It’s been exactly one year since the last two iPhones were released. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the success rate from the Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus was beyond anticipation. Every year a new iPhone releases ever since the iPhone 2G has come out, and iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus followed that ongoing trend. Read on to know more about the new iPhone 6s.
Except from a new color option, nothing much has changed externally but in fact, everything’s changed inside. A new version of iOS operating system has been introduced, the basic way of interaction between the smartphone and user has been upgraded to a whole new dimension, the cameras are now even better and photos are livelier than ever.
The improvements may not be huge, but they definitely tend to attract many more people to be iPhone fans. That’s how Apple does their magic every year!
The new iPhone 6s Plus and 6s Review
Just like the last two years, two variants of iPhone has been released. Back on 2013, the other variant aside from the main update iPhone 5s was the iPhone 5c. Apple focused on releasing a cheaper, colorful and funky iPhone for the youth and colorful out there, hence the first plastic-made iPhone was born. The plastic made iPhone didn’t last long through the following years despite its enormous popularity among the teenagers and young adults, instead Apple opted for larger screen premium phablets.
The legacy continues through the September 2015 special event. The number of iPhone still stays 2, their external dimensions are the same, the look and feel as well. But what changes then? That’s what we are looking forward to finding out.
New Metal
iPhone 6 Plus had to face a scandalous bendgate issue after its release last year. Not all the iPhone 6 Plus that were released bent, but a big portion of the initial market supply had the weak design issue which Apple fixed later. The scandal spread across the social networks and the web, resulting in controversy. However, that wasn’t much of a very practical issue because who doesn’t use a case on their precious smartphones these days?
To prevent such occurrences take place ever again, Apple has taken a new move on the element they use for casing design. Now they use an Apple-customized Aluminum which is underneath an Aluminum 7000 series doe, and molded in accordance to Apple’s requirement at their pre-assigned factories. It’s an aerospace grade aluminum which takes casual pressure and stress at ease, tackles every harshness the user may throw up at it with the in-built rigidity. Say goodbye to bendgate because the new iPhone is much less fragile.
The use of Aluminum 7000 isn’t new for Apple. Apple Watch’s housing is built using Aluminum 7000 as well, that’s how the Apple specialists predicted the new iPhone could have the same material as well. Even the Rose Gold color option on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus was anticipated earlier from the same color tone Apple Watch.
Upgraded Processor
With every iPhone a latest generation CPU is released. This year, it’s an Apple A9 chip. According to Apple, the chip is 64 bit desktop class with lesser power consumption and more performance ability at the same time.
Every new technology of the Apple iPhone 6s and 6s Plus is basically embedded into their new A9 chip. According to the R&D team, this new chip performs faster than 80% of the existing portable computers. The performance is indeed desktop class, enabling users to take out their resource-hungry jobs to anywhere they want without losing working efficiency, or wasting more time on it. The new iPad Pro makes it even easier to carry out any task on the go, and the newly released Apple Pencil speeds up works like never before. On the Apple iPad Pro, the chip is a more powerful A9X, which is a tablet optimized version of the A9.
On board the new A9 chip, a new LTE modem has been integrated to support 23 LTE bands. This makes the iPhone 6s a perfect gadget for carrying around during travelling across the globe, as most networks bands are supported by the new iPhone. Also, the download speed can reach as high as 300 Mbps through mobile data while on LTE; that’s a milestone for any smartphone that had been released in a pretty closer timeline to this new iPhone.
The GPU is inbuilt, like before. On the spec sheet, the figures don’t look much big like the Android counterparts. But in Apple’s case, they design both the hardware and the software and they know what level of precision is required. No exaggeration is usually done; no matter how inferior the spec sheet may look to bare eyes – the iPhone will never fall back in terms of delivering superior performance. Thanks to the latest SoC development technology from Apple.
Photos that are Alive!
Chances are, you are one of those who grew up watching Harry Potter – all the sequels of it. The magical worlds of Harry Potter indeed of many fancy stuff including the photos that moved. On every printed photo, they characters were alive, they could move and the whole thing looked like it’s alive! Now the iPhone 6s brings the same feel with the photos on iOS 9.
Just tap and hold on the photos, and they would show a snippet of before and after of when the photo was captured. Not much, only around half of a second would be capture on both ends but that brings life to the photos like nothing else. The Live Photo feature is turned on by default, users can simple toggle it off using the switch inside the camera app on the top row. To view the live photos, users need to touch the display on a certain way because the mean to access those live photos is the newly introduced 3D touch by Apple.
However, the feature isn’t brand new as many Apple fan may claim. Nokia Lumia 930 had a Living Image feature inside their Nokia Camera app. That app wasn’t as practical as Apple’s, yet the innovation claim goes to Nokia actually.
The live photos look like GIFs, but they are actually few 12 MP high quality photos captured with the iSight camera captured together that ends up looking like a 1 second video clip.
Retina Flash
Low light selfies often turn out to be bad. Few smartphone have come up with a front camera LED flash option, but to Apple that was too mainstream of an idea. They introduced the Retina flash, where the display of iPhone turns very bright for a tiny portion of a moment to light up the photo.
To make the retina flash work, the phone must be held in close proximity to the subject. Which won’t be much of a problem since everyone holds the phone close when capturing a selfie in low light. The effect is better than a LED flash in many cases, because the Retina flash projects light more like a light diffuser than the harsh light effects of the direct LED flashlight projection itself. People will definitely love the new flash on their iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
The front facing FaceTime HD camera got bumped up to 5 megapixels. It was a necessary step for Apple to compete against the Android counterparts’.
3D Touch
The most hyped feature on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is the new way of interaction – 3D Touch. Touch screen operation as it was known mostly took place in two dimensional space via touch, tap and swipe gestures. Now, Apple introduces a new technology that detects how much pressure has been created on the display through a tap. For different levels of taps, the output will be different.
A new taptic engine is built into the smartphone to provide accurate and precise haptic feedback for the user to know their touch level. This new taptic engine uses the same technology as used in the last Apple Macbook, which featured an innovative new touchpad without the clicky feel, but the touchpad still generated a click-like feel through its taptic engine. Apple has only improved the tech to fit it into the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.
Now an iPhone user can navigate through the smartphone using push and pop gestures. A slight tap on the screen gives a quick peek on the photos, or a deep tap shows relevant quick options that an app can perform. For example, to open the camera on rush for taking a selfie, pressing down the Camera app would provide four options. Tapping on ‘Take a Selfie’ immediately turns on the front camera for an ‘emergency selfie’, as described by an Apple executive.
Price
The latest iPhone generation now gets the same price tag as the iPhone 6 from last year. The iPhone 6s 16 GB would cost $199 on contract, and respectively $299 and $399 for the 64 GB and 128 version. For the iPhone 6s Plus, the price is $299, $399 and $499 for respectively 16 GB, 64 GB and 128 GB on contract.
Conclusion
Apple devices are unique. No matter how many options the Android devices provide, there is always a premium feel to the Apple devices that no other company has achieved yet. On the performance end, the new iPhones are well capable of competing with the existing flagship devices in the market. Hopefully, the new features of iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are going to be Apple’s savior for their #1 rank for global smartphone market consumption.
