The Good The iPhone 6 delivers a spacious, crisp 4.7-inch screen, improved wireless speeds, better camera autofocus, and bumped-up storage capacities to 128GB at the top end. iOS remains a top-notch mobile operating system with an excellent app selection, and Apple Pay is a smooth, secure payment system.
The Bad Battery life isn't much better than last year's iPhone 5S. An even larger screen could have been squeezed into the same housing.
The Bottom Line The iPhone 6 is an exceptional phone in nearly every way except its average battery life: it's thin and fast with a spacious screen and the smoothest payment system we've seen. It's the best overall phone of 2014.
For years, Android phones have shipped with displays in expansive, 5-inch-ish sizes, but Apple had insisted on the necessity of a small screen for one-handed operation. The iPhone 5S, while powerful, hit a wall in viewing room: its 4-inch screen was among the smallest on the market, and, frankly, I found it limiting.
Apple now has two larger iPhones: one big, the other even bigger. The iPhone 6 sports a 4.7-inch screen, while the iPhone 6 Plus goes full "phablet" with a 5.5-inch display. Compared to earlier iPhones, both of the new models boast thinner bodies, ship with faster A8 processors, slightly improved cameras, speedier Wi-Fi and LTE cellular data, better voice quality if you're using voice-over-LTE, and -- except in the entry-level models -- more onboard storage. And like all current iPhones, these are running iOS 8.1; it's a far less revolutionary update than iOS 7 was, but it adds some nice improvements and customization options, including notification widgets, replaceable keyboards, a new Health app and Apple Pay.
Design
My favorite-feeling 4.7-inch phone, the one that proved larger screens could be made in compact sizes, was the 2013 Motorola Moto X. Does the iPhone 6 pull off the same feel? It's close, but different.
The new iPhone design may seem bold and different, or possibly a little like the curved metal of the HTC One M8, but it's also still very much Apple. In fact, it's kind of like the design of the 2012 iPod Touch, or that of the recent iPads. This iPhone is slightly thinner than before, but it feels much thinner; part of that's the increased screen size, and partly it's the curved design. Glass from the front folds ever so slightly around the edges, and the sharp industrial hard edges of the iPhone 5 and 5S are completely gone.
It also feels a little like the original iPhone, which had a rounded design, too. But that phone was chunkier, with a far smaller screen. It felt like holding a pebble. The iPhone 6 is flat and thin, like a slab.
The screen
iPhones have always had phenomenal displays, both in terms of brightness and color quality. After CNET's display testing, we found the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens to be better than previous iPhones, narrowly. Grayscale and contrast levels are better, while color accuracy remains about the same. We still found OLED displays like those on the Samsung Galaxy S5 had more vivid contrast and slightly richer, if less accurate, color.
But the bottom line is, the iPhone 6's 4.7-inch IPS display looks excellent: vivid, rich, and bigger than before. But not that much bigger. The display's 1,344x750-pixel resolution is higher than the iPhone 5/5C/5S' 1,136x640, but it has the same 326ppi pixel density. It's a good step up, and a big help for nearly anything you'd use your phone's screen for.
19 comments
Jane Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 11:30 am
Thanks for all the comments, everyone!
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 11:27 am
We use these tests all the time! Killer stuff!
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 11:23 am
We are totally going to blog about these tests!
Jane Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 9:56 am
Image comment.
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:14 am
Comment Depth 10
Also an author comment.
Joe Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:14 am
Comment Depth 09
Jane Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:13 am
Comment Depth 08
Joe Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:12 am
Comment Depth 07
Jane Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:12 am
Comment Depth 06
Joe Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:10 am
Comment Depth 05
Also an author comment.
Fred Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:03 am
Comment Depth 04
Fred Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:02 am
Comment Depth 03
Jane Bloggs
14 marzo, 2013 at 8:01 am
Comment Depth 02
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 7:57 am
Comment Depth 01
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 7:56 am
Author Comment.
John Doe
14 marzo, 2013 at 7:53 am
These tests are amazing!
Jane Doe
12 marzo, 2013 at 1:17 pm
Comments? I love comments!
Anonymous User
11 marzo, 2013 at 11:45 pm
This user it trying to be anonymous.
They used a fake email, so there should be no Gravatar associated with it.
They did not speify a website, so there should be no link to it in the comment.
John Doe
3 septiembre, 2012 at 10:18 am
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