24 Hours with the iPhone 6s Plus

I have now been officially using my new iPhone for 24 hours. I spent a lot of time peeking, poking and otherwise kicking the tires. Here are some initial thoughts:

6s vs. 6s Plus

There was much gnashing of teeth last year over whether to get the big one or the small one. I too was flummoxed. Never have I had so much trouble deciding between two products. Initially I bought the big one and then I traded it in for the little one. When the iBooks Store began supporting my iBooks Author books on the phone, I bought a used 6 Plus so I could test and make sure the books looked okay on it. I had intended to sell the used phone back but in the meantime my wife fell in love with my iPhone 6 and I found myself with little choice but to keep the 6 Plus. So last year I ended up spending eight months with the small phone and four months with the big phone. After all that time, I realize that there really isn’t that much difference. With the bigger phone, it’s a little more difficult to carry in your pocket and with the little phone you get slightly less battery life and the text is smaller. This time I didn’t sweat it. I just ordered the big one.

Buying Options

The new variable in the mix this year is exactly how you buy the new phone. Carriers are no longer interested in contracts and there are several options for purchase from a variety of sources. I’ve been happy with my service from AT&T throughout my iPhone ownership but at the same time I’m not all that eager to get in long-term relationships with them. So I decided to buy it from Apple. In that case I had two options: either buy it outright or buy it on on the Apple upgrade plan. Since the upgrade plan price was the same (I was going to add AppleCare plus regardless) I ended up on the Apple upgrade plan. This gives me the option to upgrade it next year if I want, although I probably won’t. (In my family I hand down the phone every year to one of my daughters.) So I bought a space gray 6s Plus with 128 GB. The storage size may raise some eyebrows but I put a lot of media, photos, and video on my phone and (in my mind at least) it’s cheaper to pay an extra hundred dollars to avoid screwing with storage allocation for the next year.

3D Touch

I’ve heard from several sources that Apple spent years perfecting this feature before adding it to the phone. That shows. It was remarkable to me how quickly peeking and poking became second nature. Using 3D Touch in mail seemed like a gimmick until I tried it. Now it is a “thing” for me. If I see a mail in my inbox and I’m not sure what it is, I peek at it. An interesting feature is the ability to apply the swipe gestures while peeking at an email. It depends on your settings but for me swiping to the left deletes the email and swiping to the right allows me to move it to a different mailbox.

3D touching app icons to get immediate access to specific features and makes performing common tasks in your favorite apps easier than ever. It’s the most significant addition to spring board since the arrival of folders. I’ve now put my camera back on my home screen because it’s so easy to hard press on it and then select whether I’m shooting a movie, selfie, or traditional photo. It’s definitely faster than opening the app and swiping around to the appropriate camera.

One more example of 3D touch that still make me giggle like a school-boy is on the iPhone keyboard. If you press it hard and start moving your finger around, it moves the cursor as if you are on a trackpad. Press just a little bit harder and begin selecting text. Do this once and you will never be able to go back to the old way of selecting text. (It’s going to kill me that I don’t have this on my iPad.)

Live Photos

Live photos are strange feature. I’ve taken a bunch of live photos at this point and while they are fun, I wonder if they are a novelty. I do, however, like the idea of looking back at some of these pictures in a few years to catch just a few seconds of my daughters being silly while I took their picture and wish I had something like this of them when they were younger. An interesting notes is that you can send live photos to other iPhones (I tested it with my daughters 5s) and they display with a long tap.

The implementation is a little spotty. When viewing a live photo with a hard press, the screen goes blurry and then start showing the video. The delay and blur feel pretty odd. Likewise, the quality of the images in the video are not particularly good. I found it hard to keep things in focus even while resting the phone on a stable surface while taking the live photo.

My wife, who is not a nerd, loves live photos and has been using it nonstop since she got her phone. I think it is her big thing with the new phone. That makes me wonder that maybe I’m reading this wrong and non-nerds will really embrace live photos. If they do, I hope they are doing so on something bigger than the 16 GB entry-level iPhones.

Touch ID

I’m more impressed than I expected to be with the new Touch ID speed. It is so fast that I barely see the lock screen. When I wanted to test a live photo as my lock screen wallpaper, I couldn’t get to the lock screen because Touch ID was unlocking the phone so quickly. Instead I had to use the sleep-wake button on the side.

The New Camera

Every year the iPhone camera gets iteratively better. With the big move from 8 to 12 megapixels this year, I feel a lot more comfortable taking wide shots with the knowledge that I can zoom in on them later without losing too much image integrity. The camera quality of the iPhone 6 was pretty good to begin with. Taking pictures outdoors with good light, I couldn’t see much difference between the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6s. In low light however, the difference was noticeable. While the iPhone still is not going to replace your SLR or mirrorless camera, as a carry around camera, it’s pretty amazing. The below gallery shows some images I took last night at Disneyland with the new camera and some comparison shots with the iPhone 6 Plus camera. All images are not edited.

Comparison of the new front facing “selfie” camera isn’t fair. The new camera is far superior with the 5 megapixel sensor. The screen-as-flash feature really works and doesn’t make you look blown out.

I did some tests for the amount of time it takes to take a photograph. I saw no noticeable difference between the 6 and 6s. However, the 3D Touch interface does let me get to the appropriate camera much faster than the old iPhone did.

Speed

Between the RAM (iPhone now has 2 gigabytes of RAM) and the A9 processor upgrades, the iPhone 6s is a screamer. I’ve only began to scratch the surface on this but I can already see that jumping through multiple tabs in Safari, downloading and updating a large OmniFocus database, and making alterations to photos are all noticeably snappier on the new phone.

The most interesting story about the performance improvements for me is not what I can do today but what will happen tomorrow. With mobile devices approaching “desktop class” processing speeds, how much more awesome can app developers make the mobile devices. The powerful apps demonstrated by Adobe and Microsoft at the Apple event are just the tip of the iceberg. I expect in a couple years we are going to have a lot more “power” mobile apps available to us.

There still are a lot of questions about how developers can create that market in the current “race to the bottom” pricing wars but there is no question the hardware and evolving touch interface can support a more advanced class of software. I can’t wait to see how this turns out.

Upgrade?

One of my daughters is currently rocking her iPhone 5S and doing just fine with it. Nevertheless, every year the iPhone evolves and gets a little better. This year’s iteration feels like it has evolved a bit more than iPhones in the past. If your current iPhone does not support 3D Touch, you’re missing out. That doesn’t mean you have to upgrade though. Using a three-year-old iPhone is perfectly adequate and fully supported by the current iOS 9 software. All that said, with their own upgrade plan, Apple has made it easier than ever to get into the new iPhone and I expect a lot of people will be doing just that.

Force Touch on the iPhone

I have not said much about a force touch for iPhone. However, recent news leaks make it seem inevitable. It looks very much like the next iPhone will have a force touch screen. I enjoyed this 9 to 5 Mac coverage about force touch on the iPhone a few days ago. All of this got me thinking about exactly how big a deal force touch will be on the iPhone.

At the beginning, at least, I expect it won’t be much of a deal at all. The feature will only be available on the newest iPhones so developers will know a majority of their users won’t even have force touch. Moreover, by its very nature, force touch feels like a feature for power users are much more than for everyday users. I even see this with my wife and her Apple Watch. Rarely does she think of using a force touch the screen when she’s trying to figure out how to make a feature work.

I think it will be the same on the iPhone, only more so. People are used to seeing icons that are tied to functions in their applications. Force touch features are hidden behind a hard press on the screen and a lot of people will never think about force touching when looking for a missing feature. I think application developers that start burying key features behind force touch will do so at their own peril.

Instead, I think for the first few years force touch is going to be very much a power user feature. It will let you do things faster but I think rarely will it allow you to do exclusive things that can’t be accomplished some other way. The example in the 9 to 5 Mac article about how force touching an application icon brings it to a particular screen is a perfect example of this. Alternatively, you could manually open the application and manually navigate to the screen but being able to do both of those steps with one force touch will be much nicer. It will be an improvement on the experience for those people who want to invest the time to figure it out and set their applications accordingly. That’s not everyone by a long stretch.

Maybe in a few years when this interface function is available on all iPhones it will become a bigger deal but my expectation is that initially us nerds will love force touch and a lot of other people won’t even realize it exists.

The iPhone Extension Trick

Have you got any contacts that have extensions in their phone numbers? If you do, you’ll know that adding extension information to your contacts can give your iPhone fits when placing calls. There is, however a trick.

When creating a contact, instead of this:

Jenny
866-5309 x1982

Do this:

Jenny
866-5309;1982

The semicolon is secret code to your iPhone to wait once the call connects and gives you the option to dial the extension when you tap it at the bottom of the screen.

I use this for telephone extensions and also for my conference call dial-ins—that seem to always have ridiculously long conference ID numbers.

Alternatively you can use commas to have the phone delay slightly and enter a digit for you. For instance, if you frequently have to call your cable company to reset your cable box and you know the tone sequence to make that happen, you could have a phone number like this.

Cable Box Reset
555-1212,3,5,2,3

Assuming you got the numbers in the right order, that sequence would actually penetrate the bureaucracy and reset your cable box.

You can set the commas and semicolons in the Contacts app on your Mac, which is obvious. Not so obvious is the fact that you can add commas and semicolons on your phone too. To do so, press the symbol button on the dialer and then “pause” for a comma or “wait” for a semicolon.

Clever.

Yuvi Likes his iPhone 6 Plus

I particularly like the “simulated” photo of him using it on the toilet.

People have asked me whether I miss my iPhone 6 Plus. I do. Especially when trying to read or write long documents. I don’t find I miss it for web browsing. The 6 is big enough for that. I also don’t miss it when using it one-handed, which I can more or less do with the 6. Does this mean I’m settled on the 4.7″ size when next year rolls around? Nope. I’ve got no clue how big my next phone will be.

∞

iPhone 5s Initial Impressions

At this point my entire family of four has iPhones. The downside is I’ve got a monthly bill that reflects four iPhones. (The family share plan actually make sense for me.) The upside is there is always an upgrade available and dad always get the upgrade. So yesterday I received a nice package from China and last night the entire family and I went to the AT&T store for the annual Sparks iPhone shuffle. Having used the new iPhone 5S for less than a day, here are my initial impressions.

The Model

I went with the white 64 GB model. My iPhone 5 was black and it shows a lot of wear and tear around the edges. With white and silver I was hoping to avoid that (although it sounds like they’ve made alterations to the black model to solve this problem). Nevertheless, it’s fun having a phone with a different color for a change. One downside about the white iPhone is that when the phone is off, you see the screen whereas on the black phone it melts into the front black panel. There’s also a bit of a black line around the edges when you have it on with a light colored screen. None of these are deal breakers for me and I’ve got no regrets with the white phone.

Touch ID

Just like all of the big reviews say, this works as advertised. I very quickly adapted to unlocking by pressing my finger on the home button and holding it there just a moment longer. It reliably unlocks and takes me to the home screen with no troubles. I’ve trained three fingers on it and it’s working great on all of them. We’ve been passing the phone around the house and no one else can unlock it.

An added benefit of this extremely easy security is that you can bump up your passcode to something better than just a four digit unlock code. Since I’ll be using it so infrequently, I turned off Simple Passcode and instead am using an eight digit number. In case you didn’t know, if you create a complex passcode with just digits, the iPhone will still give you the number screen to type in your passcode.I understand this is not as complex of a passcode as one with letters and numbers but with eight digits I think I’ll be okay.

Another unexpected benefit of the touch ID system is that I don’t need to swipe the phone to unlock. If I do swipe out of habit, the phone will still take my thumb to unlock at the passcode screen.

Touch ID also works great with purchases in iTunes. I can’t wait for Apple to expand this a little bit further. For instance I’d love it if 1Password could send a call to the system to verify my identification through my thumb to unlock its database. This wouldn’t require them to have access to my thumbprint or any of the underlying security but instead just be a simple question, “Is that David or not?”. The system could prompt me to press my thumb and report back to 1Password, “Yep. That’s him.” This could make banking and other applications with secure data much more convenient on the iPhone. In short, I’m already spoiled by touch ID.

The New Camera

The camera does take better lowlight pictures. For me this is the ultimate test of these pocket cameras. Can I go to a family event and take a picture indoors and not have it look like trash? Granted it’s nowhere near the indoor pictures I could take with a big boy camera with a fast lens, it is a noticeable improvement over the iPhone 5, which I already thought took pretty good pictures indoors. I played with the flash and adjusting the color of the flash does help pictures. However, the picture still look like they were taken with a flash and have the same creepy shadows.

Burst mode is awesome. I’m going to be using it all the time. It looks like it’s only keeping the best picture in my photostream. I want to go deeper to find out where the other pictures go. Hopefully, they just go to the trash unless I actively seek them out. I haven’t done anything exciting enough to test the slow motion camera.

64 Bits

Everything on this phone is noticeably faster. Even the time it takes to optimize my OmniFocus database is faster.

Overall I’m really digging the new iPhone. I’m looking forward to using it for the next year, at which point Apple will release something new and shiny again and our family will go back to the AT&T store for the annual iPhone shuffle.

Apple Bends, Slightly

Reports are coming out that Apple has softened its stance toward third party iPhone application developers. It has begun to approve video streaming applications (bet I’m not the only one waiting for Qik) and Macworld reports Apple is even letting applications with private API calls through (temporarily at least). While this is great news for developers, I suspect Apple’s laser focus on the user experience will prevent it from ever opening the floodgates like other mobile providers are doing. That is a good thing for those of us who like things to work. Still, it is nice they seem to be backing off some of their more jack-tastic moves of late with respect to the App Store. At this point they’ve had long enough to sort out the deluge. Let’s hope this is the first step.