Apple announces the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to take on ever-growing Android devices

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 10 Sep 2014

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Last night, Apple unveiled not one but two new iPhones — the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus — with different screen sizes to take on the Android devices whose screen sizes keep increasing with every new generation. 

The new iPhones feature Apple’s custom dual-core A8 chip that is 20% more efficient than its predecessor with the GPU being nearly 50% faster. The devices also come with a new generation of Apple’s M8 motion processor that is now capable of detecting the elevation, the steps climbed by a user and more, thanks to the inclusion of a barometer.

While the new ‘normal’ iPhone comes with a 4.7-inch screen with a resolution of 1334 x 750, while the ‘phablet’ iPhone comes with a 5.5-inch display with Full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution. Both handsets are impressively thin with a waistline of 6.9mm and 7.1mm, respectively.

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On the Camera front, Apple has still gone with an 8MP F/2.2 iSight camera with 1.5u large pixels on both variants of the iPhone. They, however, come with a new lens and ISP that features Phase Auto-Detection, Smile detection, quicker auto-focus and more. The iPhone 6 Plus also comes with Optical Image Stabilisation (OIS), which is surprisingly missing from its smaller brother.

Thanks to a new baseband, the new iPhones support more than 20 LTE bands along with support for VoLTE. Other notable new features include a front-facing iSight camera that can take in 81% more light, NFC for Apple Pay, Wi-Fi calling and more.

To make sure that its devices still remain usable for one-handed usage, Apple has included a new ‘Reachability’ mode in iOS8 that can be activated by quickly double tapping the home button. Under this mode, the on-screen content are aligned at the lower part of the screen to aid one-handed usability. Other new goodies in iOS8 for the new iPhones include a landscape mode for the home screen and other system apps, a new keyboard layout optimized to take advantage of the big screen and more.

The new iPhones will come in a trio of colors — Space Grey, Silver and Gold — and will be available in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore and a few other key markets from September 19th. It will be available in 16, 64 and 128GB variants. While the iPhone 6 (16GB) will set users back by $199 on a two-year contract, they will have to shell out $299 for the 16GB iPhone 6 Plus on contract.