Let’s start with the facts.
There is explosive demand for bigger smartphones. A 4-inch smartphone feels small now; somewhere around 5 inches is the new normal. Yet too many large-screen phones are cumbersome, awkward, and often just plain bad. And Apple has a long history of taking good ideas with obviously huge markets and being the first manufacturer to really nail the execution.
Add those three things together, and this phone on my desk isn’t at all surprising. It’s the iPhone 6: a bigger, brighter, badder iPhone designed to appeal to the customers for whom the iPhone 5S and its 4-inch screen now seem adorably antiquated.(Which is basically everybody.) It starts at$199 on a two-year contract and comes in silver, gold, and space gray. It’s full of new technology and crafted from a new mold. Apple intends for it to be the new standard in a new type of smartphone, to be the big-screen phone that anyone can handle. Not the first big phone, but the best. The big phone for everyone.
Of course, Samsung, HTC, and others have been making big phones too, and they have years of iteration and millions of sales to show for it. This is Cupertino’s steepest climb yet: can it leapfrog the entrenched competition and prove that Apple can do better?
The whole time I’ve had the iPhone 6, I’ve been playing a game. I hand the phone to someone, and guess what phone they use based on their immediate reaction. iPhone users are always shocked by the sheer size of the 6; they all think it must be the 6 Plus. Android users, on the other hand, are unfazed. "This looks just like my phone, " they all say.
They’re not wrong. 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-the-top-and-bottom approach for 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 makes 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 and 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 farthest corners of the screen.