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Apple’s fresh wise phones are thicker, thinner, and totally transactional
It’s a strange day when a pair of fresh iPhones gets upstaged at an Apple event, but perhaps that’s because pretty much everything about the fresh Four.7-inch iPhone six and Five.5-inch iPhone six Plus devices was already widely leaked ahead of time, right down to the way they looked. Still, it’s something different to hold them in the arm, and we got ample time to do that after the event.
Unlike the Apple See, which was available to the press only in tightly managed demos, the iPhones were available for free play. The company even set up test payment kiosks to attempt out the fresh Apple Pay functionality.
When placed next to an iPhone 5s, the iPhone six looks noticeably thicker, while the six Plus looks positively gargantuan, but the iPhone six doesn’t feel like an especially large phone when you hold it—in fact, it makes the iPhone 5s feel kind of puny now. The six Plus is a different story. Like most phablet-style phones, it’s a handful, but Apple makes good use of the screen. A fresh two-up landscape mode for apps such as Mail, Messaging, and Calendar let’s you see previews of messages and events on one side and your inbox or utter calendar on the other. Even the home screen reorients in landscape mode.
Apple’s made some accommodations in both hardware design and user interface to make them a bit more one-hand friendly. Because it’s hard to reach the top of the devices without entirely reorienting your grip—it’s actually unlikely on the iPhone six Plus—the sleep/wake button has been moved to the right side. And two touches of the home button engages Apples’ “Reachability” mode, which shifts the entire screen down so that you can access buttons and content that would otherwise be at the top of the display. It’s an interesting feature, but by now there are so many double-tap, double-touch, and press-and-hold functions with the Home button that it’s now lighter than ever to launch the wrong thing.
We didn’t have much chance to attempt out the fancy fresh cameras with their Concentrate Pixels, and optical pic stabilizer on the iPhone six Plus, so we’ll have to save that for the labs, but the pixels on the fresh Retina HD screens made a nice very first impression. The resolution of the screens (1334 x seven hundred fifty for the iPhone 6; one thousand nine hundred twenty x one thousand eighty for the iPhone six Plus) is high, albeit nowhere near the “quad HD” resolution of both the Samsung Galaxy Note four or LG G3. But screen resolution is almost beside the point, since pixel densities these days are beyond the capacity of the human eye to differentiate. The fresh Retina display is using something called dual-domain pixels that Apple claims increase viewing angle and contrast. We’ll be nosey to see how this display stands up to our lab tests, but on very first look photos looked very nice, while text popped almost like you’d expect on an e-reader.
Ultimately, our trial of the fresh Apple Pay system was obviously a canned demo, but by combining the security of Touch ID with NFC (near-field communication), it seems like Apple Pay might have a lot of promise in a world where traditional credit cards seem increasingly insecure. We trained a finger to an iPhone 6, tapped at a payment console, verified with Touch ID, and our fake transaction was accomplish. The biometric verification is a nice touch, but we’re more intrigued by Apple’s promise that it stores absolutely none of your transactional—or even credit card data—on the phone itself. In fact, the Apple Pay system get’s a unique ID from your credit card issuer (the company has partnerships with American Express, Visa, and MasterCard), and uses that for transactions. Apple says the system is downright distinct from the iTunes store, but it will work for online payment as well. There are even a few vendors that are planning to implement hybrid real-world/cloud transactions—OpenTable will let you make reservations for a restaurant, then pay your bill via Apple Pay when you’re done with your meal. The system seems at very first glance far more secure than magnetic-stripe credit cards, but we bet there are already legions of hackers salivating at the chance to be the very first to crack Apple Pay.
They won’t have to wait too long. Apple Pay is coming in October, and the two fresh iPhones will hit stores on September Nineteen. We’ll be bringing both models into our labs for a total review.