The editors thank you for kindly providing the iPhone 6S for review.
As you know, the development of Apple smartphones occurs in accordance with the “tick-tock” principle, which was once popularized by Intel Corporation. The meaning of this principle is that a full product update cycle takes two years, while in the first year Apple introduces global design changes (“tick”), and in the second year it improves on last year’s solution primarily by increasing )
Last year's iPhone 6 was ticking and therefore brought with it a radically new design and a larger screen, but its hardware hasn't changed much compared to the iPhone 5S. This year it’s the other way around: outwardly, the iPhone 6S is practically no different from its predecessor, but inside it has almost everything new. It is on describing these changes that we will focus.
Appearance and design
As I mentioned above, the iPhone 6S looks almost the same as the iPhone 6, although its dimensions have increased slightly: from 138.1x67x6.9 mm to 138.3x67.1x7.1 mm. It’s unlikely that anyone will notice the difference, but still. But the weight increased noticeably: from 129 to 143 grams. This is due both to the fact that the new iPhone uses a more durable and heavier aluminum alloy, and to the fact that the mechanism with which the 3D Touch function is implemented also has some weight.
Another change (albeit a very minor one) is due to the fact that the United States adopted a new law according to which electronics manufacturers are no longer required to indicate regulatory information on the device body. Therefore, there is much less useless inscriptions on the back of the iPhone 6S, which is welcome.
In the hand, the iPhone 6S fits exactly the same as the iPhone 6. For me personally, it is a very comfortable size: not too small and not too large. All controls, buttons and connectors remained in their rightful places. After all, this is the iPhone 6S, not the iPhone 7, which is rumored to bring with it a revolution such as the absence of a physical Home button.
Conclusion
iPhone 6 Plus exceeded my expectations.
I can’t call myself a selfless fan of Apple technology, but I’ve been using their phones for many years and this is the first time I’ve experienced such strong satisfaction from a purchase. Moreover, you really don’t get to know this phone right away, but only after a week or more... The iPhone 6 Plus is not just a “big iPhone”, it is a real “tablet phone”, which has as much from the iPad as from the usual iPhone. This is something in between and this is its undeniable advantage. Most likely, after purchasing the 6 Plus, you will completely give up using the iPad, and that’s not a bad thing... The iPhone 6 Plus has many shortcomings, but as always, you will remember them with a grin only when fans of Android smartphones point them out to you. The phone has too many pros to pay attention to the cons.
We also have a Telegram channel. It is also very convenient to follow the news on the app.
Display
To be honest, I don’t have much to write about the screen: it’s exactly the same as last year’s iPhone 6. The screen resolution is 1334x750 pixels with a diagonal of 4.7″, the pixel density is 326 ppi, which today is far from a record figure (according to For this reason, the iPhone 6S screen does not look as smooth as competing screens that have a pixel density of more than 400 ppi). If you don't chase resolution numbers, there are no complaints about the screen; it has excellent brightness and contrast, as well as visibility in the sun. Let me demonstrate this last statement with a photo from last year's iPhone 6 review:
Battery
Apparently, the battery has not undergone significant changes. At least, the declared operating time parameters under different operating modes are no different from those of previous models.
Although, of course, many hoped that the capacity of just the “six” would be raised a little, at least to the level of 6 plus. But a miracle did not happen, we will wait for real tests and reviews from the first lucky users.
3D Touch
3D Touch is one of the flagship features of the new Apple smartphone, and understandably so. In my opinion, this is the biggest breakthrough in the field of mobile interfaces since the original iPhone with capacitive touchscreen and multitouch support.
The point of the innovation is that the smartphone is able to recognize not only the fact of pressing the screen, but also its force, and a strong press can be used for all sorts of additional actions. 3D Touch has two main modes: Peek and Pop and Quick Actions.
Peek and Pop mode is used to preview content. For example, you can view the contents of a link or letter without opening them (Peek), and if you find them interesting, you can open them by pressing the screen even harder (Pop). It sounds difficult, but in reality you get used to it instantly. Tactile feedback in the form of short-term vibration of a smartphone also helps.
In Quick Actions mode, you can forcefully press an application icon on the desktop and thus open a quick access menu to the main or most frequently used functions of the application. Again, this is very convenient and allows you to immediately jump to the desired function of the application without delving into its menu.
3D Touch has other capabilities as well. For example, pressing hard on the keyboard switches it to touchpad mode and allows you to quickly move the cursor through the text. Additionally, pressure sensitivity opens up intriguing possibilities in drawing applications.
In general, 3D Touch is a very convenient and useful feature that you instantly get used to and no longer understand how you used to live before. Apple also chose the name very well: if previously all user interaction with the screen took place in one plane, now it has volume. I think that over time, 3D Touch will become as universal on mobile devices as the right-click context menu has become on the desktop. But so far, the potential of this technology has not been fully realized either by the authors of third-party applications or by Apple itself.
Performance
At one time, at the presentation of the iPhone 3GS, Apple Vice President Phil Schiller said that “S” stands for Speed, that is, “speed.” In the case of the iPhone 6S, this is more relevant than ever, because the new generation brought with it an impressive leap in performance compared to the previous one (unlike the iPhone 6, which was literally 15-20% faster than the iPhone 5S).
The most important innovation is, of course, the amount of RAM increased to 2 GB. Now on iPhone you can finally open two dozen tabs in the browser and switch between them without reloading web pages. And in general, increasing the amount of RAM had an extremely positive effect on the experience of working with a smartphone.
Apple A9 processor. Photo © 2015 iFixit
The Apple A9 processor is still equipped with only two Twister processing cores, which are a further development of the Typhoon processor core (which, in turn, is an improved version of the Cyclone). Compared to 8- or even 10-core competitors, this does not look very impressive.
But in reality, not all kernels are equally useful. Twister is a very powerful processor core. Suffice it to say that it contains six decoders, nine trigger ports, four integer ALUs, three floating-point and NEON vector extension ALUs, two read/write modules and three branch prediction modules. Each core can perform up to four integer and three floating-point operations per clock cycle. Due to improved branch prediction modules and an improved instruction reordering algorithm in Twister, compared to Typhoon, it was possible to reduce misprediction losses from 15 cycles to 9. The volume of the second level cache was increased from 1 to 3 MB, and the L3 cache increased from 4 to 8 MB.
In addition to microarchitectural improvements, the transition to a modern process technology allowed Apple to significantly increase the processor clock speed from 1.4 to 1.85 GHz without sacrificing battery life. All this led to the fact that in the Geekbench 3 performance test, the iPhone 6S in single-threaded mode is one and a half times faster than the iPhone 6, and 40% faster than the iPad Air 2 (which uses a high-performance version of the A8 processor - A8X). In multi-threaded mode, the iPad Air 2 is a little faster due to the additional core, but overall the progress compared to last year is noticeable to the naked eye. In terms of multi-threaded performance, the 2-core processor in the iPhone 6S is approximately equal to the 8-core processor in the Galaxy S6. At the same time, the need for 8 cores in a smartphone is very doubtful, but absolutely all applications benefit from the speed of individual cores (but first of all, games and web browsers, which is why web surfing on an iPhone is much more enjoyable than on Android smartphones).
The graphics part of the chip has also undergone a major upgrade. Instead of PowerVR of the sixth series, Apple now uses PowerVR Rogue 7 (XT7600) in a six-core configuration, which, combined with fast DDR4 memory, has significantly improved graphics performance compared to the previous generation (as evidenced by GFXbench benchmark results). Today, the iPhone 6S is equipped with one of the fastest graphics accelerators of any smartphone, if not the fastest.
As you would expect, in everyday life the iPhone 6S works extremely quickly and smoothly; no stuttering or dropped frames were noticed. Even the Spotlight search animation, which always skips frames on the iPhone 6 and iPad Mini Retina, looks flawless on the iPhone 6S. But I was especially impressed by the speed of TouchID fingerprint recognition. If on my iPhone 5S I need to put my finger on the button and hold it for a while, then on the iPhone 6S scanning and recognition happens instantly.
Chip
It was also announced about a new powerful and energy-efficient processor of the next, third generation - A9. It is created on the basis of advanced transistor architecture. According to the results of laboratory tests, the A9 improved the corresponding indicators of its predecessors by 70% - in terms of productivity and economical energy consumption.
The main chip is equipped with an improved M 9 motion coprocessor. It is built into the A9, and is always on alert, reading and analyzing a lot of data about the user and external conditions.
The performance of the graphics chip has improved by an order of magnitude (the manufacturer announced an increase of 90%). In fact, games do not crash in test mode, the picture is dynamic, three-dimensional and “juicy”. At least at the presentation everything looked very decent.
Camera
Apple has a very conservative approach to cameras in its smartphones. Suffice it to say that the company used 8-megapixel modules for four years (from 2011 to 2015). And now the iPhone 6S finally brought the long-awaited increase in resolution, which again turned out to be conservative - up to 12 MP. At the same time, the lens remains the same, its aperture is f/2.2, which is not bad in itself, but worse than competitors who already use optics in their smartphones with a maximum aperture of f/2.0 and even f/1.8.
Overall, I would characterize the camera in the iPhone 6S as very good, even excellent, but overall it is inferior in quality to cameras in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S6 or LG G4. True, the iPhone takes its toll on the speed of the camera, its simple and friendly interface, the ability to record slow-motion video (up to 120 fps in FullHD resolution and up to 240 fps in 720p) and built-in interval shooting mode.
Examples of photos taken with the iPhone 6S camera:
iPhone 6S on the Intertelecom network
Some American versions of the iPhone 6S are equipped with multi-standard modems supporting not only GSM/WCDMA/HSPA, but also CDMA 2000 1x and EV-DO Rev.A and Rev.B. Such devices can be used in the network of the Intertelecom operator (and this is exactly the iPhone I had in my hands). Let us immediately note that the procedure for connecting such a device to the Intertelecom network is non-trivial and is carried out only at the operator’s service center (you can read more in the article by Sergei Makarenko). In addition, it imposes certain restrictions on the process of using a smartphone, for example, you will not be able to reset or update the firmware of the device yourself - after that you will have to go to the service center again for setup.
The advantage is excellent coverage of the Intertelecom network and low tariffs for 3G Internet. For example, in my house, 3G from Kyivstar is only available near the window, but in other parts of the apartment the smartphone falls into EDGE. The 3mob network has very poor reception at the sports club where I go. In both of these places, Intertelecom has excellent reception and provides speeds of about 3-4 Mbit/s for reception and about 2 Mbit/s for upload, which is enough for most everyday tasks (including watching online videos).
At the same time, Intertelecom’s data transfer rates are very pleasant compared to GSM operators. For example, for 200 UAH per month, a user receives 2 GB of traffic per day - this is currently impossible with any GSM operator.
Cons mentioned in reviews
The dubious value of 3D Touch
Photo: www.technotoned.com
Despite the fact that developers seem to have begun to implement Apple’s new product into their applications, the functionality of this technical bells and whistle is still small. And in the event of a breakdown, replacing a screen with 3D Touch will cost an absolutely hellish sum. In reviews on Yandex.Market , users report that the best option for using this function now is to simply disable it. In the future, perhaps, it will become a promising area of development. But by then Apple will probably release the next series of iPhones.
Updating interfaces for accessories
For many owners, another interface update was an unpleasant surprise. The headphone jack located at the bottom forces you to turn the smartphone over when listening to music, putting it in your pocket. Looking at the screen upside down is completely uncomfortable. Owners of the fourth series, who decided to jump straight to the sixth, had to deal with the fact that the charger was not suitable, and MicroSIM was replaced by NanoSIM (the Internet is full of quite official instructions on how to turn the first into the second using office glue, a knife and a file) .
