iPhone 6s review: built for success

By Rhiannon Williams

Bigger, Apple assured us last year, is better. In September 2014 the company made its first ever foray into the phablet-sized end of the smartphone sector with the release of the iPhone 6 and the even bigger iPhone 6 Plus, which swiftly sold millions of units and generated record-breaking financial results.

Replicating such an achievement is no mean feat, and was touched upon by Apple chief executive Tim Cook and he paced around the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium’s stage in San Francisco in early September when he asked: “How do you follow a success like this?”

The solution presented by Cook and team comes in the shape of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, the latest handsets in Apple’s fallow ‘s’ generation, meaning updates come more in the way of software improvements than a radical overhaul of its appearance. But has Apple done enough to keep the iPhone on top ahead of its release on September 25?

Design

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if Apple does one thing better than anyone else, it’s design a good-looking phone. Over the past few years, designer Jony Ive and his team have honed the iPhone into a sleek aluminium and glass beast that perhaps only the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge comes close to in the aesthetic stakes.

So that’s why if the iPhone 6s looks familiar, it’s because it looks almost identical to last year’s 6, from the unibody design, volume buttons, on/off switch positioning, still-protruding camera lens and headphone jack on the left of its underside. Its display is the same size at 4.7-inches diagonally, but there are a series of subtle differences, namely in the use of new materials.

The 6s is constructed from a new 7000 Series aluminium; an alloy Apple is eager to remind us is used in the aerospace industry. This is the material currently used in the Apple Watch Sport models, which the company claims is 60 per cent stronger than standard alloys. Apple is understandably keen to avoid a repeat of last year’s #Bendgate accusations and a more durable, resistant body can only be a good thing.

This translates to a number of subtle changes to its dimensions, from 138.1mm x 67mm x 6.9mm to 138.3mm x 67.1mm x 7.1mm, and an increase in weight from 129g to 143g. Physically, this doesn’t mean much - held comfortably in the palm of the hand, the 6s still feels slim and lightweight, but it does mean Apple is prevented from trotting out its ‘thinnest/lightest iPhone ever’ schtick.

The more pedantic among you may still be irritated by the fact the Apple logo still acts as a fingerprint magnet due to its highly polished surface, but it’s still preferable to having to wipe down the entire back as you have to do with other shinier rival models.

Rose gold

One of the main talking points around the new handsets is the introduction of the new rose gold colour, slotting in neatly next to the gold, space grey (tested here) and silver shades established by last year’s lineup.

Apple first started experimenting with rose gold with the introduction of the 18-carat rose gold Apple Watch Edition, the cheapest version of which retails for £8,000. Following in the footsteps of such a luxurious benchmark, the decision to extend the colour to the iPhone has been interpreted as a flagrant appeal to the burgeoning demand for the handsets within China - a market Apple considers so lucrative, Tim Cook made the rare move of speaking out to reassure investors amid fears over Apple’s performance within China’s volatile markets last month.

Apple’s rose gold is a funny kind of shade - its tendency to reflect or absorb light depending on the lighting conditions when photographed means it can appear anything from an icy mauve to a muddy golden brown in pictures. In reality it’s a warm, pinky copper colour, and is guaranteed to sell shedloads.

Display

Like the aluminium, the 6s’ display glass has also benefited from reinforcement, and is now the most durable in the smartphone industry, Apple claims, thanks to a dual ion-exchange in the manufacturing process. Again, this will make it more prone to survive the odd drop and scuff.

As for the display itself, it’s the same 1334 x 750 resolution laid down by the 6, with the same 326 pixels-per-inch. Text is sharp, colour reproduction is accurate and contrast ratio is excellent, but if you’ve been using the 6 for the past year, there’s disappointingly nothing to really offer you by way of improvement.

Camera

With the 6s Apple has decided to upgrade the rear-facing camera for the first time since the iPhone 4s’ release in 2011, when it leapt from 5MP to 8MP. There it has stayed for four long years, until now. To call the new 12MP iSight rear-facing camera (capable of shooting 4K video for the first time) a welcome advancement is an understatement - it is a necessity.

Apple have always opted out of trying to out-pixel the competition, with many rival devices offering more than double the megapixel power (Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge +’s 16MP, Sony’s Xperia Z5’s 23MP, HTC’s One M9’s 20.7MP) claiming that adding pixels tends to degrade image quality. Debate rages over quite how accurate this kind of statement is, but there’s no denying that Apple desperately needed to up its camera game to remain a true contender.

The good news is that it’s much better than its predecessor. Thanks to the iSight sensor’s 50 per cent more pixels, its autofocus is now faster and more accurate, according to senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller, resulting in less accidental blur and noise. The front-facing camera has also been boosted from 1.2MP to 5MP for those all-important selfies.

I took these shots to serve as a direct comparison of quality between the 12MP camera on the left, and the predecessor's 8MP camera on the right. The new camera provides a greater depth of field, richer, more accurate colour and greater detail.

So far so good. But what are the key improvements the iPhone 6s boasts which prove it’s a significant move on from the 6? Enter 3D Touch and Live Photos.

New feature Live Photos creates brief animations by taking a second-and-a-half’s worth of low resolution images before and after the core 12MP photograph, resulting in a moving image and a short burst of sound.

This was perhaps best showcased in the 6s’ pre-set stylised Siamese fighting fish wallpaper in the keynote presentation, in which the fish’s fins ripple back and forth across the display. Other pre-loaded wallpapers include plumes of purple and blue, white and orange or blue and green smoke, if fish aren’t your thing.

The Live Photos mode is automatically turned on each time you open the camera, and a small yellow box reading Live appears on screen while you take your picture as you would normally. To start watching your Live Photo, press down on the screen, which will temporarily blur to indicate playback has begun, which is a bit annoying. Scrolling through pictures in the Photos app triggers a brief burst of movement to remind you it’s a Live Photo, rather than a standard still image.

The best way to take a Live Photo is to act as if you were taking a standard picture, keeping the phone as still as possible and keeping an eye on the Live icon - once it disappears, you're no longer capturing the moment.

Lumia owners will moan that it’s not exactly an innovative facet of the new handset, given that they’ve been able to shoot near-identical moving pictures for a couple of years now through Microsoft’s Living Images app. But Apple has refined the process and fully integrated it into the camera’s functionality instead of eliminating it to an app, and the fact you can set your own Live Photos as your lock screen wallpaper is a nice touch.

Live Photos will be supported across iOS 9, the forthcoming El Capitan and watchOS 2, meaning while you will need a 6s to shoot them, you’ll be able to watch them in webpages and messages across your Apple ecosystem. However, they take up roughly double the size of a standard image, so you may want to hold off taking too many if you're using one of the lower GB models.

3D Touch

One of the most radical new features is the implementation of 3D Touch - a new and improved version of the Force Touch technology we’ve been grappling with in the Apple Watch and trackpads of the new 12-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro. 3D Touch is a form of pressure-sensitive technology which senses the depth of pressure you’re applying to the cover glass, which in turn triggers responsive feedback from the newly-installed Taptic engine. This means when pressing lightly you’ll feel a mini vibration, while pressing more deeply will generate a more substantial buzz.

But how useful is this in the iPhone? Apple has channeled 3D Touch into three separate functions (hence the 3D term), Quick Actions and Peep and Pop. Quick Actions is a means of providing shortcuts to the most important aspects of a homescreen app directly, removing the need to open the app, select and then launch your desired action. This works much more smoothly in practice than in does in theory - for example, pressing the Messages app opens a list of contacts it thinks you have ongoing conversations with, whilst pressing on Photos pulls up a menu to directly open your most recent picture, those marked as favourites, photos taken one year ago today, or search.

Second update Peek and Pop - ignore the cringe-inducing term - is a method of quickly checking out a link, photo or address on Maps without having to hit the home button, open the app and input your desired action. Whilst I’ve often lamented the lack of integration between apps on iPad and having to continually slap the home button to return to the portal of the home screen, I hadn’t realised how annoying it was on iPhone until presented with this solution. Pressing lightly on an address within an email, for example, allows you to ‘peek’ at the point on Apple’s Maps app, and ceasing to press returns you to the message. Pressing the open Map point more deeply will ‘pop’ the new app onto the screen, opening it fully. iOS 9 has been designed to sweep through your messages and emails to automatically detect forthcoming events, flight information, addresses, links and so on to provide you with this time-saving action, all without leaving the app you’re in.

Quick Actions also work within apps, such as peeking at an individual shot within Photos and sliding up to Copy, Share, Favourite or Delete it, or to quickly peek inside an album on Apple Music to select your track, Shuffle or add an song to your music collection.

There are those who will question just how desperately a smartphone requires pressure-sensitive capabilities, but anything which abbreviates the process of switching between apps - and especially when it comes to labourious exercises like inputting a lengthy address into a mapping app - is a good thing in my eyes. Again, the Moto X offered a similar service, which allowed you to peep inside notifications under their Moto Display function, this is not ground-breaking tech. But it’s well-executed within iOS 9 and is a genuinely useful function.

The iPhone 6s has been equipped with a new fingerprint sensor, embedded in the home button and known as Touch ID. As with the 6, you can register up to five fingerprints to the phone for unlocking the handset, authenticating your identity or verifying purchases from the iTunes Store, App Store or iBooks Store. But this time it’s up to twice as fast as the 6’s sensor which causes only only one problem - it’s almost too fast. Merely pressing the home button to wake the phone now swiftly unlocks it, ploughing you straight into the home screen and most likely bypassing the message notification you were looking for. It takes some getting used to, and you may find it a bit frustrating initially.

The 6s and 6s Plus are the first iPhones to ship with new operating system iOS 9, which is also now available to download for your older iOS devices to run on.

If you haven’t yet tried it, iOS 9 offers up a number of decent enhancements designed to improve your 6s experience, including improved battery life, revamped Notes, Maps and Wallet (formerly Passbook) apps and a more proactive, deep-search role for Siri.

The new A9 chips in both the 6s and the 6s Plus have been designed to deliver 70 per cent faster CPU (central processing unit) performance than the A8 used in their predecessors, meaning the new handsets are Apple's fastest to date.

Thanks to the integrated A9, Siri is now always on, waiting to be activated by the command "Hey Siri". This is attuned to your voice when you first set Siri up during the iPhone activation process, which means Siri is supposed to be able to pick out your voice alone from within a crowded room. I did find that a woman of a similar age and voice range to myself was able to activate Siri from a distance by speaking a command, so maybe this is a feature which needs a bit of refining.

Verdict

Apple’s ‘s’ generation iPhones have gained a bad reputation in recent years for failing to excite on the level the more comprehensive 4, 5 and 6 years have. But Apple has clearly attempted to redress the constant accusations of a failure to innovate with 3D Touch and Live Photos, two not wholly original concepts, but ones which work exceptionally well.

But as ever with Apple, none of this comes cheaply. You’ll have to fork out £539 to buy the 16GB model outright, £619 for 64GB and £699 for 128GB, eye-watering prices for what is an excellent, but nonetheless still far from the most highly-specced phone on the market. It's also significantly lighter than the 6s Plus, and - for those who care - you can slip it into your pocket with ease. I personally prefer a larger display, which is why I've given the 6 Plus the higher star rating, but this is purely a matter of preference.

If you can justify the price, are fully committed to the iOS / OS X ecosystems and prefer the smaller end of the phablet spectrum, the iPhone 6s could well be the one for you. It’s unlikely to win over many Android fandroids who will continue to decry what they deem as Apple’s arrogant appropriation of their years-old features, but when an iPhone’s this good, the rest is noise.

Pros

Live Photos is fun, if a novelty

3D Touch is a genuinely useful way to avoid hitting the home button every 30 seconds

The second best-looking phone on the market, behind the 6s Plus

Cons

Very expensive

Screen still relatively low-res

Camera still not quite as good as it could be

The iPhone 6s is available to buy from September 25/Agencies