After the effects of Apple’s reality distortion field faded, claims that the newly unveiled iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were the smartest phones ever became a little hard to digest. Here’s why.
Design
Say what you will about the tougher, Bendgate-resistant bodies the new iPhones possess, but no matter how resilient and scratch resistant Apple claims its new display glass is, we’re not convinced.
Based on the track record set by every previous iPhone, dropping one onto anything other than a mountain of feather pillows is going to result in a smashed screen. End of.
And whilst we’re on the subject of design, some level of water resistance wouldn’t have gone amiss either.
3D Touch
At the 6s’s launch Apple’s Jony Ive billed 3D Touch as “the next generation of multi touch” but being able to press harder on your screen to perform new actions and developing expensive hardware to achieve that doesn’t seem like the best use of the company’s time or money.
I’m not interested in being able to peak and pop into emails or Instagram posts and a new software-based gesture would’ve been a much easier way of achieving a similar result.
Sure it wouldn’t be as impressive on stage and makes the 6s a less appealing purchase, but there are other things I’d rather my iPhone did, like last all day long.
Battery tech
The improvement of the iPhone’s battery longevity has moved at a snail’s pace from generation to generation and apparently as a direct result of that over-engineered new screen technology, the battery in the iPhone 6s is actually smaller than last year’s model.
Now, if fast charging or wireless charging had been brought into the equation too, it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but without hacking in an iPad power adapter to charge your device faster, the iPhone looks like it’ll be retaining its title as the flagship smartphone with the worst battery life out there.
Live photos
Apple has a bad habit of saying it invented a lot of things that the iPhone uses when that’s not strictly true and Live Photos are yet another example of this.
Jump back to July 2014 and this snippet from Nokia’s Lumia Cyan hands-on video (jump to 1:45 to see what we mean):
Or if you want more proof, a clip on how to take an HTC ZOE from 2013:
Suddenly Live Photos become a surprisingly familiar ability for something Phil Schiller billed as ‘entirely new technology’ from Apple in 2015.
NFC
Take a look at the official spec sheets for the iPhone 6 and 6s on Apple.com and you’ll see that they’re both listed as featuring NFC, but beyond Apple Pay, the necessary gubbins inside the new iPhone are basically useless.
Other phones that boast NFC, like the Samsung Galaxy S6 can pair to accessories such as Bluetooth headsets or wireless speakers with a single tap and can even use the technology to initiate file transfers. Try doing those things with an iPhone and it becomes about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
Storage
Last year Apple finally gave us the 128GB iPhone we’d been longing for, but what it didn’t do was bump the base 16GB option up to 32GB. Despite this oversight the company still had no problem charging £539 for the privilege of offering a flagship with the same amount of storage as the budget-friendly Moto G.
Roll forward one year and despite crossing our fingers yet again Apple seems intent on overcharging for this meagre amount of space, pushing consumers to buy a more expensive 6s or pay for more iCloud space. Not cool, Apple.
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