Wesley's Tool-Box

It's already well known that iPhone's camera's quality usually ranks among the best in smartphones. iPhone 5S was no exception, so I wanted to see how iPhone 6 Plus could improve upon that. Naturally, I did a side-by-side photo shoot with the two phones for a few days and this is the result. All the photos here are cropped from the original resolution.

In the daytime shootings, the two performs more or less similarly at a casual glance. As you can see above, the details of the photos are very good and nearly identical to each other. I think it's a testament to how good the iPhone 5S already was.


That is not to say that iPhone 6 Plus hadn't had any improvements to introduce. As you can see in this photo, the details of the leaves receiving the sunshine are preserved better with the iPhone 6 Plus. Result from iPhone 5S looks more washed out despite having a slightly faster shutter speed. This shows that the dynamic range of the sensor has been enhanced. This is a good news if you don't want the somewhat unnatural look the HDR mode produces.

iPhones and iPads have generally gotten big boost in speed with every new generation thanks to the enhancements in their processing units. But with iPhone 6 series, Apple decided to temper the pace. Instead of something like 2x boost, the CPU was to be up to 25% faster and GPU, 50%. This should just cover the boost in resolution, so I suppose Apple felt that the iPhone 5S was already fast enough in terms of user experience.

Indeed, with both iPhone 5S and 6 Plus running iOS 8.0 (and recently, 8.0.2), the general "feeling" of the speed was nearly the same, both mostly quick. It was just that iPhone 6 Plus happened to display the contents on a larger screen. Also, the amount of RAM staying at 1GB didn't have any noticeable impacts. On both phones, apps do run fine, although running RAM-heavy processes (notably Camera and Safari) tends to gracefully quit the other app in the background. The stopped app restarts quick enough when switched back.


To gauge some solid numbers, though, I did run through the usual batches of tests. All tests were run with iOS 8.0.2 and with same installed apps and settings.

First off, the boot time was measured. This is from when the screen turns on with the Apple logo to when the lock screen is loaded. iPhone 5S clocked in at 38.0 seconds, while iPhone 6 Plus was a bit faster at 30.6 seconds. The 5S got a bit slower than with iOS 7 installed.

I've been doing a comparison test of battery life between iPhone 6 Plus and iPhone 5S for a few days. While that was happening, a bit of brouhaha over how iPhone 6 and 6 Plus supposedly bends in your pocket had been circulating the internet. It turned out that the whole thing was overblown as I suspected, and I already pointed out that it was okay to put it in the front pockets in general even before this so-called "bendgate / bendghazi" rolled in.

In any case, my belt cases work quite well. I try to use both phones identically when doing battery life comparison, so I have to have them carried around as close to me as possible. So I had my iPhone 5S strapped to my left side, while the 6 Plus took up my right side as you can see here. No worries about bending, and easy to get it out quickly, too. In normal times, I simply have one less iPhone on my waist.


As for the charging comparison side of things, Apple decided to save a bit of money on the charger. Although iPhone 6 Plus has nearly twice the battery charge as the previous models, it still ships with the same 5W charger. This is similar to how iPad mini ships with a 5W one instead of a 10W or 12W one like the "normal" iPads.

It's disappointing that Apple opted to do this, but maybe it isn't all that bad. The only way to find out is through testing. In order to see how much of an impact a lower-powered charger would cause, I prepared both 5W and 10W Apple-branded chargers for the tests.

LTE frequencies tend to be quite varied because it has to be either laid alongside or replace the existing 2G and 3G networks. Even so, Apple tries to support as much frequencies as possible because it will reduce the number of region-specific models. Unfortunately, iPhone 5S and 5C each sprawled to five different models, so people asked around whether their iPhones would work on another country's LTE network. I even wrote about iPhone 5S's LTE network compatibility last year, and it has the longest comment thread in this website.

This time around, though, the number of models were reduced to a much more manageable two for both iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The massive 20-band support did the trick. The good news here is that, if you bought an unlocked iPhone 6 or 6 Plus anywhere in the world and come to Korea, the LTE will work with all three local carriers. Korea should get A1586 / A1524 models on sale in a couple of months, but A1549 / A1522 models often found in United States or Canada should work, too.

After I brought the A1524 iPhone 6 Plus from Japan to Korea, I put the SIM card from my 5S and turned it on. The device had no problems connecting to SK Telecom's LTE network right away. I've confirmed that the situation is the same when you're on KT's network, as well. It seems that the network no longer goes into 3G mode when it sees an unrecognized LTE device, which used to be the case when I brought the iPhone 5S from United States last year.


Meanwhile, the top speed for LTE data on iPhone 6 series was pushed to 150Mbps from 100Mbps of 5/5C/5S. The bleeding edge phones in Korea are always a step ahead - 150Mbps was possible when iPhone 5 came out and the recent models can do 225Mbps - but with low monthly data caps, they are little more than technology show-off right now.

In any case, I wanted to see how fast the iPhone 6 Plus can do LTE data in real life, so I ran a speed test app. As you can see here, it can go almost up to 100Mbps. Pretty good, but that's how fast an iPhone 5S could supposedly do, as well. Obviously, a side-by-side test was needed.

The biggest change in the iPhone 6 series is undoubtedly the physical size, and it is of interest to most of the people who are considering a purchase. I had the chance to compare an iPhone 5 with both an iPhone 6 and 6 Plus at an Apple Store and took this picture to give those of you who are upgrading within 2 years some ideas of scale.

Although the 4.7" iPhone 6 is certainly bigger than the 4.0" iPhone 5, it is not considerably so. When I held both in my hands, the 6 felt like a 5 with a case that's a bit thick around the sides. Because the 6 is also thinner (0.7mm) while adding only a slight bit of weight (17g), it doesn't feel too big or heavy, either. If you want to largely retain the portability that iPhone series provided, iPhone 6 carries on the theme somewhat okay.

As for the 5.5" iPhone 6 Plus, it feels like an another class of device, rather than being an iPhone. Observe the following picture.


iPhone 4S represents the general size of all the old iPhones going back to the 1st generation. iPhone 5S represents all the 5 series (5, 5C, 5S). These two classes of iPhones are not really all that different in dimensions. However, the iPhone 6 Plus is substantially large enough that it's something that's occupying a class between the old iPhones and the iPad mini. iPhone 6 Plus is to iPad mini what iPad mini is to iPad.