Well folks, the time for wild-eyed rumors and clandestine reports is finally over - Apple CEO Tim Cook just officially revealed the hefty new iPhone 6 Plus and its 5.5-inch screen in Cupertino alongside a long-rumored (and handier) 4.7-inch model. This thing wont seem all that foreign if you frequent the geekier corners of the web, but its a sure sign that Apple wants to give all those other pocket-stretching phablets out there a run for their metaphorical money. The companys live press event still chugging along (with a sketchy stream, no less), but heres what we know so far. Theres no two ways about it: the star of the show here is the spacious 5.5-inch 1080p Retina Display HD riding up front - to hear Apples Phil Schiller tell it, its SRGB-accurate, has an ultrathin backlight, photo-aligned IPS liquid crystals, an improved polarizer, and ion-strengthened glass. More importantly (and at long last!), the screen runs at 1080p. You wont notice any dramatic design differences between this model and its little brother - its still dramatically thinner than the iPhones that came before it (the Plus comes in at 7.1mm thick, and the angular edges of the 5s have given way to a smoother, rounder look in line with the companys most recent batch of iPads. Remember all those leaks? They absolutely nailed it, and the end result looks, well, really comfortable to latch onto. But what of the tech powering the show? Lets look at Apples snappy new 64-bit A8 chipset - Schiller says its 50 percent more energy efficient (not to mention a hair smaller) than the the A7 that graced earlier models, and about 25 percent more powerful to boot. A new M8 coprocessor should also help keep better track of your activity levels, since it can hazard guesses at distance traveled and measure elevation changes for you avid stair-climbers. And speaking of power, youll be able to squeeze 16 hours of standby time out of the 6 Plus, 14 hours of continual video playback and or a full 24 hours of 3G talk time out of the non-removable battery. Mobile photographers (which is really everyone these days, right?) may be a little bummed to see that the 6 Plus has an 8-megapixel iSight camera and an f/2.2 aperture lens paired with the same True Tone flash as in the 5s. Thats not to say that Apples been slacking -- its got phase detecting autofocus (weve seen similar tech in SLRs), improved face detection and a new Best Shot mode. Extra bonus for Plus owners: you get optical image stabilization, so you can lord your crisper shots over everyone else when it launches. Youll be able to shoot 1080p video at either 30 or 60 frames per second, and slow motion video has gotten even slower: think a whopping 240 frames per second. Apples iOS 8 got the grand unveiling treatment back at WWDC, but (to no ones surprise) it packs a few extra features to help it feel more at home on bigger screens. Perhaps the biggest is the inclusion of a two-paned landscape mode which makes the whole thing feel a little more like a tiny iPad than an upscaled iPhone. If you give the TouchID button (yeah, youre not escaping those sensors), youll also invoke a one-handed mode that moves everything down to the lower half of the display for easy access -- great if youve got some short thumbs.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 18:30:02 +0000
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