren’t many big big phones that can be used successfully by all people with one hand.
Android devices like the LG G3 and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 try to get around the size issues by bringing in left and right handed modes to make one-handed calling a possibility, as well as a use-case scenario that doesn’t necessarily mean holding the phone at the very bottom.
Apple has tried this as well with “Reachability,” a unique feature that allows the home button to be tapped twice rather than pressed twice. Pressing twice — hard clicks of the button — will activate the multi-task switch, letting you jump between apps. This is specifically different from the double tap — light tap without the hard click of the button — which brings the iPhone 6 Plus screen down half way down the screen inside any app.
On the home menu, it makes sense, and puts the top rows within reach of one hand, though it’s likely the hand struggling to hold the phone from the bottom of the handset (but that’s another issue).
But load it in any other app and it might just make operation of that app confusing, with Instagram, Apple’s Calculator, and even the phone dialling system all throwing up road blocks for use when Reachability is used.
Frankly, we’d just suggest using the big iPhone with two hands. It’s safer, easier, and won’t be confusing.
There’s also less risk of you dropping the phone from the awkward hand hold it needs with one hand, unless of course you’re the Incredible Hulk and have humongous hands.
Another weak point is that Apple has limited your use of Near-Field Communication, but this is the case across both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.
Why has Apple done this?
Mostly to keep the tech suited for its “Apple Pay” wireless payments system, but it’s a particularly frustrating thing to know that technically, the technology is in place for iPhones to connect to gadgets wirelessly using Near-Field Communication — devices like speakers, headphones, and cameras — but that this is locked up and being made for use with a payment system that we don’t even have access to.
One more thing: the battery.
This has been a complaint of pretty much every iPhone owner for years, and we’ve heard quite a few customers complain that their iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, and iPhone 5C handsets were barely lasting through the day.
On the iPhone 6, we managed almost a full day of surfing, writing, social networking, web surfing, a bit of gaming, photo taking, and listening to music. That’s not the experience most iPhone users would want, so is it any better on the 6 Plus?
Yes. Yes it is.
If you use your phone sparingly, you’ll find the 2915mAh battery can offer a day and a half to two days of life, but if you’re a moderate to power user, bring that battery life to a full day and you’ll have it.
We were able to stretch ours to a day and a half, but in testing it on other days beyond the main testing day, we found that the iPhone 6 Plus could handle itself over a period of 24 hours, but that it would need a nightly charge.
Given the screen size, that’s not a hugely successful battery life, and puts the iPhone 6 Plus on par with another phone sporting the same screen size, LG’s G3, which too could have had better battery life.
That said, the Apple iPhone 6 Plus has the best battery life of any iPhone we’ve ever seen, and if you power through the handset regularly, you’ll appreciate every inch and hour of juice this phone’s extra large battery can push out, but we’d still charge it nightly just to be safe.
Conclusion
I must admit, I didn’t expect I’d like the iPhone 6 Plus.
When it came out, this journalist saw the almost identical specs and the not-so-unique screen size, and almost brushed it off, feeling like it would be one of the first “me too” products Apple had built in years, or ever.
But after almost a week with it, the extra larger iPhone 6 Plus is growing on me.
Sure, it’s slippery, and sure it doesn’t conform to the size of my hand, and sure I’m finding it irritating that it doesn’t quite fit my pocket and always feels like it’s going to fall out of my shorts when I sit down, but despite these issues, there’s something about the iPhone 6 Plus that I still like.
Perhaps it’s that it feels substantial and so well built. Perhaps it still feels better constructed than half the phones we see, even though some owners are reporting bends from stress in the body, or that it’s catching hair or beards in its gaps (we have a fairly long beard, and it never caught ours).
Perhaps it’s a lot of these things, but we still like it all the same. Its aluminium body is excellent, and while we love the HTC One M8’s use of aluminium and the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact’s reliance on glass, the 6 Plus just leads with an almost perfect curvature of the screen to the body.
That said, the phone isn’t for everyone, and the iPhone 6 Plus is a big phone, so big that it gives other similarly sized phones a good run for its money.
Honestly, we’d put this in your hands before deciding, and we’d put it in your pocket and see if you can sit with it comfortably, and hold it to your head comfortably because, yes, it really is that big.
But it’s also quite good, and quite work taking a look at, especially if you’ve loved the idea of a big iPhone for some time, but wasn’t sure if it would stack up.
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