The year 2014 marked a huge step in Apple’s direction as well as a landmark in the new leadership under Tim Cook. This is also the year that the iPhone has significantly grown, not only in sales, but also in display size. Check out our full review of the iPhone 6 after the break.
Apple’s introduction of two versions of the iPhone this year is not much of a surprise since they did it last year with the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c.
What is more interesting about this year’s release is the focus on display size. You see, for the longest time Apple has resisted the challenge of making larger smartphones. This year, they gave in to the competition and made not one large iPhone but two.
Before we proceed, we suggest reading up on our iPhone 5S review here which will give you a better perspective on the new iPhone 6.
Last year’s release of the iPhone 5c was an attempt to gain more users in the mid-range market. It looks like that approach did not pan out quite well so this year, Apple is attempting the other end of the spectrum and target the phablet market.
Design and Construction.
Every two years, Apple makes significant design changes to their iPhone. This year, the iPhone 6 got quite a cosmetic makeover.
At 4.7 inches, the iPhone 6 got a much larger display from the 4-incher that was the iPhone 5s from last year.
With the iPhone 6, you get the same premium metallic build and flawless craftsmanship from Apple. It feels good on the hands, very light for its size and a very slim profile.
It’s thinner and lighter than the 5s despite having a larger display. At only 6.9mm, the iPhone 6 has a very slim profile so the hold and grip on the iPhone 6 is a bit awkward and slippery. There is not enough girth to comfortably hold the device with in one hand. This is the same feeling when you hold the iPod Touch.
We could not shake the thought that the design of the iPhone 6 was heavily inspired by the iPod Touch. And we cannot blame Apple, or Jonhny Ive for that matter, since the iPod Touch from two years ago was already a good-looking device.
The placement of the buttons have been slightly re-arranged with the power button now on the right side (to be easily reachable by the right thumb) and the volume controls along with the lock button on the left side.
The Lightning charging port, 3.5mm port, microphone and speaker are at the bottom end. At the back is the 8MP rear camera that is flushed too close to the top left corner.
The rear camera also protrudes above the surface of the back panel and can be distracting and prone to scratching. It’s also too close to the corner that it could be frequently obstructed by the fingers when taking photos.
Those band-aid stripes at the back does look a bit distracting to the contiguous monochromatic and matte finish of the iPhone. We believe it’s a way for them to isolate the multiple internal radios and minimize signal interference from the metal body (same stripes you’d see at the back of the HTC One M8) but the coating and tone doesn’t do justice to the phone.
That and the placement of the protruding camera are so unlike Apple but we guess the designers and engineers made a compromise on that one. If Jobs were still alive, he would have gone nuts with these slight imperfections.
Display.
Having been accustomed to a lot of smartphones in the 5 to 5.5-inch display size, the iPhone 6 feels familiar with its 4.7-inch display. This, along with the iPhone 6 Plus, is the biggest increase in display size Apple has made in the last 7 years.
With a resolution of 750×1334 pixels, the iPhone 6 has the same pixel density as the previous iPhones at 326ppi. That’s basically just HD-quality display but Apple managed to make the iPhone 6 looked gorgeous that you will find the screen to be one of the best we’ve seen around.
You will only notice the pixels while watching full HD movies or browsing text-heavy websites but those times, they are overshadowed by the great viewing experience, nice color saturation, contrast and crispness of the display.
The glass panel at the front has a significantly curved edge that extends towards the side to meet the rounded frame. Suffice to say, it is the nicest display we’ve in any iPhone to date.
OS, UI and Apps.
With iOS 8, Apple introduced a lot of changes and improvements. Fortunately, Apple has rolled this out a week ago to older versions of the iPhone so everyone was able to experience the enhancements before the release of the iPhone 6.
The UI is basically still the same but Apple did a lot of changes under the hood. There’s a tight integration with Mac OS X Yosemite so AirDrop to your Mac is now possible as well as doing SMS (iMessage) and voice calls.
There were a lot of refinements and tweaks done to the menus and shortcuts that made more sense and more intuitive.
Since the display is larger on the iPhone 6, the screen can accommodate another row of icons (making it a total of 7 rows). However, there is an option in the Settings menu to either show the Standard icon layout or to Zoom In to squeeze the original 6 rows into the screen, thereby enlarging the individual icon size.
Due to the changes in resolution, we were a bit curious if apps would behave differently because of the bigger resolution. Fortunately, Apple has cleverly kept the same 16:9 aspect ratio for its screen, which means current apps will automatically scale up to fit the iPhone 6.
Multimedia and Camera.
Apple boasts of its camera that has a large 1.5-micron pixels and ƒ/2.2 aperture. On paper, it’s not as impressive as the 2.0 micron and ƒ/2.2 aperture of the HTC One M8. The camera can also record 1080p full-HD at 60 fps, 240-fps slo-mo, and time-lapse video.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating we we’ll just let these sample photos an videos do the talking in terms of performance and clarity.
Both day-light and low-light photos resulted in really great quality photos. We’re impressed that photos in very low-light conditions still resulted in very little noise.
Just like the 120fps slo-mo video of the iPhone 5S, the 240fps 720p video of the iPhone 6 is an amazing feature of the camera. It creates dramatic scenes and show details you don’t normally see with regular video recording on a smartphone. The 240 frames per second is so fast that it can even record the flickering of florescent lamps (not noticed with the naked eye).
As for gaming, the iPhone 6 worked very smoothly on almost all games we payed with it — Infinity Blade and Asphalt8 both did great in game play. However, we were a bit puzzled that we experience significant lags when playing Man vs. Machine.
Performance & Benchmarks.
Apple has never been really a big fan of multi-core processors and huge amounts of RAM. So while we’re all accustomed to 8-core processors and 3GB of RAM for Android devices, Apple’s iPhone 6 gets a modest dual-core A8 chip and 1GB of RAM. Of course, more RAM is better but iOS 8 works just fine even at 512MB so a 1GB upgrade on the iPhone 6 should be more than enough.
PassMark Performance Mobile Test:
CPU: 45,703 (iPhone 6), 36,024 (iPhone 5S) vs. 17,568 (iPhone 5)
Memory: 3,842 (iPhone 6), 4,146 (iPhone 5S) vs. 2,788 (iPhone 5)
Disk: 26,324 (iPhone 6), 13,266 (iPhone 5S) vs. 10,213 (iPhone 5)
2D: 2,948 (iPhone 6), 2,462 (iPhone 5S) vs. 875 (iPhone 5)
3D: 1,988 (iPhone 6), 1,929 (iPhone 5S) vs. 1,647 (iPhone 5)
Overall: 5,561 (iPhone 6), 5,069 (iPhone 5S) vs. 2,800 (iPhone 5)
The scores above shows the PassMark scores of the iPhone 6 compared to the scores we took from the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5 from last year.
If we based it on the benchmark scores, the A8 chip got a 27% CPU performance upgrade and 20% in graphics (2D). This backs up the claim by Apple that their A8 chip got a 25% gain in performance over the A7 from the iPhone 5S.
We also tried running Antutu Benchmark for iOS so we can compare to other chips from Mediatek and Qualcomm but the test always gets stuck at 59% when running the Memory test.
Call Quality, Connectivity and Battery Life.
Call quality on the iPhone 6 is very good with clear and crisp audio when making voice calls. Signal reception for cellular and WiFi is also at par with the iPhone 5S. The new A8 chip also supports up to 20 LTE bands which allows it to be compatible with more networks on different countries. There’s very little to no concern whether our local telcos Globe and Smart is compatible iPhone 6 released in other countries.
Our standard battery bench puts the iPhone 6 at 12.5 hours running an HD video in a loop at 50% brightness and 0% volume. That’s a great score compared to other flagship handsets but once we use the device on regular daily use, we only managed to get about 12 hours with WiFi turned on. We started using the iPhone 6 at 10:30 in the morning with 98% charge and we hit 2% at exactly 10:00pm. This was with minimal text (less than 20) and voice calls (just 2), several photo and video shots with WiFi turned on with very little Twitter use only.
This is also the first time Apple incorporated an NFC chip into the iPhone. This is to support their effort at mobile payments via a service that’s called Apple Pay. Unfortunately, Apple Pay is only supported in the US and there’s a very slim chance that it will be available in the Philippines.
The NFC chip is also locked to Apple Pay so there’s no way to use it for pairing with other NFC-enabled devices.
Conclusion.
Aside from the increased display size, we did not see anything else significant when upgrading from the iPhone 5S to the iPhone 6. The iPhone 5S is as smooth, flawless and beautiful as the iPhone 6. Actually we wished Apple could have just retained the design and thickness of the iPhone 5S and increased the size so there’s more room for a Lithium-polymer battery for better battery life.
But if the solid operating system and the app ecosystem is what really sets the iPhone apart from all other smartphones currently in the market, then we can categorically say the cheaper and more widely available iPhone 5 or 5S with iOS 8 could be the better bang-for-the-buck Apple device right now. Unless, for you, size does matter.
Nonetheless, if you have the money to spare despite the steep gray market price, go ahead. We could not stop you even if we tried.
Perhaps, once the iPhone 6 is officially released in the Philippines sometime in December, and the prices go down to more reasonable levels or when telcos offer them free with postpaid plans, then we might reconsider.
Apple iPhone 6 specs:
4.7-inch IPS LCD @ 750×1334 pixels, 326ppi
Apple A8 1.4GHz dual-core Cyclone processor
PowerVR GX6450 quad-core GPU
1GB RAM
16GB, 64GB, 128GB internal storage
HPSA+/LTE 150Mbps
WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band
Bluetooth 4.0 LE
NFC, Apple Pay
8MP rear camera, dual-tone LED flash
1080p@60fps, 720p@240fps
1.2MP front facing camera
Fingerprint sensor
iOS 8
Li-Po 1810mAh battery
129 grams (weight)
138.1 x 67 x 6.9 mm (dimensions)
What we liked about the iPhone 6:
* Solid build and construction
* Really nice display quality
* Impressive camera performance
* Great design
* Very slim profile
* Fingerprint sensor
* Option for larger 128GB internal storage
What we did not like:
* Very expensive retail price
* Crippled NFC
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