Battery life
While a bigger screen may well be high on the wishlist for Apple’s iPhone-owning customers, battery life was the chief concern.
We’ve often heard from so many of Apple’s vocal owners — and they’re pretty vocal — that the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, and 5S just don’t last the length of a day, what with all their calls, texts, emails, Facebooking, tweets, game playing, YouTubing, photo taking, video capturing, music streaming, and just about anything else their wonderous computer in a pocket slapped with an Apple logo can do.
The truth is doing all of that is going to take a dent out of any battery, but recently, manufacturers of other handsets running Android and Windows Phone can reach a full day to a day and a half on a regular basis, with as much as two days possible from some of them. That’s with Bluetooth on, with a few phone calls, texts, emails, web surfing, camera use, and games.
So how does the iPhone 6 compete?
Before we received review units, we looked at the specs, the numbers, did the math, and we weren’t confident: a slightly bigger screen running at a slightly different resolution with the same amount of pixels per inch, and a marginally larger battery didn’t spell a good result.
And after testing it for several days, we can confirm that it is more or less exactly what we predicted.
While the combination of the A8 processor and M8 motion chip may well conserve power better than previous efforts, the increase from a 1560mAh battery to an 1810mAh has done pretty much nothing to extend the life, and you’ll find more or less the same battery from the iPhone 5C on the iPhone 6.
That is to say the iPhone 6 lasts a day. Ish.
Our test was conducted with making phone calls, sending texts, emails, taking photos and the odd video, playing a game here and there, listening to music, social networking, and surfing the web, and throughout this, we found a life of one day was possible, but only just. Technically, it wasn’t a full 24 hours, with a 7am unplug to needing the charge at half past midnight.
That’s not a great result, and iPhone owners keen for more will certainly be frustrated, as they’ll still be forced to carry a battery recharge brick with them if they get more done on their deliciously thin phones than we do.
Worse, that was without Bluetooth, and with under 15 minutes of calls per day. If you make more calls through the course of a day, or rely on an excess of wireless devices — headphones, smartwatch, fitness band — expect to need a charge midway into your regular day, that’s just all there is to it.
And that’s bad news for customers with a dependency on their phone, it really is, as the iPhone 6 isn’t the battery improvement you may well be expecting it to be.
We have higher hopes for the iPhone 6 Plus, because a bigger screen often means a bigger battery, but here in the iPhone 6, Apple has traded a larger battery for a slimmer body, and that’s a trade-off we’re not so sure people will agree with.
The storage dilemma
With the move to the iPhone 6, Apple has upped the built-in storage in smartphones to a whopping 128GB, putting the phone on par with what the MacBook Air offers, and even giving that computer a run for its money in terms of total cost.
You don’t have to pick a 128GB phone, though, as there’s a choice of either 64GB or 16GB.
But we have trouble with that last option, because with no upgradeable storage slot on the iPhone 6, you will run out of storage very quickly, especially if you like games, apps, music, video, and taking photos with the excellent camera found here.
We’re not even sure why Apple has made a 16GB option, and with the iPhone 6, are of the opinion that the sizes should have started with 32GB, not the piddling 16GB option Apple has made the first one.
In fact, the only reasons we can see a school of logic for with the 16GB iPhone include the company having an entry-level iPhone 6 — albeit one that will feel sorely lacking months after purchase when the storage has been eaten into — and having an easy way of upselling customers, especially when the phone seller on the floor explains to them the difference between the 16 and 64GB sizes.
If you are considering an iPhone 6, don’t bother with the 16GB variety, and just invest in either 64 or 128GB. You won’t regret having that supply of storage, but you almost definitely will with the 16GB, especially since you can’t upgrade it.
Conclusion: should you buy it?
For many, the iPhone 6 is exactly what they want in the next stage of the Apple smartphone: a sleek, sexy, and svelte smartphones that feels like it has evolved significantly with this superior size that we’re all seduced by.
But it’s more of a minor increase that brings the iPhone into the current day, with a larger screen, a slimmer design, and a bit of the tech that will make it faster at home and abroad.
That said, it isn’t a benchmark setting phone, unless you want to talk about people standing in line. Rather, it’s a modest upgrade from where the iPhone was, making it larger and more usable for today.
It’s also the first iPhone since the original metal 2G model that this reviewer would actively consider using, since it feels excellent and offers a fantastic experience, once you get around that mediocre battery life.
In fact, the battery life is what would bring us back to another phone, and until Apple fixes it, that’s probably where we’d sit, as barely a day is never a good benchmark for a product that’s supposed to keep up with you, and not the other way around.
Ultimately, if you already own and love the iPhone, you’ll probably love what Apple is offering this time around, but we’d advise checking the competition, because now that everything has changed, it’s not the same formula you’ve grown up with.
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