iPhone 6 Plus

Is this the iPhone you've been looking for?

If the iPhone 6 with its 4.7-inch display still feels small and insignificant, try the IPHONE 6 Plus for size. This is a really big iPhone. The display is 5.5 inches, making it bigger than flagship phones from Samsung, Nokia and Sony. Of course, those companies also make phone/tablet hybrids with bigger screens, and the iPhone 6 Plus is very much a direct rival to the recently announced Galaxy Note 4. But what's it like to use an iPhone this big?

SEE ALSO: iPhone 6 Plus vs Galaxy Note 4
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iPhone 6 Plus: Design and Build

This certainly feels like a phablet. As with the iPhone 6, Apple has moved the power button from the top to the right shoulder to make it easier to reach. Like the smaller new phone, the curved back and gently rounded screen make it feel much more manageable than the raw specs would suggest. And the curves mean you can roll it through your fingers like a worry stone in a satisfying way, assuming you don’t have small hands. 

Build quality, as with every iPhone Apple has ever made, is immaculate. It is precise and detailed with no sharp edges between surfaces and a sumptuous feel in the hand. Grey lines on the back match the top and bottom strips on the iPhone 5S, though here they work to let the signal in and out through the metallic case. The look won’t please everyone, but I found it quickly became something I barely noticed.

SEE ALSO: iPhone 6 vs iPhone 5S
 

iPhone 6 Plus: Screen

Like the iPhone 6, this handset uses Retina HD display with a promised increased viewing angle and bright, sharp colours. But here, for the first time, Apple has exceeded the 326 pixels per inch found on iPhones from the IPHONE 4 onwards. The 401 pixels per inch of this Full HD display looks stunning. 

And as with the smaller iPhone just announced, you can choose from Standard and Zoomed views. Zoomed increases the sizes of shortcut icons, text and more, though you still have the same number of apps visible at a time. This is different from Nokia’s Windows Phone handsets, where the extra real estate is used for more app icons, not bigger. On the other hand, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus both have room for an extra row of icons at the bottom of the screen, which is handy.

SEE ALSO: iPhone 6 vs iPhone 6 Plus


Still, there are extras in this phone – as with the IPAD but not other iPhones, when you rotate the phone the home screen icons turn as well to give a landscape home screen. Choose certain apps, such as Messages, and the app rotates to show a message list on the left and message contents on the right, as happens on the iPad. It just reinforces the feeling this is a mini-tablet as well as a phone.

Apple has previously made much of the fact that its screen sizes were perfect for one-handed use, with everything within easy reach. So now, by gently touching, not pressing, the home button twice, the top of the screen (any screen) drops down so it’s in easy reach of your thumb. Or to look at it another way, it makes the screen half the size! None the less, it’s an ingenious way to make a big screen more manageable. It might feel counter-intuitive for an Apple device to do this, but it works. 

SEE ALSO: iPhone 6 vs Galaxy S5

iPhone 6 Plus: Camera and Features

While its larger, the iPhone 6 Plus shares most of the same basic specs and features as the iPhone 6. So there’s the new NFC chip to make Apple Pay a reality, though sadly not just yet in the UK. There’s an improved processor, the A8, and a new motion co-processor that will enable exact fitness and movement tracking, including elevation change.

Similarly, VoLTE (short for Voice over LTE), which permits calls to be conducted over 4G, is on the iPhone 6 Plus. This should result in a serious improvement in audio clarity on phonecalls, though only on networks that support it.

The camera is new, as it is on the iPhone 6. It has the same eight megapixel sensor and supports Focus Pixels, which Apple claims speed up autofocus and promise better low-light snaps. But the iPhone 6 Plus gets one more feature: optical image stabilisation (OIS). 

This will reduce camera shake – in brief tests this seemed impressive and it will be interesting to see how it compares to the iPhone 6's digital stabilisation. Improved slo-mo video (now up to 240fps), 1080P recording at higher frame rates and HDR for video are also added to the camcorder’s capabilities, as they are for the iPhone 6.

SEE ALSO: Apple Watch vs Android Wear

iPhone 6 Plus: First Impressions

It’s strange at first to see an iPhone this big. But because it’s such a straightforward enlargement of the iPhone 6, it quickly becomes familiar. The screen is stunning – it may not have as many 'pixels per inch' as the QHD Samsung Galaxy Note 4, but it still looks sharp, rich and bright. 

It seemed fast and powerful and the extra features the iPhone 6 lacks, such as a landscape home screen and apps optimised for the bigger display, work well. These touches make it feel like a different experience, rather than just a 'larger' one. Whether it's a better one will largely depend on your point of view, though the OIS camera is a clear benefit over the iPhone 6. Whether it's worth the extra money is another matter.