Everything that the leaks predicated came true today, from the format of the iPhone 6, to the fact we were going to get a phablet with a 5.5 inch diagonal. Aside from the iPhone 6 4.7 inch unit, there’s now a 5.5 inch phablet announced by Tim Cook, a model that will arrive on September 19th, after being offered for preorder on the 12th.
There’s not much of a difference between the iPhone 6 and the 5.5 inch version of the device, since they’re only separated by screen, resolution and battery, plus some camera aspects. The iPhone 6 5.5 inch packs an IPS LCD display with a Retina HD resolution, in this case 1920 x 1080 pixels. iOS 8 is tweaked to fully use the screen and there’s also a special landscape mode triggered in some apps and features, reminding us of the iPad usage. Split screen is sometimes also offered.
The handset is made of anodized aluminum and has a stainless steel frame, while inside we find the same 64 bit Apple A8 dual core 20 nm processor from the 4.7 inch new iPhone. There’s a boost of 20% in CPU poer and 50% in GPU power from the predecessor. The iPhone 6 Plus supports 20 LTE bands, does WiFi with a speed 3 times higher than the one of the iPhone 5s and offers WiFi calling on a few carriers.
There’s VoLTE available, NFC payments and an 8 megapixel camera with 1.5 micron pixels, F/2.2 aperture and optical image stabilization in this case. We’ve also got phase detection autofocus, that should improve focusing speed by 100%. The handset does Full HD video at 60 or 30 FPS and slow mo at up to 240 FPS. Battery will reach as high as double the video playback time of the iPhone 5s, supposedly and this model is priced starting at $299 for the 16 GB version.
64 GB is $399 and 128 GB is $499.
