After rumors and customer demand, Apple has finally given the people what they want: an iPhone 6 with a larger-than-4.5-inch screen. In fact, customers will have a choice of two phone to consider, the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus...Bigger screen
The smaller iPhone 6 breaks away from the 4-inch screen of models past and into larger territory, though at 4.7-inches, the iPhone 6 is still small by today's standards.
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A refreshed Retina display (Apple's calling it Retina HD) retains its 326ppi with a 1,334x750 pixel resolution. The iPhone 6 Plus has the higher pixel density on its 1080p HD display. The iPhone 6's better-than-720p display on a 4.7-inch phone is about right. It's when you get to 5 inches and higher that we generally start seeing 1080p HD and above.
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Click to view the video.
Apple doesn't want to just give customers a larger screen without doing anything useful with it. To that end, the company touts a new horizontal view (that really reminds us of theiPad) to see messages, weather, email, and so on. The keyboard pops up with new dedicated keys as well.
Although it's larger, Apple still wants to enable one-handed access, and it's doing this with app drop-drowns.
Look and feel
Here's another interesting phone feature, glass that curves around the edges of the phone. It isn't the sapphire screen we were hearing about, but it is a slightly different design element. The phone is also slim, at 0.27-inch, or 6.9-millimeters thin, and comes in three colors: gold, silver, and space gray.
Tiny design changes shift the placement of the power/lock button from the phone's top edge to its right spine. On other phones, this button location sometimes results in the phone screen turning on unintended, so it will be interesting to see if the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will suffer from these problems as well.
It weighs in at 4.55 ounces (129 grams), and, like the iPhone 5S, contains a Touch ID fingerprint scanner integrated into the home button.
The iPhone 6 runs iOS 8, which you can read about fully here.
Camera and video
Apple's 8-megapixel iPhone 6 iSight camera may not get the pixel boost that fans might want, but it gets a refresh with a new sensor all the same. Focus times speed up, Apple says, colors look more lifelike, and the imagining chip has better ways to battle noise.
Panorama mode will capture up to 43 megapixels in its five-element lens, and there's face detection, and blink and smile detection as well. As with some rival phones, the burst mode auto-pick feature uses algorithms to select the best from a string of similar photos.
The iPhone 6 has digital image stabilization, but if you want the optical image stabilization that many more premium phones are incorporating, you'll need to upgrade to the iPhone 6 Plus.
On the video front, you'll be capturing 1080p HD video at either 30 or 60fps, with slow motion coming in at 120 or 240fps. Continuous autofocus while you're shooting video means that the camera will adjust as the subjects move around -- or as you do. You can shoot video in HDR mode as well.
Apple has also made improvements to the front-facing camera, or the FaceTime camera, as the company likes to call it. The iPhone 6 tweaks face detection and focus to aim for better accuracy, and now weaves in HDR.
Brawnier internals
The iPhone 6's A8 processor boasts 50 percent faster graphics and a 25 percent faster CPU that should make the phone more power-efficient.
Remember that co-processor in the previous iPhone? Well, the M8 co-processor gets some new sensor tricks that brings it on par with some existing phones, so you'll get elevation and air pressure readouts, and distance estimates. This is all important for the iPhone's fitness apps.
Apple never gives battery specifics in mAh, but the iPhone 6 is rated to last through 11 hours of video, and 14 hours on Wi-Fi. There's Wi-Fi calling at long last, and Voice over LTE (aka VoLTE). Speaking of LTE, new specs allow for a theoretical zenith of 150Mbps downlink.
Support for the Wi-Fi802.11 ac standard means you're looking at Wi-Fi speeds three times faster than in the iPhone 5S.
Apple Pay and NFC
After resisting NFC, or near-field communication, for years, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus not only add the short-range communications protocol to the phone, but also build an entire mobile payments system around it, with partners galore already waiting in the wings.
Apple Pay works with the Passport app on your phone, and independently as well, to let you buys goods and services with a single touch of the phone. Like other mobile payment systems, the merchant never sees your credit card details, and a handy feature with the camera will add new credit card details to Passbook, which saves you some typing.
Starting in US with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, and backed by six major banks, with more to come. Right out of the gate, you'll be able to use Apple Pay at 220,000 merchants that accept it, including Macy's, Walgreens and Duane Reed drug stores, Whole Foods, and McDonald's at all their store locations, drive-thrus included.
Groupon, Uber, and Panera, and others will also incorporate Apple Pay right into their apps. When Apple releases the API (imminently), developers will stream on board.
Pricing and availability
The iPhone 6 (and its 6 Plus sibling) will launch in eight countries on September 19.
So far, Apple has released only US pricing, with numbers that fall into the on-contract range. The 16GB version will sell for $199, but $100 more will get you a whopping 64GB for $299. Another $100 on top of that supersizes your storage to 128GB for $399.
Source:http://www.cnet.com/products/apple-iphone-6/
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