One week with iPhone 6

I got my iPhone 6 on the first day of availability (19 Sep 2014) and started using it as my primary phone since that day. There are things that I love, there are issues that I wish Apple would have done better. Here is my review after using Apple’s latest flagship phone for one week.

Overall Design
I like the new design of iPhone 6. It looks very classy, and comfortable to hold. The edges of the screen is curved, creating an impression that the entire screen is somewhat closer to our eyes. On the down side, this new design is more prone to stretches and cracks as it exposes the front glass as the first to receive an impact. This gets worse that Apple didn’t put sapphire protection on this year’s iPhone. The solution of this problem is actually simple, though probably not for everyone. I choose to use screen protector, right from the first day of usage.

Display
The display of iPhone 6 is bright and vivid. I can clearly see the display even under direct sunlight. Instead of going into the technical specs, I simply compared the new iPhone 6 to my old iPhone 5S side by side. And iPhone 6’s display clearly win by landslide.

Power Button
The new position of power button was one of my disappointment when I first unboxing this phone. Currently I’m in love and hate relationship with it. When I carry the phone outdoor, the new position is indeed useful as my thumb can easily reach it. However, I still have many occasions of accidentally pressing the volume button when I try to press the power button. Taking screenshot becomes somewhat awkward.

Phone Size
I can put iPhone 6 easily in all my jackets’ (or jeans’) pocket. The weight does not bother me and I actually like to hold this thin phone with solid weight feeling. Until today, I still fail to understand the hype about “larger screen”. 4.7″ model of iPhone 6 is indeed still manageable, and I can still operate it using one hand. But it’s not as comfortable as my iPhone 5S. The Reachability feature works and it did help me few times. However, I still find it slightly uncomfortable operating this phone using one hand, especially when in a hurry.
If Apple offers iPhone 6 mini with 4″, but everything else are the same with 4.7″ model, that would be the perfect phone for me. Too bad they don’t offer 4″ size for iPhone 6, so I guess 4.7″ is an acceptable compromise for me. Apple does need to please those people with lust over large display.
Other than the screen size, I am fully amazed with the thinness of this new iPhone. Being a thin device, I know and aware that it will obviously more fragile to bend. That’s why I was speechless when I read so many news about people having their iPhone 6 plus (not iPhone 6) bent in their pockets. Well, it’s a thin phone made of metal. Metal bends and does not return easily, unlike plastic. That’s a choice we made, choosing a phone with metal body instead of plastic. What are they expecting? The media also love to blow this issue way out of proportion. According to apple, only 9 people formally reported that their iPhone 6 plus got bent. 9 people. 9 people out of 10 millions sold. And look at those buzz everywhere. Media doesn’t even care whether a news is positive or negative, true or partially true, as long as it’s about Apple, they will continue to blow things up because those news attract people’s reaction, draws social media clicks and likes (thus larger coverage), which means higher income for them.
I always use protection case since the era of dumb phone, so this habit of mine would be useful to protect this new thin phone. I choose Case Mate’s Naked Tough transparent case, just like what I use for my iPhone 5S.

Speed
iPhone 6 is blazing fast and smooth. But since iPhone 5S was already fast, to be honest the “extra” power of A8 processor is not noticeable in most casual usage. I did feel the new processor’s power when opening some “heavy” apps, but that doesn’t happen everyday.

iOS 8
Apple’s latest version of mobile operating system runs very well in iPhone 6. I noticed minor glitches with version 8.0, including slow returning to library view after reading a book in iBook app. During this week, Apple released 8.0.1 update which brought 40,000 new iPhones lost their cellular signal and TouchID. It was a disaster. Shame on Apple for allowing such a bad update getting released. Luckily I didn’t update to 8.0.1. When I woke up in the morning (Australia time), Apple already pulled out the update. Yesterday iOS 8.0.2 was released, with fixes to some bugs, including the 8.0.1 disaster. I did install 8.0.2 in my iPhone 6 and iPad mini 2. Both devices work fine, but Settings app in my iPhone 6 shows “1” badge even after update and I couldn’t find a way to remove it. This unusual side effect does not happen in my iPad mini 2 though.

TouchID
Detecting our fingerprint is noticeably faster than iPhone 5S with iOS 7. It feels a lot more comfortable to unlock my phone using fingerprint now to the point I often tried to do that to my iPad mini2 (which doesn’t have fingerprint sensor).

Screen Resolution
When opening apps that are not yet optimised for iPhone 6 (and 6 plus) new resolution, those apps will be rendered at iPhone 5S’ resolution, then get upscaled into iPhone 6 screen. It looks great for games and other graphic-based apps since virtually all apps compatible with iPhone 5S are directly usable (and look great) in iPhone 6. However, for text-based apps, the upscale looks terrible, at least for my taste. This is not the phone’s fault though. Eventually most of those apps are going to get compatibility updates. Some popular apps like Good Reader already posted their updated version. I can’t wait until Facebook app gets updated.

Audio
Maybe it’s just my ears playing trick on me, but I do feel the music from iPhone 6 (listened through Apple Earpod) sounds better than iPhone 5S. The music sounds warmer, but rich and detailed. I have tested various songs using the same Earpod and same settings, and I prefer iPhone 6’s audio quality by far.
The built-in speaker of iPhone 6 sounds louder than any other previous iPhones. It’s still mono, but will be sufficient for most casual needs.

Battery Life
In my personal experience, iPhone 6’s battery does last longer than iPhone 5S. Sometimes I get almost 1.5 days of battery life with modest usage, or the entire daytime (from 7 am to around 6 pm) with heavy usage. My iPhone 5S never can survived an entire daytime when I used the phone intensively, especially for some energy-eating apps like Facebook. For this first week, I never need to use my backup battery.

Custom Keyboard
When iOS 8 was announced to enable custom keyboard, I was genuinely excited. In my first few hours with iPhone 6, I quickly downloaded few custom keyboards, from the free SwiftKey to the paying Swype. After playing with these keyboard for few days, I concluded that they don’t really help much in typing. I didn’t type any faster, and there is no significance gain other than some fancy look and various sizes of the keyboard. Not to mention that most custom keyboards need “full access” to provide optimal results while I have serious issue with allowing “full access” of a keyboard. By allowing this, we actually allow a custom keyboard to track everything we type, including sensitive information like credit card numbers, passwords or other private information. Remember the danger of hidden keylogger at the era of Internet cafe? This time we install the keylogger and giving it full access by ourselves. So I uninstalled them all.
Having said that, it’s probably too early to conclude that this new feature is useless because there might me many new custom keyboards in the future that I might actually like. For example, perhaps using our finger to make handwriting as input method would be cool (if implemented properly).

Camera
Still not tested yet, haven’t got time to do camera test.

HealthKit
Still could not test this feature as Apple just started to approve HealthKit-related apps yesterday after the release of iOS 8.0.2.

Conclusion
Even with all the small issues, iPhone 6 is very responsive, comfortable to hold, and the display looks awesome. The collection of high-quality third party apps is still unbeatable. This phone inherits all the great user experience from previous iPhones and improves on it. As I wrote above, there are few things I wish Apple would have done differently, but we don’t always get what we want in life.

iPhone 6 will stay as my primary phone this year.