Apple iphone 6 plus Review

Design
The iPhone 6 Plus sports the same newly curvaceous design as its smaller sibling, but with one major difference: its beefed-up body frames a substantially larger 5.5in, Full HD display. This makes the iPhone 6 Plus something of a handful but, at only 7.3mm thick, the slender, curved profile fits surprisingly well in the hand. With the rounded edges nestling comfortably in the crook of each finger, it feels just as manageable as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

The extra girth bumps the weight up a tad, but this is by no means a heavy phone. At 172g, the iPhone 6 Plus only weighs 43g more than the iPhone 6, so it isn’t the weight that will cause problems for your pocket – it’s the size. And, despite the reports from users who have bent their iPhone 6 Pluses by sitting on them, or keeping them in a pocket, our impressions are that the iPhone 6 Plus feels just as sturdy and solid as other big-screened smartphones we’ve tested. Rest assured, we’ll be testing its mettle in our tightest jeans pockets over the coming weeks and months.

In practice, though, the iPhone 6 Plus often feels more like a miniature iPad than an iPhone. Hold it in landscape orientation and, for the first time on an iPhone, the iOS homescreen spins around into a landscape view. And while it’s nigh-on impossible to reach every corner of the display (at least without unusually long thumbs), the iPhone 6 Plus shares the iPhone 6’s “Reachability” function: a quick double-tap of the home button slides the upper half of the screen downwards to bring icons, buttons and address bars within reach.

Apple has also taken advantage of the 6 Plus’ extra screen real estate to add extra keys to the left and right of the onscreen keyboard in landscape mode, with dedicated copy, paste, full stop and comma keys spread across each side. This makes it much quicker and easier to tap out longer emails without constantly switching back and forth through keyboard panels.

Display, performance and battery life
As you’d expect, the iPhone 6 Plus’ Full HD display is the centre of attention. Image quality is sumptuous from the off, with brightness soaring high enough to fend off even bright sunlight, and image quality that marries pin-sharp clarity with rock-solid contrast and rich, believable colour reproduction. And at 401ppi, the iPhone 6 Plus has the most densely pixel-packed display of any Apple device to date.

Interestingly, the iPhone 6 Plus’ display lags a little behind its smaller sibling in terms of its technical performance, but it’s not far off. We measured a maximum brightness of 493cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 1,293:1, and the colour accuracy is excellent, too. The IPS panel served up a very slightly wider range of colour than the iPhone 6, covering 95.5% of the sRGB colour gamut, and was only slightly less colour-accurate, with an average Delta E of 2.58 and a maximum deviation of 5.33. To the naked eye, the iPhone 6 Plus’ display is nothing less than superb; moreover, we noted none of the backlight inconsistency that afflicted our test sample of the iPhone 6.

In terms of power, there’s scant difference between the two. As the same 1.4GHz Apple A8 chip is the driving force in both handsets, it came as little surprise to see a nigh-on identical set of scores in the SunSpider, Geekbench and Peacekeeper benchmarks. What’s really impressive, though, is that the iPhone 6 Plus’ gaming performance doesn’t suffer due to its higher-resolution screen. Despite pushing twice as many pixels as the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus actually pulled slightly in front in the GFXBench T-Rex HD test with an average frame rate of 53fps. We suspect Apple’s new A8 chip is capping the maximum frame rate at 60fps regardless of screen resolution to prevent excess heat buildup and minimise power consumption – a very sensible design choice.

One area where the iPhone 6 Plus comprehensively betters the iPhone 6 is battery life. Even with the demands of GFXBench stressing the GPU, the iPhone 6 Plus achieved a projected runtime of 3hrs 26mins. This isn’t the best result we’ve seen by any stretch, but what’s impressive is that it maintained an average frame rate of 53fps throughout the test. By way of comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S5 lasts almost an hour longer, but it artificially limits the frame rate to less than 20fps.

The iPhone 6 Plus turned in some excellent figures in our other battery tests, too. In our 720p video-playback test, where we calibrate the display to a brightness of 120cd/m2 and activate flight mode, the handset used only 4.9% of its battery capacity per hour – a figure that puts it just ahead of every Android flagship out there. It didn't quite repeat the feat in the 3G audio-streaming test, but it still fared very well indeed. With the screen off, a pair of headphones connected and one of PC Pro’s podcasts streaming, the iPhone 6 Plus used only 2.1% of its battery capacity per hour.

Camera
Fittingly, Apple has equipped the iPhone 6 Plus with a superb pair of snappers front and rear. Apple hasn’t played the numbers game here – Nokia’s Lumia 1020 still rules the roost with its 41-megapixel sensor – but the 8-megapixel iSight camera has received a handful of behind-the-scenes upgrades, and the front-facing 1.2-megapixel camera has received a larger f/2.2 aperture to gather more light for those all-important selfies.

Although it has the same resolution as the iPhone 5s camera, “Focus Pixels” dotted across the iPhone 6 Plus’ sensor add speedy phase-detect autofocus to the camera’s list of talents. The dual-LED True Tone flash is still present and correct, though, and just as we found on the iPhone 5s, this does a fine job of providing more natural lighting in poor to non-existent lighting conditions – there’s none of the horrible, washed-out effect that afflicts shots taken with a single-LED flash.

The iPhone 6 Plus even trumps the iPhone 6 in one key area: its larger body has given Apple room to squeeze in optical image stabilisation. Disappointingly, though, this is activated only for low-light stills, so video recordings don’t benefit.

In practice, though, the iPhone 6 Plus is capable of capturing some beautiful shots. The speedy hardware inside means that the camera app flicks into view almost instantaneously from the lockscreen, and the lightning-quick autofocus does its bit to help grab pin-sharp impulse snaps. In most cases, the results are excellent: photographs look crisp and well-focused across the frame, colours are rich and true, and the low-light performance is second only to the Lumia 1020.

Still photography isn’t the iPhone 6 Plus’ only talent, either. Like its sibling, video can be recorded in both standard Full HD 30fps, timelapse and 720p 240fps Slo-mo modes, and the results are impressive in every case. Once third-party apps such as Horizon are updated to take advantage of the new hardware, we suspect 4K video recording may be on the cards, too – we’ll be sure to test this as soon as an updated version of the app becomes available.

Features and call quality
In terms of features, there’s nothing to separate the two new iPhones. We’re pleased to see that 802.11ac has finally made the cut; Bluetooth 4 is now accompanied by NFC in readiness for the forthcoming Apple Pay contactless payment system; and, of course, there’s the now familiar Touch ID sensor embedded in the home button. Call quality is nigh-on identical to that of the iPhone 6, that is to say crisp, clear and full-bodied. There is a difference, however, in speaker quality: the iPhone 6 Plus houses a larger, louder speaker than that of its stablemate. We’d have no qualms listening to radio broadcasts, music or even watching movies without using headphones. The clarity and quality on offer is highly impressive for a smartphone.

Verdict
Thus far, we haven’t been universally won over by giant-sized smartphones, but with the iPhone 6 Plus we’re steadily beginning to see the appeal. In situations where we’d normally have found ourselves swapping our smartphone for a tablet – on the sofa in the evening, say – we simply didn’t feel the need with the iPhone 6 Plus. The display is large and sharp enough to make web browsing a slick, pleasurable experience, and the stormingly quick hardware makes for a device that never once slows down or lags in everyday usage. Factor in the superb screen and camera, and in many ways the 6 Plus makes a great halfway house between a smaller-screened iOS device and the iPad mini.

In our time with the 6 Plus, however, we did miss having a phone that we could sling in a trouser pocket or a cycle jersey without a second thought. If you’re the kind of person who values pocketability and portability over all else, neither this nor any of the giant-screened flagships from rival manufacturers will fit the bill. They’re all simply too large.

Even if you are one of the increasing number who doggedly subscribe to the “bigger is better” mantra, there remains one major hurdle to overcome: the price. Just as with its smaller sibling, we’d pointedly ignore the 16GB iPhone 6 Plus. With no recourse to add extra storage via a microSD slot, that simply isn’t enough to make the most of such a capable, powerful device. Set your sights on the 64GB model, however, and you’ll only get enough change from £700 to buy a packet of McCoy’s. It’s enough to put a lump in anyone’s throat.

Be in no doubt, this is the most luxurious, high-performance phablet that money can currently buy, but just as with the iPhone 6, Apple is demanding a daunting premium for its work. With competent smartphones available for substantially less, we’d think long and hard about spending this much on any handset.