IPhone 6 Plus review

Everything you need to know about Apple’s XL iPhone

Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus is big, really big – a gargantuan 5.5in diagonally across its screen. It’s the biggest iPhone so far, but does that outweigh the negatives: loss of portability, greater power requirements and the difficulty of one-handed use?

Price

The new iPhones are available to buy now. We suspect the most popular choice will be the 16GB 6 Plus, which costs £619 SIM-free but even that is one of the most expensive prices for a smartphone on the planet.

There are also the 64GB and 128GB models, which cost £699 and £789 respectively. There’s a choice of three colours in each capacity, with our favourite being Space Grey. Second choice would be Silver; Gold sits in a distant third place, but we imagine it will be first choice for some.

Let’s be straight here. 16GB on a modern smartphone is a tiny storage capacity when you can’t add to it via a microSD card. Apple has canned the 32GB option, and even that was poky. Remember that you won’t actually get 16GB – more like 12GB, and that won’t hold many apps, especially if you load it with music and/or take a lot of photos or a small number of videos. So try to afford the 64GB iPhone if you can – you’ll thank yourself later, we promise.

Of course, you don’t have to buy your iPhone SIMfree. However, on contract you will still have to pay an up-front charge as well as the monthly payment,

which will work out more expensive overall. Check out where to buy the iPhone 6 Plus, where we lay out all the best deals.

Display, specs and performance

You probably don’t need us to lay out the specifications for you, but here are the highlights anyway. The iPhone 6 Plus has a 5.5in screen with a full HD resolution of 1920x1080. That’s likely to match the TV in your living room, and is the sharpest screen on any Apple device to date at fractionally over 400 pixels per inch (ppi).

It’s the brightest screen on any iPhone and has the highest contrast ratio, higher even than the iPhone 6. Apple claims 1,400:1, and the firm never quotes figures it can’t back up. It looks great from any angle, regardless of whether you’re browsing for apps on the home screens or reviewing photos and video you just took.

It’s by no means the biggest smartphone or phablet screen, nor is it the sharpest. So-called QuadHD or QHD screens used by phones including LG’s G3 have four times the resolution of a 1280x720-pixel screen. Since the G3 also has a 5.5in screen, its higher resolution gives it a much higher pixel density of 538ppi, and it really does look fantastic.

The Galaxy Note 4 is Samsung’s 5.7in phablet and has the same resolution – 2560x1440 pixels – but obviously a slightly lower density of 515ppi. For most people, of course, this is a non-issue, and they will be over the moon with the iPhone 6 Plus’ screen.

They’ll also be happy with performance, even though the on-paper specifications of the 6 Plus aren’t all that exciting. In Geekbench, which reports the A8 CPU running at 1.39GHz (roughly 200MHz faster than the iPhone 6), the 6 Plus showed it was clearly the fastest iPhone yet with a multi-score average of 2917.

To put this in context, the Samsung Galaxy S5 managed 2869, the iPhone 5s 2556 and the LG G3 2465.

In GFXbench 3, the 6 Plus managed 41.1fps in the older T-Rex test, and 18.7fps in the demanding Manhattan test. Despite having a faster-clocked GPU than the iPhone 6, having to drive the extra pixels takes its toll, and these frame rates are a little lower than the iPhone 6, which scored 49.1and 26fps respectively.

In SunSpider 1.0.2, we saw a speedy result of 369ms, making the 6 Plus one of the quickest smartphones we’ve seen in the web browsing test.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to buy any product based on benchmark results, let alone a couple of synthetic tests. What

matters is real-world performance and battery life. As you’d expect, the iPhone 6 Plus feels extremely fast in general use. There’s no hint of lag or judder throughout iOS 8, nor a delay when launching most apps. One of the areas where you really notice the extra speed – especially if upgrading from an iPhone 5, 5c or 4s – is how quickly the 6 Plus is able to stitch together panoramas (which are now saved in a much higher resolution than before) and compress videos for emailing.

Battery life

Battery life is certainly a step up from any previous iPhone. In normal use, which in our case is a mix of web browsing, phone calls, watching videos, playing games, taking and editing photos and sharing them on Facebook, we’re able to go almost two full days between charges.

Obviously your mileage will vary: battery life is highly dependent on what you’re using a smartphone to do. Streaming video over 4G at maximum screen brightness will quickly deplete the battery, whereas checking and sending emails at a medium brightness won’t.

There are other new features stuffed inside the 6 Plus, too. NFC has finally made an appearance but it won’t be any use until Apple Pay comes to the UK. Hopefully Apple will open up the chip to developers so iPhone 6 Plus owners can use it for more than just buying goods and services.

There’s also faster Wi-Fi (now 802.11ac) and a barometer which is used by the new M8 motion coprocessor to gauge elevation changes and – as many activity trackers do – record when you’ve walked up a flight of stairs. This data can then be read in the new Health app.

Design and size

Compared to the angled and almost industrial design of the iPhone 4 and 5, the iPhone 6 Plus makes something of a return to the original iPhone with curved sides. The screen gently curves at the edges to meet the sides and, even though it’s not much thinner than the iPhone 5, it feels it because it’s so much larger – it measures 78x158x7.1mm. And it really is a lot larger. It’s bigger than quite a few Android phones which have 5.5in screens: not wider, but taller. And this explains why Apple had no choice but to move the power button to the side. Whether you hold it right- or left-handed the power button now falls under your finger or thumb. The only problem is that the button is directly opposite the volume buttons, so it’s very easy to accidentally press both. Usually, this means turning the phone off when you meant to increase the volume or take a photo using the volume button.

Like everything, though, you quickly get used to the size of the 6 Plus, and the bigger screen makes a positive difference when browsing websites and using any apps which have small controls which are fiddly to use.

A minor point to note is that the camera now protrudes from the rear of the iPhone 6 Plus and if you’re the type who refuses to ‘ruin’ the design by using a case, bear in mind that it won’t sit perfectly level when you put it down on a hard surface – in fact, it rocks between two of the corners which is pretty annoying, especially if you like interacting with your phone when it’s lying down flat. (Most cases are likely to leave the camera sitting flush or slightly recessed. Apple’s cases are both thicker than the protrusion.)

Cameras

This brings us neatly to the photos and videos. The 6 Plus has the best rear camera of any iPhone, including the iPhone 6. It may still have an 8Mp sensor but as anyone who knows anything about digital photography will tell you: more pixels does not equal better quality photos (or video).

The 6 Plus has a couple of features which elevate it above earlier iPhones. One is optical image stabilisation, which even the iPhone 6 lacks. This

helps counteract camera shake by physically moving the camera, and leads to sharper images in low light, which is the only time the system is active.

In most situations, the iPhone 6 Plus takes fantastic photos. It’s in its element in good light: details are sharp, colours accurate and exposure spot on. In some photos, quality is noticeably better than the iPhone 5s; in others, there’s not that much to separate them. In low light, the 6 Plus wins out, but you’re not guaranteed a great shot.

In the shots that aren’t blurry, the new camera and processor team up well to eliminate unsightly noise as well as retaining detail. Here’s an unedited low-light shot that’s only been resized to 1200 pixels wide.

The new ‘Focus Pixels’ make a huge difference in video. There’s almost no focus hunting – where the camera can’t lock onto the subject – and the system is very fast to switch focus between objects at different distances. The stabilisation also lends a real cinematic feel to footage when you’re moving, but it can’t cope with extreme movement such as when you’re running.

Two new modes are time-lapse and 240fps slo-mo. Time-lapse is fun, but you really need to find a place to prop up the phone as hand-held time-lapse movies are

usually too jerky. With the new high-frame-rate slow motion setting, hand-held shots are no problem at all. In fact, the problem is that it’s still too difficult to share slo-mo videos and the clip below had to be AirDrop-ed to an iPad to create a shareable movie that wasn’t as compressed as the email option.

Software

We’ve been using iOS 8 for a few months so are already familiar with its new features. On the iPhone 6 Plus, though, are some extra features you won’t get on older iPhones. One is a split-screen or twincolumn view in certain apps – just as you already have on the iPad. On the iPhone 6 Plus, these are also available in landscape mode, and the home screen also rotates to a landscape view.

Instead of simply making the keyboard keys larger or wider, you get new keys on the iPhone 6 Plus, and more than you’ll see on an iPhone 6. To the left are cut, paste and undo buttons, while on the right are cursor keys and extra punctuation keys. What’s frustrating is that there’s no option to use the extra screen space for a row of number keys so you don’t have to swap between letters and numbers. We’ve yet to see a third-party keyboard which offers such a

design, but we’re hopeful there will be one. Another feature specific to the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is Reachability, which helps to offset the larger screen and enable you to ‘reach’ the whole screen with one hand. When you double-tap on the home button, the top half of the screen slides down to the bottom.

This means your thumb should be able to reach far enough to tap the top row of icons when on the home screen, or swipe down to display the Notification Center. It works in any app, so whenever buttons or options are out of reach, a quick doubletap should sort it out. It feels like a workaround, because that’s what it is, but we’d rather have this slightly inelegant method than none at all.

Because the iPhone 6 Plus has a new resolution, any apps which aren’t optimised for it have to be scaled up to fill the whole display. This works seamlessly and the quality of the scaling is excellent. In certain apps it feels odd because the keyboard is oversized, but most popular apps should be updated to use the iPhone 6 Plus’ native resolution.

iPad & iPhone User’s buying advice

As with the iPhone 6, it’s hard to come to a conclusion about the 6 Plus. For a start, it’s unusual for Apple not to make the first move, so while it’s the biggest and fastest iPhone ever, there are even bigger smartphones with higher resolution screens in the Android stable.

There’s also the unknown for a lot of people. Is a 5.5in screen too big? Conversely, is it big enough to replace a tablet such as the iPad mini? These are questions that have no definitive answers: screen size is and will always be a personal preference. There will be iPhone owners that will prefer to stick with a smaller screen and opt to hold onto their iPhone 5s, 5c, 5 or buy a 4.7in iPhone 6. Others will love the extra size for browsing websites, watching videos, using detailed apps (such as GarageBand) and browsing their iCloud Photo Library. Yet more might feel that 5.5in isn’t enough to comfortably browse some websites or use fiddly controls in apps.

If you’re not sure, it’s well worth heading to an Apple store to try out an iPhone 6 Plus before you buy. One thing is for sure: it’s expensive. If you’re a dedicated iPhone user and would never consider switching to Android, you’ll save money by going for the smaller iPhone 6. But saving money has never been a goal for most iPhone buyers and on that basis, the 6 Plus is a very fine smartphone indeed.