The iPhone 6 is 5.44 inches tall and 2.64 inches wide, which slots it right in between last year’s Moto X (also a 4.7-inch phone) and the new HTC One. It’s almost exactly the same size as Samsung’s Galaxy S5, just a little thinner and a little lighter. And it shares more in common with the world’s many Android phones – and the original, curvy iPhone — than with the sharp, rectangular iPhone 5S.
The iPhone 5S was a stark piece of jewelry, a gorgeous object that was slightly cold and unapproachable. The iPhone 6 is far friendlier and far more usable. Mixing form and function this way is hard to do, and Apple gets it largely right.
It’s simply and cleanly designed, with a metal back that curves cleanly around the sides. There are few seams and no ugly clutter. The only real flaw is the antenna design: Apple opted to essentially outline the top and bottom of the phone’s back with small plastic stripes where wireless radios can transmit signal. It just looks bad, like someone drew on my phone with a marker. HTC’s simple, striped design on the One M8 is far better, and even Apple’s glass-strip-on-top-and-bottom approach on the 5S looked nicer.
In a weird way, slim and gorgeous as it is, this iPhone begs to have a case on it. (Apple makes some, including a really nice line of leather cases, and the third-party ecosystem is going to get even bigger.) It helps obscure the unsightly plastic strips, it make the otherwise slick phone a little easier to grip, and it compensates for the awkwardly protruding camera lens on the back, which prevents the phone from sitting flat on a table. I’m worried I’m going to scratch the lens, and I’m annoyed that the phone wobbles. A case solves both problems.
The 6 is big, much bigger than the 5S or the other iPhones that came before it. It’s even bigger than some other 4.7-inch phones; because Apple refuses to change the top and bottom bezels so as not to disturb the big home button, the phone is much taller than it needs to be. But it’s still usable in one hand, comfortable enough that I never feel terribly awkward using it. I have found myself holding it slightly differently, though: I tend to rest it on my fingers rather than grip it in my palm, the better to reach the furthest corners of the screen.
The screen, of course, is the whole reason the iPhone 6 exists. It’s 4.7 inches diagonal, 1334 pixels tall by 750 wide. It’s not the pixel density curve-breaker that the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is, but it’s an extremely good display. It has great color reproduction and phenomenal viewing angles, it’s viewable even in bright light thanks to a new polarizer, and my eyes can’t make out individual pixels anywhere. The glass on the front slopes ever so softly into the curved metallic edge, giving the iPhone 6 a sort of infinity pool effect: the screen just never seems to end.
There’s something perfectly polished about the way it feels to use this screen. I’ve never felt so much like I was truly moving things around under my finger, manipulating icons and pictures by hand. It’s organic and natural in a distinctly Apple way.
With only a couple of small exceptions, this is the right way to build a larger phone. It’s thinner, more comfortable, more friendly to the touch. But what Apple didn’t do was come up with a way to take advantage of the new screen real estate, or make it easier to navigate. Other devices have clever screen-unlock mechanisms, or stylii, or split-screen multitasking, or always-on voice control. (The iPhone 6 does let you yell "hey Siri!" to give voice commands from across the room, but only when it’s plugged in.) Apple is clearly saying a big phone is better, but it doesn’t answer the critical question: how is it different?
The 6 Plus at least gestures in this direction. A few apps work in landscape, with handy two-pane modes, and even the homescreen rotates on its side. On the "smaller" model, though, the only concession to gargantuanism is Reachability, in which you double-tap (but don’t click) the home button and the whole screen just slides downward. It does the job, I suppose, but it just looks like you broke something when there’s only half an app on the screen and the rest of the display is just empty.
Apple had a chance here to not just make a bigger iPhone, but to really think through how we might use a bigger iPhone differently. How a bigger iPhone changes what we can do, or see, or interact with on one display. But Apple didn’t do any of that. It just made a bigger, better iPhone. all rights reserved by www.theverge.com for this post.