APPLE IPHONE 6 PLUS REVIEW

Beautiful design (wish it was waterproof)

Year in and year out, the iPhone is always the best-looking, best-built phone available. Nothing has changed with the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus. Aside from the HTC One M8, nothing out there comes close to its design quality.

Notable design features:

An insanely thin 7.1mm body (the thinness should help if you use a case)
A brushed-aluminum frame (silver, black, or champagne “gold” available)
Less plastic than last year around the top and bottom of the back (there’s just a thin strip for the antenna)
Roomier volume buttons
A more comfortable power button on the side instead of the top

You will notice that the camera now protrudes about a millimeter from the back. This is a byproduct of Apple going for broke on thinness, and it could lead to some broken camera lenses, but isn’t excessively noticeable and doesn’t hamper the feel.

The brushed metal, rounded edges, and large size of the 6 and 6 Plus combine to produce a somewhat slippery device. If you’ve used an HTC One M8 or iPad, you know what you’re getting into here.

Finally, Apple has not commented on water resistance, but many leading competitors to the iPhone 6 Plus can take a dunk in the drink, including the LG G3, Galaxy S5, and Xperia Z2/Z3. Treat the iPhone like it’s Gizmo from Gremlins: Keep it away from water at all costs.

Still, when all is said and done, the pros outweigh the cons. This is a comfortable, beautiful iPhone that leads the market. Apple hasn’t lost a step.

Apple’s Reachability makes 6 Plus more manageable

Despite its size, one small feature makes the 6 Plus much easier to use: Reachability.

Normally a big phone forces you to strrrretch between a Home button at the bottom of the screen, a notification tray way on the top of the screen, app back buttons in the upper left corner of the screen, and power/volume keys high up on the sides. The smaller a phone is, the easier it is for you to hit all these keys with one hand; the larger it gets, the more you have to adjust your grip or use two hands. This leads to discomfort and dropping.

Apple’s Reachability feature is the best way I’ve seen a phone maker deal with size.

Reachability is the easiest, best way I’ve seen a phone maker deal with this common phablet problem. Double tap (not a press, just a touch tap) on the Home button and the entire top of the screen pulls itself halfway down. This simple maneuver lets you easily access the top three rows of app icons, yank down the Notification center, and reach the top-left navigation in apps. There are also options to increase text and icon size.

Even with Reachability, it’s still somewhat cumbersome to have to double tap every time you want a screen to come down to meet your thumb, but at least the iPhone gives an option if you need to do some things with one hand. Kudos to Apple for thinking that through better than any Android phone maker so far (or Google).

iOS 8 is a good, small step forward

For a more complete look at iOS 8, you should read our full review. Aside from Reachability and some improvements to iCloud — Family Sharing and iCloud Drive both rock — there’s little new in the iPhone 6 Plus. Apple’s maligned Podcasts app is now included at installation and there are two new apps: Tips and Health.

Tips is literally just a guide to new features in iOS 8. Despite being an app most people will use once, you can’t remove it.

Health is the most poorly designed app I’ve ever seen from Apple. In its current state, it is completely unusable by anyone outside of engineers and Apple’s elite. I’m not sure who approved this mess, but it’s shameful. I’ve been reviewing apps since 2006, and I’ve used better health and fitness apps on the original Motorola Razr phone than Apple’s Health app.

Without any form of tutorial you’ll have no idea what’s going on; even when Apple gets its act together and fixes the bug with the Health app’s Sources screen, nothing outside a massive redesign will make it user friendly. Right now it’s just folder after folder of complex medical terms, requests to manually add “data points,” and things you have no way to measure. The app needs to show you what you need to know and hide the clutter. So far, Health is a major disappointment.

Aside from Health, iOS 8 looks about identical to iOS 7, and that’s great. iOS remains the most consistent, easy-to-use operating system available. You can even do a few new things, like install your own custom keyboard — hello, SwiftKey.

(Apple will also launch its own payment service called Apple Pay, but not until later this year.)

Good specs, but storage comes at a cost

First, a rant. When is Apple going to upgrade the iPhone’s memory? The default $750 iPhone 6 Plus has only 16GB — the same as the low-end iPhone 3GS in 2010. There’s no reason Apple couldn’t give users at least 32GB of space in the cheapest iPhone 6 models except greed.

If you pay $100 more, you can get a 64GB iPhone, and $100 more will nab you 128GB. With apps and photos taking up much more space than even a year or two ago and no MicroSD support, we can’t recommend that you purchase a 16GB iPhone. Pay $100 more and buy a 64GB option.

iPhone 6 Plus is likely the best smartphone camera on the market.

Outside of storage, the iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 pixel LCD screen, 1.4GHz dual-core 64-bit Apple A8 processor (based on the ARM v8), a special Apple M8 motion processor that can now detect movement precisely enough to know when you’re going up stairs, 1GB of RAM, ion-strengthened glass that may or may not be better than Gorilla Glass 3, an 8-megapixel rear camera, a 1.2-megapixel front camera, and an NFC chip, which will be used with Apple’s upcoming phone-payment system.

The 6 Plus appears to be roughly on par with the iPhone 6 and a small step up in power from theiPhone 5S. The phone gets noticeably warm when you play games or do a lot of downloading.

We performed a 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited test on the iPhone 6 Plus and it scored about an 18,000, which is on par with the Galaxy S5. However, we should note that it didn’t appear to yet run at full 1080p resolution. The Geekbench processor benchmark gave the phone a slightly higher score than the iPhone 5S, with a 2,860 multi-core score, compared to a 2,515 for the 5S.

The specs of the iPhone 6 Plus are good, but no matter which way you slice it, Apple has not focused on raw processing power this year (or memory). The insides of the iPhone 6 Plus are a lot like the 5S.

Camera improvements

We have more testing to do on the iPhone 6 Plus, but so far the 8-megapixel camera seems about on par with the iPhone 5S. Time-lapse videos work great as does moving video.

We need to do more low-light testing, but it appears that the 6 Plus rear camera performs a little better in darker situations. The 6 Plus also brings out slightly more detail in certain situations (like the blue in the sky in a distant window) than the 5S.

The camera improvements are subtle, and the front camera is still a sad 1.2-megapixel webcam, but the iPhone 6 Plus still has likely the best smartphone camera on the market outside of crazy cam-centric phones like the Nokia Lumia 1020.

Call quality and battery life

Call quality and download times on the 6 Plus are up to par, and it’s impressive that Apple’s phone supports more LTE bands (more carriers) than any other smartphone. It can also seamlessly switch from a network call to a Wi-Fi call, and T-Mobile users will be able to take advantage of this feature first.

We’re hopeful about battery life. Apple claims that the 2,915mAh battery in the 6 Plus will get up to 24 hours of talk time on 3G, but we’re just hoping it can make it through a day and a half of use. iPhone battery life was at an all time low with the 5S, and most Android devices now approach two-day life.

Score:

Highs

Industry-leading design, build quality
Reachability feature makes size manageable
Fantastic camera
iOS 8 remains a fluid, beautiful OS
Large battery

Lows

16GB storage on base model is not enough
Large size is too big for some hands
Specs aren’t much better than iPhone 5S
No water resistance

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