Apple iPhone 6 Plus review

Apple iPhone 6 Plus review: design

The iPhone 6 Plus sports the same newly curvaceous design as its smaller sibling, but with one major difference: its beefed-up body frames a substantially larger 5.5in, Full HD display. This makes the iPhone 6 Plus something of a handful but, at only 7.3mm thick, the slender, curved profile fits surprisingly well in the hand. With the rounded edges nestling comfortably in the crook of each finger, it feels just as manageable as the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 or Samsung Galaxy Note 4, and a little more manageable than the chunkier Nexus 6.

Apple iPhone 6 Plus review: display, performance and battery life

As you’d expect, the iPhone 6 Plus’ Full HD display is the centre of attention. Image quality is sumptuous from the off, with brightness soaring high enough to fend off even bright sunlight, and image quality that marries pin-sharp clarity with rock-solid contrast and rich, believable colour reproduction. And at 401ppi, the iPhone 6 Plus has the most densely pixel-packed display of any Apple device to date.

Interestingly, the iPhone 6 Plus’ display lags a little behind its smaller sibling in terms of its technical performance, but it’s not far off. We measured a maximum brightness of 493cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 1,293:1, and the colour accuracy is excellent, too. The IPS panel served up a very slightly wider range of colour than the iPhone 6, covering 95.5% of the sRGB colour gamut, and was only slightly less colour-accurate, with an average Delta E of 2.58 and a maximum deviation of 5.33. To the naked eye, the iPhone 6 Plus’ display is nothing less than superb; moreover, we noted none of the backlight inconsistency that afflicted our test sample of the iPhone 6.

In terms of power, there’s scant difference between the two. As the same 1.4GHz Apple A8 chip is the driving force in both handsets, it came as little surprise to see a nigh-on identical set of scores in the SunSpider, Geekbench and Peacekeeper benchmarks. What’s really impressive, though, is that the iPhone 6 Plus’ gaming performance doesn’t suffer due to its higher-resolution screen. Despite pushing twice as many pixels as the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus managed a very respectable average of 42.7fps in the GFXBench T-Rex HD test.

The iPhone 6 Plus turned in some excellent figures in our other battery tests, too. In our 720p video-playback test, where we calibrate the display to a brightness of 120cd/m2 and activate flight mode, the handset used only 4.9% of its battery capacity per hour – a figure that puts it just ahead of every Android flagship out there. It didn't quite repeat the feat in the 3G audio-streaming test, but it still fared very well indeed. With the screen off, a pair of headphones connected and one of PC Pro’s podcasts streaming, the iPhone 6 Plus used only 2.1% of its battery capacity per hour. 

In practice, those numbers add up to a phone that is astonishingly long-lasting. Having spent a year in the company of the iPhone 5c, our experience of upgrading to the iPhone 6 Plus has been a revelation: we now regularly get two days of usage out of the handset, and sometimes the best part of three. The only downside? The sumptuous screen and fantastic performance mean that we regularly find ourselves spending more time gaming than we ever did previously - and in our experience, lengthy matches of World of Tanks are a great way to kill the battery in short order. You've been warned.