First, the design, and this is an area most readers will know Apple is brilliant at. With that in mind, the iPhone 6 continues Apple’s dominance of simple designs that work. There are some bugs with it, and we’ll get to them later, but for the most part, this is the Keep It Simple philosophy in all its excellent.
It’s also an evolution of another Apple product, with the company choosing the iPod Touch as the next canvas for the iPhone and utilising that design in the process.
More than the last generation of the iPhone and more than the iPad Air, the iPhone 6 looks and feels like the iPod Touch.
Like Apple’s phone-less iPhone, it’s slim, soft, and solid, with a metal body, 6.9mm thickness, 129 gram weight, and not much of a dent in your pants when you push the handset into your pockets.
If you ever held the iPod Touch and said “wouldn’t it be nice if this had a phone inside,” that’s more or less what you’re getting in the iPhone 6.
Apple’s attention to detail is here in the materials used, too, with aluminium and a very solid mineral strengthened glass relied upon in its construction. We’re not quite sure what type of resistant glass it is — Apple wouldn’t say — but we’re hazarding a guess that it’s Gorilla Glass 4 or something equally durable, and the curved edges on the side help complete the look, with a glass that bends to meet the solid aluminium frame and chassis, not just meeting with it at the corners as previous iPhones have.
Every other detail, though, is here as you’d expect it, with perfect circles of the speakers at the bottom and at the top where the ear goes, two screws holding the Lightning dock in place, and a microphone sitting just to the right of the 3.5mm jack.
In typical Apple style, everything is drilled perfectly, and there isn’t an errant edge or jaggy at all. As per usual, this is Apple’s industrial design brilliance and perfection at its best.
The back isn’t all metal, mind you, with some plastic around the top and bottom, but it’s a minor shift, and doesn’t stop you from focusing on the simplicity of the iPhone 6 design.
By now, you’ve probably heard the buttons are in a slightly different position, and that’s part and parcel of the handset being bigger. Like what Samsung does with the Galaxy S series, you’ll find the power button on right edge and volume buttons on the left, and if you hold your phone comfortably with your digits gripping each side, you’ll likely find them easily.
So with that in mind, let’s switch the phone on.
Just like so many phones, the iPhone’s screen comes to life with an immense amount of colour and brightness.
We’ll go into detail about the screen shortly, but for the most part, you won’t be disappointed: it’s bright, vibrant, crisp, and viewable from every angle. To that last part, we’re told Apple does this with “dual-domain pixels,” but all you really need to know is that even if you’re viewing at extreme angles, you’ll see colours almost exactly as they’re meant to be seen.
It’s a very pretty display, and yes, it’s now larger.
For the iPhone 6, we’ve almost gone up a whole inch from its iPhone 5S brother, jumping from 4 inches all the way to 4.7 inches, which is a pretty severe difference when all things are considered. To help you deal with this screen size, Apple has built in two display modes: standard and zoom.
Standard will deliver smaller icons, smaller text, and is generally made for people who have no problem with eyesight, even adding an extra row of icons on the menus with the space saved.
If you do have a bit of an issue, zoom will raise the size, rendering the screen at the iPhone 5S resolution of 1136×640 and making for larger icons and bigger text sizes.
Regardless of what mode you choose, the screen will be very clear, though not as sharp as what is offered by other smartphones out there, with the iPhone 6 continuing the “Retina” resolution set out by Apple years ago, and keeping the pixel count at 326 pixels per inch.
Technically, the iPhone 6 runs at a resolution of 1334×750, an unusual resolution that is made for this specific purpose, and lets Apple get in there just barely with the statement of calling this a “high definition” screen, with the new label “Retina HD.”
Even though there’s a high definition screen at play, it isn’t quite as high end as the competition, with 326ppi less than the other flagship 4.7 to 5.2 inch screens. That said, your eyes aren’t likely to notice the difference, especially since they’re the bottleneck in this whole thing.
Moving over to phone performance, and while it’s hard to compare benchmarks, you won’t be dissatisfied here either.
While we’re yet to see anything truly take advantage of the new A8 processor and the M8 motion chip working alongside it, the games and apps we tested on the iPhone 6 all performed very well with few moments of lag.
WiFi worked well for the most part on our 802.11ac networks, as did 4G LTE, which provided speeds of between 30 and 80Mbps on the Telstra network within Sydney’s CBD. Higher speeds are likely possible on Category 4 LTE networks, which at this point should include Vodafone in Australia.
Voice over LTE is also supported on the phone, but not running in Australia, not yet anyway, with telcos expected to see it launch locally next year. At least you know the iPhone 6 is future-proofed for one thing.
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