Hands on Review : iphone 6s

The Good Improved speed everywhere (new processor, faster wireless, quicker Touch ID sensor); a sturdier body; better front and rear cameras; a bold new 3D Touch pressure-sensitive display that could end up being a really useful tool in apps down the road, and which already offers new iOS shortcuts.

The Bad Same battery life as the iPhone 6. The 6S Plus model remains the only way to get optical image stabilization for photos and video, plus better battery life. You'll need to pay extra to vault past the too-small storage of the entry-level 16GB version.

The Bottom Line The newest iPhones are top-to-bottom better phones with lots of enhancements; iPhone 6 owners don't need the upgrade, but everyone else should seriously consider it.

 

The first iPhone heralded the arrival of capacitive displays and multi-touch technology. The iPhone 6S is the first to have 3D touch - a screen technology that recognizes different levels of pressure for an extra dimension of interaction with a device.
A late tribute perhaps to resistive screens, which Apple itself sent to their doom. Not a particularly scientific statement although resistive technology did rely on actual pressure to work. Good enough for anyone with a penchant for the dramatic.
But if we are to stick to the facts, the iPhone 6s isn't the company's first device with a pressure-aware display, the Apple Watch is. Plus, phones like the Huawei Mate S and the ZTE Axon mini do deserve at least a mention as well. Anyway, this only highlights the difference between Apple and the rest. Cupertino has the habit - and in all fairness, the capability - to pick a niche technology and make it mainstream.

Unboxing the iPhone 6s

The retail package of the iPhone 6s will hardly surprise anyone. The compact cardboard box contains the device itself, a well-packed pair of EarPods, an A/C adapter and a Lightning cable.

Apple iPhone 6s retail package

The 1A charger is very compact, but it's not going to win any speed competitions - in the day and age of Quick Charge, VOOC and other quick battery topping solutions, what Apple offers is rather disappointing. And if you live in the UK, Ireland, Malta, Hong Kong, or any other country that uses the British standard then you also lose the small size perk as the adapter there is huge.

Apple iPhone 6s 360-degree spin

The new iPhone 6S, as the 's' suggests, pretty much reuses the original design and only upgrades the internals. The additions of the 3D Touch technology and the bigger camera required some minor changes though.
For one, the iPhone 6s is a tad thicker and yet had to sacrifice some battery capacity to accommodate the layer of pressure sensors in the screen. Its dimensions are 138.3 x 67.1 x 7.1 mm, compared to the original 138.1 x 67 x 6.9mm. The difference is negligible but it's bad news if you had some tight-fitting cases for your iPhone 6 - they won't fit on the 6s.
What's more readily noticeable is that the iPhone 6s has gained some extra 14g of weight, again down to the pressure-sensitive layer. That's the kind of difference you can feel in your pocket and makes the phone heavier than the Galaxy S6 with its 5.1" screen.

Design and build quality

It may be an entirely different device within, but the exterior of the iPhone 6s is absolutely identical to last year's iPhone 6. Packing just 4.7 inches of screen estate it is still one of the most compact flagships on the market, but its screen-to-body ratio is rather unimpressive (read too much bezel). Apple has been reluctant to do something about that for years now and things are now getting embarrassing - there are phones with 5+" screens that have the same footprint, while phones with equally sized displays usually come in notably smaller packages.

Apple iPhone 6s

There are some good news though. The iPhone 6s unibody is cast out of 7000 series aluminum instead of last year's 6000 series and it's stronger. Latest tests revealed the iPhone 6S bends at much higher levels of pressure than the previous generation - almost triple actually. So, Apple has put bendgate firmly behind it and skinny jeans are no longer an iPhone's mortal enemy.
The front is covered by an ion-strengthened glass with oleophobic coating - those are pretty much the same specs as in the previous iPhone models and mean the glass is scratch and smudge resistant. The Ion-X glass creates the so-called 2.5D effect thanks to its rounded edge. By the way, Apple claims the new special ion-exchange process makes it the most durable screen glass among smartphones today, but early drop test didn't provide conclusive evidence for that.

Apple iPhone 6s

So, higher-grade durable glass and aluminum alloy should improve the overall resilience of the phone. It still lacks water and dust resistance, but seeing how Sony is changing its policy on those and Samsung gave up on it for the Galaxy S6 this is less of a disadvantage now than it was last year.
The back of the iPhone 6s is familiar - mostly aluminum, with two plastic bands covering the antennas and a slightly protruding camera ring. The new 12MP sensor is still protected by a small piece of sapphire glass, so you should worry more about scratching your wooden desk rather than damaging the camera piece.
Extra heft might have made carrying it a bit harder, but handling the iPhone 6s is pretty much the same pleasing experience. The phone feels great in hand thanks to the premium materials and finish but you still need to be extra careful as the thin and rounded edges don't have the best grip.

Handling the iPhone 6s

Controls

The iPhone 6S has the same control set as its predecessor. Above the display is where the earpiece, a couple of sensors and the new 5MP selfie camera are.
While the front facer doesn't come with a LED flash, Apple make up for it by letting you use the screen as one. If you turn on the so-called Retina flash the entire screen will light up in white and provide some extra light as long as you keep close to it. It's something we've seen other manufactufrers do for a few years now, but Apple went a step further and gave the backlighting a brightness boost of up to 300% compared to the usual maximum.

A peek above and below the display

Below the display is the Home button, which also hosts the refined Touch ID sensor. It's noticeably faster than before. About time too! Although Apple brought the technology back from the dead, it's among the last to improve the performance of the sensor. In an ideal world we would have also got an always on mode so you don't have to press the button and wake the phone, but even so the iPhone 6s still has one of the better working solutions on the market.
The volume keys and the silencer are on the left, while the power/lock key and the nano-SIM tray are on the right as usual.

The left and right sides of the iPhone 6s

There is nothing on top of the iPhone 6s, while the bottom has the audio jack, the primary mic, the Lightning port, and the loudspeaker grille.

The top and bottom of the iPhone 6s

The iPhone 6s rear side is as familiar as it can get - the camera is there, the second mic and the dual-LED dual-tone flash. The new 12MP sensor allows for wider panorama photos and 4K video recording, while the more powerful hardware enables 120fps capture at 1080p resolution.

Display

While the display may hide an entirely new touch technology, it's still the same display in terms of size and resolution: a 4.7" unit with a resolution of 750 x 1334 pixels (that's 326ppi). It's a LED-backlit IPS LCD screen with RGB matrix.
The Apple iPhone 6s display offers deeper blacks than the iPhone 6 but unfortunately, it's not as bright at its maximum setting. Nevertheless, the new generation of iPhone managed to output an overall better contrast ratio of 1481:1.
The color rendition of the screen is generally accurate with a pretty low average deltaE of 3.6 (for the primary colors plus black and white), and it's the white and reds that show a somewhat higher deviation. The white is slightly on the cooler bluish side, but nothing major and certainly not noticeable without a reference.
As usual, display colors are a matter of personal taste and perception so if you don't need calibrated color output, you will probably be quite happy with the Apple iPhone 6s screen as it is out-of-the-box.

As far as sunlight legibility is concerned, the slightly lower brightness of the iPhone 6s outs a whisker lesser score than its predecessor, the 6, but it's still among the top 20 devices in our all-time chart. This means the contrast in direct sunlight remains excellent in all cases.

Battery life

The iPhone 6S is equipped with a non-removable Li-Po 1715 mAh battery, which is about 5% smaller than the one of the iPhone 6. iOS 9 introduced a Low-Power mode, which you can enable manually and should save your phone from dying faster once the charge drops below 20%.
We were eager to see how the new features will affect the battery life, especially when the battery unit got even smaller. The iPhone 6s posted very balanced score across all of our tests - it can do about 10 hours of 3G calls or video playback on a single charge, while you can browse on Wi-Fi for half a day.
So, the total ratting of the iPhone 6s is 62 hours - an hour better than the iPhone 6. This means 62 hours is how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the iPhone 6s for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. Such usage pattern is of course entirely artificial, but we've established it so our battery results are comparable across devices.
Our proprietary score also includes a standby battery draw test, which is not featured in our battery test scorecard but is calculated in the total endurance rating. Our battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you want to learn more about it.

Connectivity

The Apple iPhone 6S comes with a bunch of wireless connectivity features. It supports faster LTE Cat. 6 (up to 3000Mpbs down, 50Mbps up) and has even wider LTE coverage. Regular 2G and 3G connectivity is all safely covered as well with a multitude of supported network bands.
The iPhone 6S also supports the latest Voice over LTE (VoLTE), HD Voice and Wi-Fi calling protocols, but those are carrier dependent features so not everyone will enjoy them.
Compared to the iPhone 6, the 6S now upgraded Wi-Fi functionality too - it supports all the current Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac standards but doubles the theoretical speeds thanks to the use of a 2x2 MIMO antenna. AirPlay is the only way to wirelessly cast your screen's contents to an HDTV, but you'd need to have an Apple TV for that.
Additional local connectivity includes Bluetooth 4.0 LE. There is also support for NFC, but its functionality is only limited to Apple's region-restricted Apple Pay.
The iPhone 6s uses a proprietary Lightning connector for wired data transfers and charging.
There is no support for USB On-the-go or USB host but you can pair a Bluetooth keyboard to the phone should you need this sort of peripheral.

Apple iOS 9 - some new features, lots of potential

Sticking to its usual practices, Apple unveiled the new iOS 9 in June, but at that point it didn't cause too much excitement. Looking much like iOS 8 and bringing only a handful of new features, it didn't stay in the spotlight for long.
Now, a few months later things are different - the iOS 9 biggest update wasn't mentioned at the announcement for understandable reasons - it's the support of the new 3D Touch display and the API that will be available to game and app developers. Depending on how it goes with the early adopters, this feature alone has the potential to alter the way we interact with our phones the same way the first capacitive display and the multi-touch gestures did.
The support for 3D Touch allows for another level of interaction, press the screen for a bit longer (and harder). This gets you access to extra actions and contextual options and we can't wait to see how say, game developers put that to use in the months to come. We'll get back to examining Touch ID and its impact on iOS 9 in a short while, but first let's cover the basics of the new Apple platform.
iOS 9 brings a couple of new apps - News and Notes, while also enhancing Maps with public transit support. Mail and Messages got refreshed and there's a new system font. Meanwhile Siri got smarter, while Spotlight Search expanded its reach.
Visually iOS 9 looks the same as its predecessor. All of your apps are on the homescreen, you can group them in folders and there is the familiar dock that can take up to four shortcuts. System icons, color themes and transparency - everything is like we left it in iOS 8.
The lockscreen hasn't changed much either, but it now supports Live Photo wallpapers - they are either short animations or you can use one of thoseLive Photos that the iPhone 6s duo is capable of capturing. For the animation to activate, you need to press firmly on the screen, which is somewhat counterintuitive and we doubt it will be an oft used feature as nobody would really want to hard press the screen for 3 seconds just to see their lockscreen wallpaper move a bit.

The lockscreen • The homescreen • Control Center • Notification Center

The Control Center that's pulled up from the bottom of the screen keeps the same layout of toggles, shortcuts and media controls. The Notification Center drops from the top and features the same Today and Notification tabs. There are no new widgets or notification options.
The task-switcher interface loses its webOS flat cards look and opts for a cooler 3D carousel. Unfortunately, you are still able to only see just three apps, and it takes even more scrolling so we're not quite happy with this change.

The new task manager

The iPhone 6s supports quick app switching between opened apps via a Force Touch gestures. Just swipe from the far left side of the screen with a firm touch and you'll get to the app switcher. Upon choosing the app you want to go to, this gesture starts alternating your current app and the one you've selected. Say you are browsing and Facebook chatting simultaneously, you can switch between the two apps with just a firm swipe from the left. It sounds a bit complicated but it's actually quite intuitive once you try it.
The Spotlight search has been improved. You can invoke it by a downwards swipe from anywhere on the homescreen, or go to the leftmost pane. It has been updated and can now do simple calculations and conversions. It also supports finding sport scores and weather forecast information. And finally, you get shortcuts for making a call or sending a message to any of the contact results in the Spotlight searches.

The new Spotlight Search

Siri got smarter, too. In addition to all the cool stuff the intelligent assistant could do before, it can now search through your photos and videos based on dates, locations and the album names. It supports custom reminders from things you've been searching for in Safari, Mail, Notes and Messages and it got support for public transit navigation too.

Siri can be summoned anytime by saying 'Hey, Siri'

Next, there is the new pro-active assistance available system-wide, which is more or less Apple's take on Google Now - it provides relevant information to you in advance - before you start typing something or before you leave for some place (work, home).
Finally, iOS 9 extends the overall language support for Siri, Spotlight, the predictive input, dictation support, dictionaries and spell check. Siri is now available in Austrian German, Belgian French and Norwegian, while Mexico gets its proper Spotlight support.
Predictive input is now available in Belgian French, Austrian German, Gujarati, Hindi, Hinglish, Punjabi, Mexican Spanish and Telugu. Finland and Korea get spell check. Last, but not least, dictation is now available for Belgium (Dutch and French), English for Ireland, Philippines, and South Africa, Austria (German) and Spanish for Chile and Colombia.
When it comes to predictive input, iOS 9 would gradually learn the way you type and search and would eventually become a passive yet very useful assistant. This will take off some pressure of Siri and yet make your interactions with the iPhone much easier and pleasant.

3D Touch aims to be the next big thing

Currently 3D Touch gestures are available only on selected system app. You can use it on the lockscreen, the homescreen and within apps. We already talked about the lockscreen gimmick, let's see what it does on the homescreen.
Force pressing on the Message icon pops up a balloon with a New Message shortcut and a short list of your most recent messaging contacts. Force clicking on the Phone app gives you a - Create New Contact key and a short list of recently contacted people.

Force Touch on Messages and Phone apps

Applying force on the Calendar pops up New Event option; on the Clock - New Alarm/Start Timer/Stopwatch; on Maps - Directions to Home, Share location, drop pin and search nearby; on the Stores - Redeem and Search; on the Camera - Take Photo, Take Selfie, Record Video and Record Slow-mo.

Force Touch on Calendar, Clock, Maps, App Store and Camera apps

Continuing on Safari - you get Show Reading List, Bookmark list, New Private tab and New tab; Mail offers shortcuts to Inbox, VIP, New message and Search; Music has Play Beats; and Notes - New Note, New Sketch and New Photo note.

Force Touch on Safari and Mail

As you can see those force taps on the homescreen are indeed useful sometimes, but are hardly something you can't live without. What really matters is what you can do within the apps with 3D Touch.
3D Touch is meant to allow you to get more content than you normally get on a screen, so that you can give it a quick glance and let it go - all of this with just one firm long press.
If you press hard on an email within the Mail app, first it will be selected by blurring all the others. Applying slightly more force will pop its contents into a balloon for you to see it. Here you can either apply more force to open the whole email, or release your finger thus you'll be back on the email list.

Force Touch within Mail app

While you are holding the Mail balloon open, you can swipe it up and you'll get advanced options such as Reply, Forward, Mark, Notify Me and Move.
You can do the same on Messages - a firm press opens a preview of your most recent messages with this contact and if you keep pressing you'll eventually open the full thread.

3D Touch within Messages app

Tapping with force on a contact in the Phone app pops up Mail, Message and Call shortcuts. Tapping on a day in the Calendar pops up a preview of the day's events and will eventually open the full day view. The Notes app has the same logic.

3D Touch within Phone, Calendar and Notes

Force touch on a photo in the gallery will pop up a photo preview. If you move your finger towards the top you'll reveal a menu with copy, share and delete settings. If you swipe down or just release, you'll put this photo back on the pile.

Force Touch within Photos

And if you opened the photo already, a strong Touch will invoke its Live Photo, if available.
Safari also takes advantage of Force Touch - hit a link firmly and you get a pop up with the linked page and if you like what you see you can press harder to open it, or just release it for discarding.

Selecting text with 3D Touch in Safari • Force Touch on links in Safari

Finally, one of the most meaningful uses of the Force Touch is selecting text. If you do a standard tap and hold on text you'll begin scrolling through the words. And when you apply force to activate the Force Touch, you begin text selection from this very moment. This eases the entire text selection process tremendously - just scroll to your desired place and force touch from there and continue scrolling until you're done.
That's basically all of it at the moment - it's not much and certainly most of the functionality feels, if you pardon the pun, forced rather than intuitive and helpful. However, we get the feeling that Apple is simply trying to give hints to developers with those. Those are just ideas with the hope that developers will actually put the feature to great use in their apps.
Given the chance, 3D Touch may turn to be a breakthrough that will shape smartphone usage for years to come. Similar to what Apple did with multi-touch or the fingerprint sensor.
What does add more fuel to the 3D Touch fire is that other manufacturers began announcing phones with similar tech shortly before Apple's event, so there will be more companies that want to see it succeed and in turn more developers willing to give it a proper consideration

Apple A9 chip performance

The new generation of iPhones is powered by a brand new Apple A9 chipset, which packs a dual-core 1.85 GHz Twister processor, PowerVR GT7600 six-core graphics and 2GB RAM. The chips are made either by Samsung on 14nm process, or TSMC on 16nm process. All of these mean the A9 has more processing power, a stronger GPU punch, double the RAM and better thermal properties.
Apple has always focused on the single-core performance since it is the most important one when it comes to interacting with the iOS user interface and early tests showed that the 64-bit Twister core is the best and fastest CPU core currently on the market. On the other hand you are only getting two of those, so we'll see how it goes. In come the benchmarks.
The multi-core score of GeekBench 3 shows how powerful the new dual-core Twister processor is. It beats the Snapdragon 810 chips with their quad-Cortex-A57 CPU, but trails behind the Exynos 7420, which uses a similar architecture but a higher clock speed.

GeekBench 3

Higher is better

 The single-core results show you the difference. A single Twister does insanely better than any other CPU core on the market today. In fact, a single Twister core is equal to the 8-core Cortex-A53 performance on the Meizu m2 note.

GeekBench 3 single core

Higher is better

Posted in: Hands on Review