Apple iPhone 6 review

While the rest of the world went to bigger and bigger screens, Apple steadfastly refused to follow suit, sticking with the 4in screen for its iPhone 5S. As good as that handset was, we couldn't help but think that it was a little too small and that Apple was lagging behind. Step forwards this year's iPhone 6, which address all of those problems.

With its 4.7in screen, Apple has managed to strike the right balance: the phone's not too much bigger than the iPhone 5S, so there's no upgrade worry and the iPhone 6 will still slip easily into a pocket, but the display's noticeably bigger and has a higher resolution. Of course, for anyone that wants something bigger, there's the iPhone 6 Plus.

Build quality

The one area that Apple hasn't changed for the iPhone 6 is build quality, and this model is the best yet. Sticking to its usual design regime, the iPhone 6 uses a completely new design. Gone are the square edges of the iPhone 5S, replaced with a curvier, more rounded body. Given the extra size of the phone, the rounded edges don't just look great, they make the phone easier to hold and we've not once dropped our handset by mistake.

Apple's usual attention to detail is ever-present, with the front glass curving gently to meet the sides of the case, so you can't feel the join. It's this kind of quality that sets the iPhone apart from its rivals. An aluminium case gives the iPhone 6 the high-quality look and feel that we expect from Apple. Plastic runs between the individual metal parts, in order to allow for uninterrupted mobile and wireless reception. It's been neatly done and you can barely feel the join. Available in Space Grey, Silver or Gold, each colour has its own merits, so it's really a matter of which one you prefer.

While the iPhone 6 has a bigger footprint than the iPhone 5S, there's not a lot of difference between the phones. For starters, the iPhone 6 is just 6.9mm thin, making it thinner than the iPhone 5S. Impressively, at 129g, the new handset is only 17g heavier than the old one.

With a bigger screen, some design changes have had to be made. The most obvious one is that the power button is no longer on the top but has been relocated to the upper right-hand side. This makes it much easier to reach with a finger or thumb, even more so than with the iPhone 6 Plus.

We're pleased to see that the other side of the phone still has the physical volume buttons and the silent switch. A physical switch to go into silent mode is a really useful thing to have and much easier than messing around with on-screen controls.

Screen

With its 4.7in display, Apple has had to up the iPhone 6's resolution in order to keep the Retina tag. According to Apple, this is the point at which you can no longer see individual pixels. In the iPhone 6's case, this is a resolution of 1,334x750 - slightly more than 720p. While the resolution may be higher, the pixel density is the same 326ppi as the iPhone 5S. In other words, you get the same screen sharpness as before.

Other handset manufacturers have managed to squeeze in Full HD displays at this size, so why hasn't Apple? The simple answer is because it doesn't feel the need to. In fact, the issue of image quality is far more than simple pixel density. Comparing the iPhone 6 to the Nexus 5 (5in screen, Full HD, 445ppi), we found that the iPhone 6 was actually slightly sharper; comparing it to the LG G3 (5.5in screen, 2,560x1,440, 538ppi), the G3 was the sharper handset. In all of these cases, it has to be said that the difference is rather marginal, and in practical terms the iPhone 6's screen is more than sharp enough. You certainly don't look at text or images and notice that any jagged lines or softening due to there not being enough resolution.

There's a good argument that adding more pixels would just drain the battery faster and give the CPU more work to do. In fact, only using the screen resolution that's required is something that's becoming more popular, as you can see from the 720p Samsung Galaxy Alpha.

That doesn't mean that Apple hasn't made any changes to the screen. While it still uses an LED-backlit IPS panel, this time around it uses dual-domain pixels. This technology helps improve viewing angles and even looking at the screen almost edge on we couldn't detect any noticeable colour shift.

Apple has also stated that the new screen has better contrast and black levels than on previous handsets. Our colour calibrator confirmed this, with a black level reading of a low 0.37cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 1,456:1. The screen brightness of 543cm/m2 is impressive too, meaning you can see it clearly in direct sunlight, while blacks are still inky and dark.

Colour accuracy is also very good, with our colour calibrator measuring the phone as capable of producing 95.1% of the sRGB colour gamut (the graph below shows the gamut, with the dotted line representing sRGB). This puts this screen in the top leagues of LCD displays. Super AMOLED screens, such as that on the Samsung Galaxy S5 have better colour reproduction and black levels, although they're dimmer and some find their colours a little over-saturated.

In our regular image tests, photos on the iPhone 6 looked great, with natural colours and plenty of detail throughout the image. Overall, it's a great screen, as you'd expect from an Apple handset; it's not the best display available though there's practically no cause for complaint.

Although we were all hoping for a sapphire glass display, that technology's not quite ready yet. Instead, Apple has used ion-strengthened glass, which is both scratch and shatter resistant; as always, treat the phone with care and use a decent case to add extra protection.

iOS 8

Apple ships the iPhone 6 with its latest operating system, iOS 8, since updated to iOS 8.1. In terms of features, it's a big step forward for the company. Our full iOS 8.1 review goes into more detail, but the short of it is that the new OS now makes working with multiple Apple devices even easier. It's also a much more open OS, letting you install your own keyboards and add widgets to the Notification screen.

As the iPhone 6 doesn't have the screen size and resolution of the Plus, you don't get the landscape home screen mode, or landscape apps, such as mail. Instead, you get the same portrait mode as with the iPhone 5S. However, the extra screen resolution gives you one more row of icons to play with, although you can set the screen to scale to have exactly the same view as you did on the iPhone 5S.

With a slightly larger screen, it's not always possible to reach the top of the display one-handed with this phone. To counter this Apple has introduced Reachability, which you use by double-tapping (not clicking) the TouchID button. This shifts the screen downwards, so that the top appears halfway down the display, letting you reach it easily. Although it looks a little odd, as the top of the display is left blank, Reachability works well enough and makes the iPhone 6 easier to use one-handed.

One downside of the higher screen resolution is that lots of developers need to update their apps to use the iPhone 6's higher resolution, as many old apps look a little low-res at the moment. We imagine that this process will take a few months to complete, just as when the iPhone 5S was launched and apps had to be made taller in order to fill the entire screen.

Keyboard

Put the phone into landscape mode and you get the new keyboard, which uses the extra screen width to add additional buttons, including cursor keys and a button to wipe out all of the text you've entered.

This keyboard uses Apple's QuickType technology, which gives you optional words and phrases as you start to type. It's a big improvement over the old autocorrect system and we found that it increased our typing speed and accuracy. Of course, as we mentioned before, if there's a third-party keyboard that you'd rather install, such as the excellent SwiftKey, you can now do so.

TouchID

TouchID is back for the iPhone 6, as a way to secure your phone with a fingerprint. It works really well and you only have to hold your finger on the button, rather than swiping across it. With iOS 8 Apple has finally opened up the system to third-party developers. While support was slow in the beginning, we're starting to see more and more people using the Touch ID. We have to say that this move from Apple is brilliant, as it saves having to enter long and complex passwords.

NFC and Apple Pay

TouchID is also designed to be used with the new Apple Pay system, which will let you buy goods using contactless payment in stores using the phone's NFC chip, as well as for online transactions. At the moment, Apple Pay is only available in the US, although the technology will be coming to the UK at some, as yet declared, point. As such we couldn't test these features, but we'll update this review when the system is made available.

Performance - Apple A8

As with the iPhone 6 Plus, this handset uses the Apple A8 SoC, which has a dual-core 1.4GHz CPU. Compared to the 2GHz+ quad-core Android competition, this sounds a little slow, but specs don't tell the full story. Rather, it's how well optimised the OS is and how efficient the CPU is. Running the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, the iPhone 6 completed it in 349.2ms, which is around the same time as the iPhone 6 Plus. More importantly, that's faster than any Android handset that we've seen.

Graphics performance is also very good. With a score of 17,509, the iPhone 6 scored the same as the iPhone 6 Plus. This puts it on a level with the current crop of flagship Android phones. Running a real game on the phone, Assassin's Creed Pirates, we noticed that the level of detail and textures were the same on this phone as with the Samsung Galaxy S5. However, the S5 rendered the game at a higher resolution. We believe that this game is probably designed for the lower-resolution iPhone 5S and hasn't been updated.

More exciting for iPhone users, is the Metal API, which is promising to let developers get more out of the hardware, while improving performance. Early demos certainly look impressive, and Apple has the clout to get make the new technology widely adopted.

Battery life

The non-replaceable 1,810mAh battery in the iPhone 6 isn't much bigger than the battery in the iPhone 5S, but it has a larger screen to deal with. Fortunately, the new 20nm manufacturing process for the A8 is much more power efficient. As a result, we saw the iPhone 6 last 12h 58m in our video playback test, which is slightly shy of the 14h we got from the iPhone 5S. However, using the phone all day, we noticed that battery life was generally better than on the iPhone 5S, with the phone easily lasting a full day; heavy use with the iPhone 5S could mean a couple of charges in a day. This is largely because most of the time you don't have your phone's screen on all of the time, with the handset synchronising in the background; the more-efficient A8 SoC helps here, drawing less power than the old A7 chip.

The iPhone used to amongst the best smartphones when it came to battery life, but that's no longer true. Its slender 6.9mm design means the battery is small compared to the 2,600mAh one in the slightly chunkier Sony Xperia Z3. That phone last for an immense 20 hours in the same test, and will last a whole day under even the heaviest of use. If you're regularly away from a power point and need really long battery life, the iPhone 6 most likely isn't the phone for you and you may want to look at the bigger iPhone 6 or a longer-lasting Android model.

Charging is via the Lightning port on the bottom of the phone, with a 1A USB charger in the box. The iPhone 6 takes about the same amount of time to charge as the iPhone 5S did. If you want faster charging, use the 2.1A iPad charger or buy a high-power third-party model.

M8 co-processor, fitness and Health

Alongside the A8 is the M8 co-processor, which can constantly monitor the phone's sensors: the accelerometer, gyroscope and, new, barometer for height measurement. While the M7 in the iPhone 5S could do something similar, this time around that seems to be more of a point thanks to the Health app.

From this app you can add to the dashboard monitoring for the number of steps you take and how many flights of stairs you climb a day, with all of the information coming from the handset. We didn't find that results perfect, with the occasional flight of stairs missed from the phone's calculations, but it's good enough for people who just want to keep an eye on their fitness levels without going the whole hog and buying a fitness tracker.

Health is also designed to work with other fitness apps and trackers, though, giving you one place to view all of your data. 

Camera

The camera is one area where the iPhone 6 slightly differs to the iPhone 6 Plus. Both handsets have the same f/2.2 aperture lens, 1/3in sensor with large 1.5µm pixels and a resolution of 8-megapixels, but the iPhone 6 does not have optical image stabilisation (OIS).

That means that its specs sound dangerously close to those of the iPhone 5S, so it looks as though there's been no improvement made. However, the sensor is new and has Focus Pixels. These give the camera phase detect auto-focus, which is a much more accurate and faster form of auto-focus than the traditional contrast detect method used in most camera phones. It works by accurately measuring the distance to the object it's trying to focus on, so that the lens can be moved to the correct position to get everything in focus. It definitely works, with the iPhone 6 focusing quicker than the iPhone 5S in our tests.

In terms of image quality, the iPhone 6 is excellent. Those large pixels certainly help to keep down noise, with each pixel getting a lot of light, and our shots outside were captured with the correct exposure and the correct colours, as you can see from the sample shots below (click to view the full-resolution image).

Inside, noise is handled well, and you can get some cracking shots from this camera. Its low noise levels are rather impressive and it's clearly the work of the larger pixels. You can see this in the sample shot below (click to view the full resolution image).

There's little to tell the difference between the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, except you can shoot handheld without blur in lower lighting with the Plus thanks to its OIS. You can see this in the two sample shots below, with the iPhone 6 Plus at the top and the iPhone 6 below (click to view the full-resolution images). Low-light wise, the iPhone 6 is an excellent camera and only the iPhone 6 Plus with OIS and the huge-resolution Nokia Lumia 1020 are better.

If it's too dark to shoot properly, then there's the true tone flash, which uses two LEDs (one white, one amber) to match the colour temperature of the scene. The result is a more natural image that doesn't look as obviously shot with a flash.

With the new camera app, the iPhone 6 now gives you full exposure control, so you can lighten or darken the image to get the results that you want. It's nice to have this control for once. There's also a new automatic HDR mode, which will turn on when there are light and dark parts of an image; the results are pretty good in the right circumstances.

Occasionally, the relatively low resolution can let an image down, as there's not as much detail as you zoom in. You can see this on the image of a black cat below, where his fur lacks some detail when you zoom in; however, it's important to point out that the camera captured the layers of information in this image, as black cats are notoriously hard to shoot. Of course, it's all about trade-off, and more pixels would mean more noise, so it feels as though Apple has struck a fair balance here.

Thanks to the new image processor, you get a few new video modes, including the 240fps slow-mo mode. This is double the frame rate of the same mode on the iPhone 5S, although the 720p resolution is the same. The results are really impressive, as you can see from the demo video below; the same sort of shot on the iPhone 5S had slightly obscured details.

We also really like the time-lapse mode, which is available on older phones running iOS 8. Using this mode gives you another tool to capture footage in a slightly different way, with the iPhone choosing the right frame rate. Check out our video of Liverpool Street Station to see it in action.

Wireless

LTE support has been upgraded in the handset, so that the UK model supports all native 4G networks and plenty worldwide for roaming. Call quality is excellent, as we've come to expect from Apple, with clear and detailed voices.

There's been a Wi-Fi boost to 802.11ac networking, too, supporting a maximum throughput of 150Mbit/s. That's great news for large iCloud backups and for downloading apps, although you'll need a matching router and fast internet connection to really see the difference. Apple has also enabled Wi-Fi calling so that you can make and receive phone calls over a wireless network; EE has pledged support for the technology, although it hasn't implemented it yet.

Storage options

There's no microSD card slot for increasing storage space, so you're stuck with the capacity that you buy. Models start at 16GB (£539), skip 32GB and then there's a 64GB (£619) and a massive 128GB (£699). Dropping 32GB feels like a shame to us, as this feels as though it should have been the entry-level model.

Conclusion

Although the iPhone 6 is considerably bigger than the iPhone 5S, Apple has done a good job not making it feel so. As such, this feels like the natural successor to the older smartphone and a worthy upgrade - it's faster and the bigger screen really works, making the previous model look a little old fashioned.

Competition-wise, at this size there's the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, which has great build quality, but a slightly lower resolution screen and it's not as fast. It's the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact that really gives this phone a run for your money, it's cheaper by around £270 over two years, has a great camera and a huge battery life. It's not as quick as the iPhone 6, though, and its plastic build can't match the aluminium body of the Apple handset. All that said these are all great phones, and you're really deciding between Android and iOS.

Overall, the iPhone 6 may not have the highest specifications, but as we've said before you can't read too much from specs alone, as it's the overall quality that counts. In these terms, the iPhone 6 is the best smartphone that Apple has ever made. Its sharp and clear screen is brilliant, and iOS 8 neatly uses the most of the extra resolution. Then, there's the lightning-fast processor, combined with the slickest and smoothest OS, giving a brilliant user experience. To top it all off, you know that this phone will automatically get the next version of iOS on the day of release.

With Apple's eco system improving all of the time, an iPhone isn't just about the handset, but how it plays and interacts with other devices and it's here that the real advantage lies. With iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 Yosemite, Apple's phone works brilliantly with all of your other devices, letting you share tasks seamlessly and even answer phone calls from other devices.

This whole package is what really makes the iPhone such a great choice, and the excellent hardware is just another bonus. The iPhone 6 Plus might have the slightly more detailed screen and OIS, but its size means that it isn't for everyone. For the perfect, all-rounder, every-day phone for most people the iPhone 6 is the best choice. If you're wondering if you should upgrade from an older phone, read our iPhone 5S vs iPhone 6 comparison. Finally, if you want to know what the competition is like, read our guide to the best smartphones.