Monday 15 September 2014

Apple iPhone 6 Review

Apple iPhone 6 Review

Apple iPhone 6 Review Scoring Summary

Style & Handling
User Friendliness
Feature Set
Performance
Battery Power
Overall Score3G.co.uk grey star

 

Pros:Cons:
+ Beautiful build- Relatively low-res screen
+ Good size camera- Expensive
+ Great camera- Lacks innovation

Full Review and Specification for the Apple iPhone 6


The iPhone 6 is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated phone of the year and in just a few short days you’ll be able to buy one, but should you? There’s no doubt that it’s a great handset but for better or worse it’s also a big change over the iPhone 5s and on paper it doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t get elsewhere. So is it worth your hard earned money? Read on to find out.

Screen

Apple iPhone 6 - Display

After all the leaks and rumours in the run up to its announcement the iPhone 6 is a phone of few surprises and one of the biggest changes- its screen size, has been long expected. It’s gone from 4.0 inches as found on the iPhone 5s to 4.7 inches, which is the same size as the Samsung Galaxy Alpha or the original HTC One for example.

For our money that’s a good thing. 4.0 inches was starting to look distinctly on the small side and it’s about time Apple caught up, but we’d wager that a lot of people liked the compact design of iPhone’s past so for them it may not be such a welcome change.

But 4.7 inches is still far from the phablet territory of the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a size which means the iPhone 6 is still easily pocketable and can just about be used with one hand, while at the same time it makes it far better for typing, web browsing and watching videos than the iPhone 5S ever could be.

Whether you’re a fan of the screen size or not the actual quality is pretty impressive. At 750 x 1334 it’s higher resolution than the iPhone 5S but with the extra size it still has exactly the same pixel density, so if you were happy with how sharp the iPhone 5S’s screen is you’ll be happy with this too.

That said Apple could have done more, because that’s a pixel density which falls some way short of most Android rivals and the difference in sharpness is noticeable if you put them side by side.

Thankfully while Apple may have slightly dropped the ball on the resolution, its Retina HD display is about more than just packing in the pixels. It also delivers superior contrast and viewing angles to any previous iPhone and even has better colour reproduction and an improved polariser so that it’s easier to see when wearing sunglasses.

All of which leads to by far the best viewing experience we’ve yet seen on an iPhone and means the iPhone 6 has one of the best phone displays around, despite the slightly disappointing resolution.

Design


If there’s one thing Apple always gets right it’s design and the iPhone 6 is one of the company’s best looking products yet. With a metal and glass build it was always going to look premium but Apple hasn’t simply used expensive materials, it’s also thought about the construction.

You can see that in the way the curved edges glide almost seamlessly into the screen and in the fact that despite being bigger than before it’s also slimmer at just 6.9mm thin. It looks and feels great and while you won’t mistake this for an iPhone 5s you also won’t think it’s anything other than an Apple handset.

Apple iPhone 6 - Thin Design

Being bigger at 138.1 x 67mm it’s naturally harder to use one-handed but Apple has thought of that too, by moving the power button to the side and elongating some buttons as well as working in clever features on the screen to ensure that whatever you’re interacting with can always be aligned with your thumb.

It should be a little more durable than past iPhone’s too, thanks to a supposedly stronger display. This isn’t sapphire but it is supposedly strong enough to survive drops and scratches. It’s a little disappointing that Apple didn’t go one step further and make its phone dust and water resistant like other companies are starting to do though.

Power


It’s never easy to directly compare the power of an iPhone to anything else because on paper its specs just don’t match up. But to make things even harder we don’t even know for sure what the specs of the iPhone 6 are, as Apple has simply said that it has a 64-bit A8 chip, though many sites claim that it’s a 1.4GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM.

Whatever the case though, in use the iPhone 6 feels as slick and smooth as you’d expect. Of course there’s nothing out there to really tax it yet, with all currently available apps and games designed to work smoothly on the iPhone 5s, so it’s hard to say how it will fare down the line but Apple promises that it’s substantially more powerful than last year’s phone.

Gamers can rest easy too, as the Cupertino company has included a new technology called ‘Metal’, which allows the CPU and GPU to work together to deliver console-style games.

Camera

Apple iPhone 6 - Camera

We couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when we heard that Apple once again put an 8 megapixel camera in its phone, but this isn’t the same 8 megapixel camera as we got in the iPhone 5S.

Focus Pixels allow it to autofocus faster than ever, there’s improved face detection, exposure control, digital image stabilisation to counter motion blur and shaky hands and improved photo apps to let you quickly edit images.

The video camera has seen even more improvements. It can film in 1080p at 60fps or 720p in slow-motion at 240fps. There’s video stabilisation to keep shots steady, continuous autofocus and you can even shoot time-lapse videos.

Meanwhile the FaceTime HD camera can capture up to 81% more light than previously and features a new burst mode which can take 10 photos per second, making it better than ever for both selfies and video calls.

Features


The iPhone 6 is light on new features which don’t directly tie into something else such as the camera or the screen, all of which have been discussed above. The main new feature is Apple Pay which uses NFC to allow you to make contactless payments. It’s got the potential to be a hugely useful feature and with Apple backing it contactless payments might become a lot more common than they are now.

On the other hand Android phones have included NFC and contactless payment solutions for a long time, so while it’s a useful feature it seems more like Apple is playing catch-up here than truly innovating.

The two big features from the iPhone 5S have made a return too, specifically the motion co-processor which tracks your activity without killing your battery and Touch ID, which lets you unlock your phone and approve purchases with your fingerprint.

These features are just as good as ever and in combination with iOS 8 Touch ID is getting even better, as developers can now use it with third-party apps. While the M8 motion co-processor can now measure steps, distance and elevation changes.

Battery life, memory and connectivity

Apple iPhone 6 - Connectivity

As usual Apple hasn't confirmed the size of the iPhone 6’s battery, so we’ll have to wait for someone to take it apart. But the company has said that it can last for up to 14 hours of talk time, 10 days of standby time, 11 hours of internet use or 11 hours of video.

All of which is pretty good and is down to a combination of the battery itself and a more efficient processor. It still doesn’t sound like quite a match for the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example though.

The iPhone 6 comes with a choice of 16, 64 or 128GB of storage, with 32GB MIA for some reason, so there’s the potential for a lot, but there’s no microSD card slot and with the 128GB model costing £699 Apple hasn’t made higher storage capacities all that affordable.

For connectivity you get Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, 4G and NFC. It’s worth noting that the iPhone 6 also supports 4G LTE-A speeds of up to 150Mbps.

Early verdict


The iPhone 6 is a phone which has almost everything you could want all delivered in a stunning new design and with flagship power. It’s as expensive as always, the screen could be higher resolution and we can’t help but feel that it’s one of Apple’s less innovative offerings but the whole package has been put together so well that it hardly matters.

Apple iPhone 6 Specification



iPhone 6
Colours
Available in silver, gold, and space gray,
Dimensions
138.1 mm x 67.0 mm x 6.9 mm
Weight
129 grams
Screen
4.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit widescreen Multi‑Touch display with IPS technology
Resolution
1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
Chips
A8 chip with 64-bit architecture

M8 motion coprocessor
Memory
16GB,64GB and 128GB  
iSight Camera
New 8-megapixel iSight camera with 1.5µ pixels

Autofocus with Focus Pixels
Facetime Camera
1.2-megapixel photos (1280 by 960)
Video recording
1080p HD video recording (30 fps or 60 fps)
Touch ID
Fingerprint identity sensor built into the Home button
Battery
Talk time: Up to 14 hours on 3G

Standby time: Up to 10 days (250 hours)

Video playback: Up to 11 hours
Connectivity
NFC, VoLTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, 4G LTE
SIM Card
Nano-SIM

No comments:

Post a Comment