Today Tim Cook and his henchmen took the stage at the Clint Center in order to announce new iPhones, the company’s first Watch and more goodies. First things first, the iWatch is in fact called the Apple Watch and it’s priced at $350. It’s coming in early 2015, but more about that later.
The iPhone 6 is real, it comes with a 4.7 inch display, with a Retina HD resolution, that’s basically only a few pixels higher than a strange form of HD. Meanwhile, the iPhone 6 Plus adopts a LCD Full HD screen with a 5.5 inch diagonal. The bigger unit has an 8 megapixel camera with OIS, while the smaller one sticks with digital stabilization. The two share dual core Apple A8 64 bit processors, based on the 20 nm production process.
There’s also an upgraded 2.1 MP front camera for selfies and Apple will offer these new iPhones with storage up to 128 GB. The price for the iPhone 6 starts at $199 on two year contract, while the bigger one is $100 more. The new CPU is said to be 50 times faster than the chip of the original iPhone and the battery life of the regular iPhone 6 is said to be 11 hours of video playback or 14 hours of talk time.
The new iPhones are shipped on September 19th and preordered on the 12th. The Apple Watch is a rectangular piece of gear, with a stainless steel, ceramic and aluminum body, a sapphire glass display and a crown button, used to zoom in. Devices from iPhone 4S upwards will be compatible with the Watch, that only works in tandem with an iDevice. There’s a heart rate monitor at the back and trackers for various workouts.
This model does payments via the freshly announced Apple Pay, the mobile wallet solution from Apple, that rolls out next month. To use this, the new iPhones employ NFC. By the way, iOS 8 was also announced to arrive on September 17th. All in all it was a pretty concise event, ended with the performance of Irish alt rockers U2, that put out an LP on this occasion. What do you make of these announcements?
I find the Apple Watch underwhelming, but the iPhone 6 Plus may just be a winner…
