Hello my friends this first Review on my blog and is about
iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus Review
For most of the reviews here at Gadgets 360, we use the mobile in question as our primary phone for about a week or so before sharing our verdict with you. We realise this isn't perfect, since there are some aspects of the device that don't become obvious during that time, and in an ideal world, we'd use every phone for a couple of months before we publish our review. But we work under constraints where most devices aren't available to us for that long - almost all products that we review are loaned to us by companies for short durations - and there's also the competitive pressure of wanting to get your review out before others do, as long as it doesn't involve cutting any corners.
With the launch of iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus in India, Apple offered to loan the two new iPhones to Gadgets 360 - and indeed other publications - for more than the typical timeframe of a few days. The India iPhone launch of course came a few weeks after it was available in the US and several other countries, which meant that there were enough reviews out there for us not to worry about timelines too much. This gave us an ideal opportunity to spend more time than we'd initially imagined with the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus and share our thoughts two months into using them.
The extra time also gave us more time to think about the development of the iPhone line in the future, and tie that in with information that has come to light in the recent weeks. Strap yourselves in, because you are in for a long ride.
Look and feel
We were using the iPhone 6 as our primary phone before our rather lengthy experiment for the sake of this review, and we remember that the iPhone 6s felt noticeably heavier when we first picked it up, and this difference really threw us off our game for the first 24 hours. We imagine the experience would be pretty much the same if you switched from an iPhone 6 Plus to an iPhone 6s Plus. For a company that's obsessed with making its products thinner and lighter, shipping flagship products that are both heavier and thicker than their predecessors is an interesting decision, and one that may not have been taken lightly at Cupertino.
We understand the new 3D Touch sensors are to be blamed for the extra weight, but in the absence of any official information from Apple, it's difficult to be certain. A couple of days into the review process, however, we'd gotten used to the new weight of the phone, and this is where we hope against hope that Apple takes a lesson when designing future iPhone models.
The lesson of course is that people aren't as obsessed with 'thin and light' as the product designers at Cupertino, and they can get used to a little bit of extra weight pretty quickly. So dear Apple designers, when you figure out how to make the 3D Touch panels thinner and lighter, can you fill that remaining space with a bigger battery? We won't complain, we promise. We wouldn't hold our breath on Apple actually listening to that feedback, but that doesn't mean we stop trying, right?
It seems as if every iPhone is greeted by a controversy that rears its head around launch time and before you realise, it has taken on a life of its own. If it was iPhone 4 and Antennagate - a problem that was as real as physics itself - then in 2014 we had one-part truth, one-part fiction, and all-parts YouTube sensation called Bendgate. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, as you may remember, were shown to be prone to bending if you, well, tried to bend them with a great amount of force (what a surprise). The topic eventually died down, but one wonders if reverberations of the controversy are being seen in the build of the newest iPhone models.
While there was no mention of Bendgate when Apple launched the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, our thoughts went back to last year's controversy when Apple announced that the new iPhone models are made out of 7000 series aluminium alloy, a grade of metal that's also used in the aerospace industry. Sceptics may see this as an acknowledgement that Bendgate was real, while others may see it as a natural design evolution.
The iPhone 6s Plus comes with a 5.5-inch display but in terms of overall size it rivals some 6-inch devices in the Android world. This is something we had criticised during our review of the iPhone 6 Plus last year, and since we are on an 'S' cycle, we didn't expect it to change this year. Manufacturers who don't call Cupertino their home have been making big screen phones for a while now and they have evolved their designs to the point where there is hardly any bezel on the sides. In contrast, much like their predecessors, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus have very prominent bezels and space both above and below the screen, which translates into a poor screen-to-body ratio for Apple's phones.
We can count on Apple reducing the bezels on the sides of the screen, but making the iPhone shorter while retaining the same display size might prove to be a bigger challenge. The physical Home button - which has evolved over the years to also house the Touch ID fingerprint scanner - has always been the centrepiece of the user interaction paradigm on iOS. Android phones on the other hand can choose to have on-screen buttons, which gives manufacturers more flexibility with their designs. Given how important the Home button is on iOS, it will be interesting to see how Apple goes about making a 5.5-inch screen that's easier to carry around.
Since we've been carrying around the new iPhones for over a couple of months, you'd perhaps be curious about the wear and tear visible on the devices. As you can see from the images, there are practically no signs of wear and tear on these phones, even though we've been using them without any sort of a case. Having said that, as someone who treats their gadgets like their first-born, our usage doesn't replicate the real-world experience of most users, and it's safe to assume the wear and tear is no different than what you've experienced on previous iPhone models. The new
3D Touch
Traditionally, the S series of iPhones are seen as minor upgrades, since they look just like the predecessors. However, the S models have also introduced some marquee features over the years. The iPhone 4S - or iPhone 4s as Apple now wants us to write it - was the first iPhone to ship with Siri, Apple's virtual assistant. The iPhone 5s brought with it the Touch ID, a dual-LED flash, and it was also the first iPhone to ship with a motion co-processor, the M7, and it came with iOS 7, a major overhaul to Apple's mobile OS, though obviously other iOS devices got the update as well.
The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus continue this tradition by bringing their fair share of improvements. The first new headline feature is 3D Touch, a variant of the Force Touch technology that debuted in the Apple Watch and has since found its way into other devices such as the MacBook as well as accessories. There's been some confusion around what 3D Touch is - a lot has been written about it, yet some continue to think it is nothing but the latest trick from the marketing team at Cupertino in making everyone thing Apple has 'invented' something that exists in every touchscreen phone out there.
Not much has changed in the new iPhones as far as the display is concernedWhile some think 3D Touch is nothing but a long press, in simple terms, it's more of a hard press of the screen. Traditionally, screens have been capable of detecting the point where the user is pressing the display. Then came multi-touch displays that could detect more than one pressure point, making multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom possible. Until now - and this admittedly is an oversimplification of sorts - the pressure sensitivity sensors have been binary in nature - an 'on' state indicating the user is pressing the screen at that point, and an 'off' state indicating an absence of touch. With 3D Touch, this becomes a continuous scale, with the hardware now capable of detecting the amount of pressure you put at each point.
Touch-screen devices have traditionally achieved pressure sensitivity by putting this technology in stylus, which can detect how hard you are pressing the stylus against the screen and then pass this information to the software, to take the required action. Admittedly, 3D Touching the display the first few times takes some getting used to, and instances where you fail to trigger it because you didn't put enough force, or just absentmindedly put too much force and accidentally invoked it are common initially.
As you would expect, 3D Touch has been made possible by putting a series of sensors underneath the display, increasing the overall weight of the new iPhones as we discussed before. Given what you need to do to trigger the action, the original name - Force Touch - was perhaps more accurate as far as capturing its essence is concerned. The 3D Touch name, however, comes from the pressure sensitivity being sort of a Z axis to the X and Y axis that represent where the user is tapping the screen.
Armed with this additional bit of information, software developers can do a whole lot of things that weren't possible earlier. Apple talks about two ways in which applications can use 3D Touch - Quick Actions and Peek & Pop, but that's barely scratching the surface. You can 3D Touch app icons on the home screen to reveal a set of Quick Actions - existing functionality within the app that you can quickly jump to, when you would've traditionally needed to launch the app and then trigger that feature.
The default Camera app, for example, lets you quickly jump to selfie mode via 3D Touch, while the Messages app lets you start a conversation with contacts you frequently chat with (in case you are wondering, the contacts in the list are not from your Favourites list, nor are they recent contacts; our guess is they are inspired by Siri Suggestions). Third-party apps need to be updated to add support for these actions, and most of the popular apps have done just that.
You can, for example, quickly resume the podcast you were listening to with Overcast, one of our favourite apps from 2015. Facebook, via Quick Actions, lets you start writing a post or take/ upload a photo or video straight from the home screen. Whether these actions are actually faster than launching the app and switching to that particular option is debatable. That's particularly true with the bigger iPhone 6s Plus, where 3D Touching an icon on parts of the screen that are not easily accessible requires a certain amount of control and precision that one isn't capable of at all times. However, if thoughtfully done, 3D Touch can indeed save you some time and a few taps. Our favourite implementation is perhaps in the Twitterrific app, which lets you quickly switch Twitter accounts, perfect when you spend most of your time using one Twitter account, but want to get something off your chest via another account in a jiffy.
In Mail, Messages, and Notes, 3D Touching anywhere on the on-screen keyboard turns it into an onscreen 'trackpad', making it easier to quickly move around the text and make selections. Also, you can 3D Touch the left edge of the display while you are on the home screen to bring up the multitasking view, which is a quieter alternative to doing it by double pressing the home button.
Peek and Pop are Apple's implementations for adding 3D Touch related functionality within apps. You can take a peek (aka quick look, not to be confused with Quick Look on OS X) at a mail by 3D touching the List view in the Mail app and let go to get back to the list, potentially saving you the gesture of tapping and then swiping back. If, while taking a peek, you decide you need to respond to this message, you can swipe up to see a list of preset replies. Similarly, you can 3D Touch to preview a link without needing to open it in Safari.
As we mentioned earlier, not only can the sensors on the new iPhones differentiate between 3D Touch and a regular touch, but they can detect everything in between as well. This enables developers to build all kinds of applications that were not possible earlier. Game developers, for example, can now let you choose between gently prying the door open and entering secretly or swinging it wide open by simply detecting the amount of pressure you are putting on the on-screen door.
Other great implementations of 3D Touch are coming from third-party developers as well. Magic Piano app, for instance, detects how hard you are pressing down on the virtual keys on screen and adjusts the playback volume accordingly, just like a real piano. Someone even figured out a way to convert your iPhone into a weighing scale, though that's unlikely to find its way into the App Store anytime soon.
Software
The new iPhones of course ship with iOS 9, the newest version of Apple's mobile operating system. There are some software features that are tied to the new hardware - like 3D Touch-related tweaks and Live Photos (see below), but for the most part, iOS 9 enhancements are available to older hardware as well, and we've covered them in depth before. We'd still like to highlight a few points we noticed during the considerable time that we spent with the new phones.
If you are someone who tried Siri on iPhone 4S and then forgot about it because the performance was fairly hit and miss, then you'd be pleasantly surprised by how far we've come from those days. Siri of course was recently updated to work better with Indian accents, and it can do a lot more as well, although its full potential remains unfulfilled in India and some other regions. We love the ability to ask questions like "What's the score between Liverpool and Manchester United?" and "Who has the most goals for Southampton this season?" and receiving fast, on-the-spot answers.
(Also see: iOS 9 Brings Better Battery Life, Smarter Siri, and More)
If you are an Apple Music subscriber - at Rs. 120 per month in India, it's one of the best value deals going around - you can even tell Siri which song (or genre) you are in the mood for, and hear your phone start belting it out in on time. Siri now also works hands free, in that your phone is constantly listening for you to say 'Hey Siri' so it can automatically invoke Siri without you needing to press any buttons. This is similar to the 'Ok Google' functionality on some Android phones.
You can invoke Spotlight by swiping right from the first home screen, and apart from the search box, you will see four contacts and apps listed there. These are not the four most recent apps or contacts; instead Siri is trying to guess the apps you might need or the people you might need to get in touch with. Unfortunately this is definitely not Siri's strongest suit and we can't say we care much for this feature.
(Also see: iOS 9 Search Showing Too Many Results? Here's a Simple Fix)
If you use Apple's built-in email client, you can enjoy certain other features as well. Many people include their phone number as part of emails they send you. iOS 9 scans this information and the next time this individual calls you, the name of the person who sent the email pops up right next to the number. The first time this happens it's a little freaky as it seems Truecaller's Android avatar has magically installed itself on your phone, but this is definitely a handy feature. Apple of course stresses that all this processing is happening on your device itself and nothing is being sent to the cloud and that no Truecaller-like global registry of numbers is at work here either. Similarly, if emails you receive mention an event like a restaurant confirmation or a flight reservation, iOS 9 can create a suggested event in your calendar.
Apple claims to have made some underlying improvements in iOS 9 that offer up to an hour of additional usage time with the device under similar conditions, but we didn't notice any difference when we upgraded our iPhone 6 from iOS 8 to iOS 9, and we didn't spot much of a difference between the battery life of our new iPhone 6s compared to last year's iOS 8-running iPhone 6.
iOS 9 brings a new feature called Wi-Fi Assist that's a boon for those who stream content from wireless drives, as they can now use their phones cellular data to stay connected to the Internet at the same time. Of course it works with other Wi-Fi networks as well. Earlier, if you were on a Wi-Fi network and its Internet connection died or was erratic, you'd have to manually switch off Wi-Fi and move to cellular data. With [Wi-Fi assist] - which is on by default, but can be toggled off - the OS automatically switches to cellular data in case of problems with your Wi-Fi's Internet connection. However, you may end up eating into your cellular
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