Growth Spurt: The iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus

Yup, Apple’s gone for bigger screens this time around. At the company’s launch event taking place in San Francisco Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken the wraps off the iPhone 6, which is a little bit larger than the current iPhone 5s.

Okay, maybe more than a teeny bit. The iPhone 6 will sport a 4.7-inch, 1,334 x 750 display compared to the 5s’ 4-inch 1,136 x 640 display, maintaining the pixels per inch at 326ppi. They’ve made the iPhone 6 thinner, perhaps assisted by the increased display size. It’s dropped from 7.6mm to 6.9mm. But wait, there’s more.

That even larger iPhone is definitely a thing in the iPhone 6 Plus, a monstrous – for Apple – 5.5 inch HD-screened smartphone that boasts a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution. Welcome to the world of Full HD smartphones, Apple. The thickness here? Just 7.1mm, also thinner than the last iPhone.

According to Apple these are the “…best iPhones we’ve ever made” and this claim is because they’ve gone for more than a display change. The new iPhones are a much more curved affair, with anodised aluminium forming the edging of the devices without actually having edges. It’s a different look for the iPhone, but it still appears as premium as Apple fans are used to.

Both handsets feature Apple’s A8 chip, which we will likely have more details on later. For now, Apple is claiming a performance boost in both processing and graphics, with Metal-based games on the way soon to take advantage of that. It’s supposed to be fifty times faster than the first iPhone overall in terms of CPU power – we’d like to see a few tests against the incremental jump the iPhone 6 pair has over the 5S though.

Faster LTE, WiFi, the inclusion of a barometer and an M8 coprocessor will all be inside Apple’s new hardware but it’s the camera that may take the cake this time. The iPhone 6 will have a new 8MP iSight camera (1.5µ pixels, ƒ/2.2) with Focus Pixels, OIS and a crop of software features. Oh, and slow-motion video shooting – 240fps at 720p.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will both ship with iOS 8 installed, with pre-orders starting this Friday, 12 September overseas. It’ll be available in select countries from 19 September but sadly South Africa isn’t one of them. We’ll have local details as they arrive.

We’ll have more details on Apple’s new smartphones at a later stage, including comparisons to the current crop of Android superphones and a more extensive list of upcoming features, once the dust settles.