iPhone 6 Plus – Specs, features, price, release date and everything you need to know

Apple unveiled two new iPhones this morning. The iPhone 6, which is the actual “next iPhone” and its bigger brother, the iPhone 6 Plus. You can read more on the iPhone 6 here.

iPhone 6 Plus – What’s new?

Apple has responded well to the Phablet trend in the mobile market by bringing a huge iPhone to its line up. So lets see how iPhone 6 Plus is different.

Design

iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 6 are pretty much the same when it comes to external design, except of course the size. It has a larger and thinner form factor as compared to previous generations but is 0.2 mm thicker than the iPhone 6. It has the rounded corners and edges, similar to the current iPod Touches and iPads. The colored antenna bars on the back, new speaker grills, protruding camera, and the lock button on the right are all as we have seen in the leaked images.

Display

The iPhone 6 Plus brings a massive 5.5 inch screen and the best part is that it is a full HD panel. Meaning the resolution is 1080p or 1920×1080 with a 401ppi crystal clear display – the Retina Display HD. Besides, they have integrated a better polariser, thinner backlight and ionised glass, resulting in wider viewing angles, higher contrasts and a more durable finish.

Processor

iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 6 packs the new A8 Chip which is built on their 2nd generation 64 bit architecture. This makes the CPU and GPU, upto 50 and 84 times faster than the original iPhone, respectively.
iPhone 6 Plus also sports the new M8 Motion co-processor which is better at tracking movements and can now measure elevation and even the altitude with the barometer functionality. All the information from these sensors go into the Health app to create better lifestyle and work out charts.

Camera

There is nothing much fresh for the Camera in iPhone 6 Plus hardware. It comes with the same 8MP iSight Camera with True Tone dual LED flash. The sensor has been improved with 1.5 micron pixels and the aperture remains the same at f/2.2.

However, the Camera app has learned some new tricks like faster auto-focus, face detection, wider and more accurate panorama, auto stabilisation and exposure control. The camera can now capture time-lapse videos and slo-mo videos at 240 fps over the previous 120. Burst Mode for the front-facing camera and the Timer were also introduced with an innocent joke about selfies.

One noticeable difference here is the Optical Image Stabilisation on iPhone 6 Plus when compared to the iPhone 6 with Digital Image Stabilisation.

Landscape Use

This is one of the most important software differences between the iPhone 6 Plus and the 6. When you tilt your phone to the side, the springboard and the icons turn for a wide-based use just like while using an iPad. Within apps like Calendar, Mails or supported third party ones, landscape brings a split screen interface, similar to the iPad and makes the best use of the available screen space.

Connectivity

iPhone 6 Plus comes with faster LTE of upto 150 Mbps, with support for about 20 LTE Bands. Voice over LTE is coming to the new iPhone and so is the 3 times faster WiFi.

Battery Life

Though we’re not sure about the actual capacity of the iPhone 6 Plus battery, Apple’s stats show a remarkable improvement from previous iPhones and a significant difference from the iPhone 6 too. Apple claims a 12 hour 3G Talk Time and a 16 day standby time for the jumbo iPhone.

Price and Release date of iPhone 6 Plus

The iPhone 6 Plus ships on the 19th of September in three colors – Gold, Silver and Space Grey. They will be available in 16GB, 64GB and 128GB for $299, $399 and $499 respectively, with a two year contract.

So that was an overview of the new features, price and release date of the Apple iPhone 6 Plus. You can get more details on their website or read the spec sheet here.