Did I mention the 4.7-inch screen? After two years with a four-inch display (and a few prior with even less), it's a welcome relief to have some breathing room. While not a massive bump on the spec sheet, in everyday use the difference is dramatic. You will zip through emails faster, type more accurately, see much more on menu listings, and even fit an extra row of apps on each home screen. More notably, apps and games just pop, with vibrant visuals really benefitting from the extra space.
While billed as a Retina HD display, at 326 pixels per inch (ppi), it's identical in sharpness to the previous few iPhone models. With impeccable color clarity and contrast, excellent brightness, and wider viewing angles, however, everything just looks better on the bigger screen (except for not-yet-updated apps, sadly). Still, it falls well short of the sharpest Android screens out there, which routinely push past the 400 ppi mark. If you're a longtime iPhone user, you won't notice—but anyone switching over from a recent Android flagship might.
Of course, with a much larger screen comes a larger handset, and while the minimized bezel and rounded edges help keep it from feeling gargantuan, the iPhone 6 pushes the limits of being a one-handed device—and that's coming from someone with relatively large hands. Existing iPhone users will have to relearn how to hold the phone to keep it secure while reaching the far top edge; a double-tap on the Touch ID sensor pulls the top half of the screen down to help, which is a usable but inelegant addition. Still, the larger screen is such a strong upgrade that initial clumsiness can be tolerated.
While the iconic, ultra-minimal Apple smartphone aesthetic remains intact, the iPhone 6's design is thankfully refreshed here. Rounded edges suit the large frame well, with a near-seamless merging of the front face and the aluminum sides and backing. At 6.9mm, it's devastatingly thin—and no, our unit hasn't shown any signs of bending—but there are two surprising tweaks to come to terms with.
First, the power button is now on the right, after forever being found up top. (Oh, how I've fumbled my fingers around seeking it in these early days.) Also, the back camera lens now juts out from the frame, sacrificing the flat surface in favor of a slimmer overall build. That feels a little weird to run your fingers upon when reaching for the phone in a pocket, but it's more curious than alarming.
The iPhone 6 packs an A8 processor inside, and the enhanced second-generation 64-bit chipset promises more power with less energy consumption. In everyday use, however, there's little noticeable change in performance at this point, and few games and apps are pushing the new hardware. In time, we'll probably see something that really puts the phone to excellent, obvious use, but for now, flipping through apps and menus feels just as comfortingly zippy as on the iPhone 5s.
Luckily, the reduced energy needs may already be showing on the battery life, which really impressed in my testing. The iPhone 5s got me through the day in the initial few months of use, but then lost steam over time. Even when I replaced it with a new handset this summer (following an unrelated hardware issue), I still often found myself grabbing the charger before my day ended.After running through a couple of battery cycles, I found that the iPhone 6 would get me through a full day of regular use with at least 30% battery life remaining. If you're running a lot of heavy-duty games or media, you'll probably dip lower by the time you hit the sack, but it'd take extremely heavy use to wipe the iPhone 6 out before the day ends. Whether the iPhone 6's strong initial battery life will hold up after months of use remains to be seen after last year's long-term letdown.
Upgraded storage capacity is another big perk here. The 16GB base model remains the same, but the 64GB and 128GB models double the previous mid- and top-tier models, finally providing enough space to store a solid amount of games and other content on the big screen. It's a long-overdue upgrade that's much appreciated.
While the back camera has changed physically in how it now protrudes from the iPhone 6, it's actually rated at the same eight megapixels as previous models. But as with last year's phone, Apple decided to improve the experience without bumping the megapixel tally. This time around, so-called "Focus Pixels" deliver faster, effortless auto-focus that's really noticeable, plus there's digital image stabilization. You can also hit 60fps with 1080p video recording, and now slow-mo video is taken at a whopping 240fps. It makes that extremely cool 5s innovation even better.What ties everything together is, of course, iOS 8—Apple's upgraded operating system also now available on semi-recent existing iPhones and iPads. Last year's overhauled iOS brought the flash, but this one delivers better functionality, adding an array of helpful tweaks throughout, smoother animations, and beneficial cross-app extensions. This results in everything from third-party keyboards to interactive notifications, contact shortcuts on the multitasking screen, and enhanced messaging capabilities.
Some tweaks are amazingly small, and yet speak to iOS 8's great user-friendliness: like how I can snap a photo from the lock screen and now use Touch ID to sign in and share it right away—without exiting the camera, signing in, opening Photos, and triggering the whole multi-step process. Subtle enhancements like that demonstrate the detailed improvements being made to iOS over time.