battle between Apple’s iPhone and a bevy of models based on Google’s Android. What wasn’t immediately obvious was that the two camps would persist in having radically different stances on how large a smartphone should be.
On one side: Apple, which has maintained that it’s essential that a phone be small enough to use comfortably with one hand. In the seven-plus years since the iPhone debuted, it’s bumped up the screen size only once, from the original 3.5 inches to the iPhone 5's taller-but-no-wider four inches.
On the other: makers of Android phones, who have always believed that bigger is better (in part because it was a
a vulnerability for Apple). Every major Android flagship model of 2014 has a screen that’s at least five inches. And "phablets"—phones like
Samsung's Galaxy Note that are so spacious they’re practically tablets—go way beyond that.
It’s made buying decisions difficult for anyone who covets both seamlessness androominess.
No longer. While the most radical new feature may be Apple Pay, which aims to render your wallet full of plastic superfluous—and which won't arrive until October—the biggest news is that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are, well, big. And the question on everyone's mind is: Are they too big
What's different in iphone 6 and iphone 6 plus?
Since this is a two-fer review, let’s start by outlining the difference between both the new devices. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are like the Retina iPad Mini and the iPad Air, or like the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Airs. They’ve got mostly the same insides and design touches, with a handful of differences. Many things in this review will apply to both phones; when they don’t, we’ll be sure to specify which one we’re referencing.
Here’s a list of the major differences between the 6 and the 6 Plus, aside from their physical dimensions:
- Screen size: iPhone 6 is 4.7 inches and 1334×750, iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5 inches and 1920×1080.
- Battery: iPhone 6 is 1810mAh, iPhone 6 Plus is 2915mAh.
- Camera: The iPhone 6 Plus adds optical image stabilization (OIS) to the same camera the iPhone 6 uses.
- Software: The iPhone 6 Plus’ larger screen lets it do a few things the iPhone 6 can’t, though not without caveats.
Look and feel
Since the first iPhone 6 part leaks began, I’ve thought of the new design as the child of an iPhone 5 and an HTC One. Both of those phones share a mostly metal chassis with strips sliced out of it to let wireless signals through. But the iPhones retain distinctly Apple-esque design touches—symmetrical front bezels with the TouchID-equipped Home button, solid and creak-free construction, and an obsession-to-a-fault with thinness.
In most respects, both new iPhones are worthy of their predecessors. Apple’s build quality is characteristically excellent, and neither phone exhibits even a hint of creaking, flexing, or button-wobbling. The nicest change is that the hard edges of the iPhone 4- and 5-era designs have been expelled in favor of rounded edges that run all the way around the back of the phone. They blend (nearly) seamlessly with the gently curved glass on the front of the phone, making the whole thing comfortable to hold.
Though it’s larger and more curvy, the rest of the design should be pretty familiar if you’ve ever seen an iPhone. The Home button, still ringed by the TouchID fingerprint sensor, remains a mainstay, and this year’s version feels and sounds more rigid and clicky than the version in our 5S. The long rectangular volume buttons on the left edge of the phone under the mute switch resemble those used by the iPhone 5C or iPads rather than the round buttons of the iPhone 4 or 5. The power button has moved to the right edge of the phone, as with many larger Android phones; with devices this big, this placement is easier to hit with one hand than a button on top of the phone might be. The nano SIM tray still sits on the right edge of the phone.
The iPhone 6 design isn’t really doing a whole lot that’s new, not if you're paying attention to what any of the high-end Android and Windows phone hardware makers have been doing. But Apple takes many individual things that have been done well in other phones—those rounded edges, the curved glass, the larger, higher-resolution displays—and combines them all into one nicely assembled package. We only have two complaints about the new design, compared both to iPhones of past years and to the Android-based competition. And both, I suspect, stem from the aforementioned obsession with thinness.
The first complaint is that, compared to most recent Android handsets, the new iPhones don’t have a particularly good screen-to-bezel ratio. This is due in part to the TouchID button, a genuinely useful feature for which we’d gladly trade a smaller bezel. But especially in the iPhone 6 Plus, there’s plenty of extra bezel around the Touch ID button that feels like it could have been condensed, and Apple’s love of symmetry means any space shaved off of the bottom bezel could automatically be removed from the top bezel as well.
