iPhone 6 Plus: Apple’s new beast may be too big for its boots

THE iPhone 6 Plus is a beast of a handset but it may be too big for some traditional Apple users.

THE iPhone 6 Plus is a beast of a handset but it may be too big for some traditional Apple users.

It’s the highest specced of the two new iPhones, and seemingly more prestigious, with handset scalpers in Australia asking for up to $2400 on eBay for it. That’s $750 more than its listed local price.

It’s very thin for a big phone — just 7.1mm thick — thinner than the iPhone 5S. But being more than 50 per cent heavier at 172 grams and 28 per cent longer than the 5S, the 6 Plus may not fit narrower pockets, and you will notice it’s there — particularly if you currently have a relatively tiny iPhone 4.

That’s the curse of the phablet phone: large handsets with screens in the 5-inch to 6.9-inch screen range that are almost tablet sized.

If your main interest is bread-and-butter actions such as calling, emailing, SMS, calendars and messaging, you might be better off with the relatively smaller iPhone 6. But if you’re into watching or shooting video, or mobile gaming, or need a smartphone with improved battery life, the 6 Plus is the go.

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Like the 6, the 6 Plus has a well crafted anodised aluminium back with an LCD screen. It’s beautifully finished. Being super thin, the iSight camera slightly protrudes on the back, so the back isn’t totally flat.

Screen colours are not as vivid or saturated as you’d see on handsets with super AMOLED touchscreens, a different technology on phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S5, but arguably the colours are more natural. The display is full high definition — 1080p or 1080 x 1920 pixels.

Since the iPhone 4’s release in 2010, iPhone screen resolution has been 326-330 pixels per inch even as the size crept up. The iPhone 6 Plus breaks this mould with 401 ppi. Video I watched on the 6 Plus looked sharp and crisp despite its bigger size. But this resolution is below that of Android phablets such as Samsung’s upcoming Note 4, which also boasts 4K video shooting, something Apple has avoided.

The Note 4 is to be launched in Australia within a week and the fight for market dominance between it and the iPhone 6 Plus looms as a most ferocious shoot out in the phablet world.

As I’ve said previously, Apple smartphones don’t necessarily win the hardware specs race against Android rivals; it’s Apple’s app ecosphere, brand name, reliability and the fact advertised features are well thought out and generally work that seem to matter to consumers.

On the 6 Plus, the home button, volume rocker, headset socket and mute toggle switch are located where they were on the iPhone 5S, but the power button has moved from the top to the right hand side. You can hold the phone in one hand and switch it on, but in my case, only just, with my medium sized hands.

The weight dictates you really need two hands to hold it. As with the 5S and 6, the home button doubles as a fingerprint sensor — Apple’s Touch ID.

Apple has introduced features on the 6 Plus not found on the 6. Two gentle taps of the home button causes the top section of the screen to scroll down so you can reach it with your thumb and press links displayed on it during one handed operation. But again, you’ll need big hands. And being a little heavier, I found it hard to balance the phone with one hand.

You can also scroll from side to side to access multiple web pages in apps such as Safari.

And you can rotate the 6 Plus and experience landscape mode - just like you might with an iPad. Both the iPhone menus and some apps, particularly Apple ones, can switch to landscape but other apps resolutely stay in portrait mode.

Mail, contacts and messages display in two-column format, as they would on an iPad, and look attractive. Others, such as Apple’s standard Music app, do not rotate. How they behave will depend on developers. On a few occasions, I found the menu rotation slow to kick in initially.

The consistent 16:9 screen ratio across iPhone models means that apps can scale up to the larger 6 Plus screen without issue. Over time, developers might make better use of the extra screen real estate with more information rather than just bloat it. As with iPhone 6, the 6 Plus display settings include a choice between standard and zoomed view, which shows larger controls.

Both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus purport to offer faster 4G LTE download speeds, and faster 802.11ac Wi-Fi with a claimed threefold speed increase.

The iPhone 6 Plus shares other new attributes with the 6. It has Apple’s new A8 system on a chip, and an M8 co-processor that monitors activity sensors, even while the phone is asleep.

It gleans information from the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and the new barometer sensor which Apple says knows when you’ve travelled up a flight of stairs by measuring the air pressure difference. The phone matches this with forward walking movement detected at the same time.

However this begs the question, how high is a flight of stairs? With phone in pocket, I scaled 4 flights of stairs to my apartment but the Health app recorded 3. I tried tricking the phone into thinking I was climbing stairs by walking on the spot in my apartment lift as it went upwards. (My neighbours thought I was crackers.)

Alas, this did not trick the iPhone into thinking I was climbing stairs. If it had, Apple would be bracing to endure the wrath of millions of office workers in high rise buildings world wide.

In the health app, most of attributes such as blood pressure, and various vitamin and mineral levels require you to either input data directly or for a third party app to populate it. That functionality is yet to come as companies that produce health and activity monitors and other medical-style devices are yet to integrate with Apple Health.

Apple has always been coy about stating actual battery capacity; rather it quotes expected performance such as up to 12 hours of internet use on 3G, 12 hours using Wi-Fi and up to 14 hours of video playback. I got 13.8 hours of 1080p video playback at 75 per cent brightness using the 6 Plus.

We don’t know for sure, but tear downs claim the 6 Plus battery capacity is 2915 milliampere hours which is 87 per cent more than the iPhone 5S’s. But that would be smaller than the 3220 mAh battery on the Note 4.

Apple too has chosen less than the most high resolution screen on the market for the 6 Plus, such as new quad HD displays. But Apple instead prides itself on delivering an energy efficient ecosystem that is reliable and works and long battery life seems to sits well with Apple users.

However time could soon run out for this strategy as Samsung and co squeeze more juice into their battery cells and offer advanced power saving options.

The iPhone 6 Plus cameras for the most part have the same attributes as the 6 cameras. There’s an 8 megapixel back facing “iSight” camera and 1.2mp forward facing one for video conferencing and selfies. I have to say these specs are getting somewhat dated given the competition offers 16mp and 3.7 mp sensor cameras respectively.

There are genuine improvements thanks to the power of the A8 processor which delivers capabilities like 60 frames per second HD video, a dramatically slowed down slow motion rate of 240 frames per second shooting, and there’s time lapse photography. I enjoyed shooting traffic along the busy Princes Highway in both slow motion and time lapse modes, and that video appears online.

Apple also has adopted phase detection autofocus on this camera. Basically the phone processes images as opposite ends of the lens to adjust focus and focusing is much faster than on the iPhone 5S.

There is one significant difference in the camera specs between the 6 and 6 Plus and one that I spent time testing out — optical image stabilisation. It’s a feature found on higher end Nokia Lumia Windows phones that offers smoother motion when shooting video.

While the iPhone 6 uses software for its image stabilisation, the 6 Plus has a lens mounted on tiny springs that is capable of moving in all directions: back, forward, up, down and side to side. I shot vision with both the 6 and 6 Plus while walking down a pathway at Sydney Park.

The OIS on the 6 Plus delivered almost a gliding movement, like on a dolly at a film set, but you could still see my gait. Vision shot by the 6 on the other hand contained more jolting action. It was particularly noticeable when looking at a high-rise building in the background. See our video.

All in all the iPhone 6 Plus is a fine handset; it’s beautifully put together as Apple devices mostly are, and slim, and it gives you access to Apple’s impressive ecosystem of apps, and now its upcoming payments system, comprehensive health monitoring and in the future, home automation.

But Apple is up against top competition in the phablet market with offerings with more powerful processors, ultra high resolution screens and better cameras. Further, Australian pricing of $999, $1129 and $1249 for 16, 64 and 128 Gigabyte storage models means this is a very expensive handset. You can get a MacBook Air for the same price.

While the iPhone 6 Plus is a superb handset, Apple is more vulnerable to the competition than in the past, especially in the Phabet market where it is a newcomer. It will be fascinating to see how things pan out.

The iPhone 6 Plus comes in silver, gold and grey. Silver and gold have a white front, grey a black front. There’s already a swag of covers for the phones, made by Apple and third party suppliers.

Rating: 8.5

Price: $999, $1129 and $1249 for models with 16, 64 and 128 Gigabytes of storage, or on contract with Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and resellers.

Click here for our review of the smaller iPhone 6 handset.

Chris Griffith travelled to the Apple launch event at Cupertino courtesy of Apple