The transition of an Android user into an Apple user continues in Part 3, much like the protagonist from District 9 turning into a fookin’ prawn. In the earlier instalments, I cribbed about gridlocked icons and praised the understated notifications. There has been a two week break between the previous instalment and this piece because the iPhone 6 Plus was taken on a vacation – for scientific purposes, of course.
The inference is simply this – the iPhone 6 Plus is the ultimate travel phone. Nothing else comes remotely close in comparison.
An Extraordinary Camera
I’ve finally accepted why Apple’s phones are priced way higher than Android phones. They spare no expense in giving you the best smartphone camera on the planet.
I generally always carry my DSLR around during vacations and it’s constantly in use. But with an iPhone 6 Plus in my hands, I found myself using the DSLR less every single day because the iPhone takes truly incredible photos.
It’s cumbersome to carry a bulky SLR for basic day-time photos, and the iPhone 6 Plus is well and truly the replacement. I went to a sunny beach and the iPhone camera captured it gloriously.
The best part is that the camera app opens in a flash right from the lock screen – this is especially terrible in most Android phones.
Notice the blue colour of the water? No filters were added – that’s exactly how the water was and the iPhone camera captured it in its entirety.
Even against the sun the iPhone camera did well. This is when most cameras crash and burn the images.
The only place the iPhone camera struggled was during low lighting but it still gave the best low light photos I’ve ever taken with a cell phone.
There’s some buzz about the LG G4 taking better low light photos than the iPhone 6 Plus due to its manual controls, but I’m prepared to take that with a grain of salt.
Moreover, if the iPhone gives such decent photos with just point and shoot mode, I’d gladly choose this over wasting time tinkering with manual controls while the clickable moment is in danger of passing.
The only thing that’s more stunning than image capture is the video capture through an iPhone 6 Plus. The footage has movie quality to it and the optical image stabilisation does wonders when you pan the camera. You could buy some aftermarket lenses for your iPhone and shoot your own motion picture.
The timelapse and slow mo modes are cool features. I used the former to record glorious sunsets and the latter to splash waves in the sea. The results were thrilling.
It’s a bummer that slow mo, timelapse and regular video recording all suck in low lighting. Perhaps Apple will fix that in the 6s, and if they do that I’ll definitely be upgrading on day one.
An Extraordinary Battery Life
The single most frustrating thing while traveling is the constant hunt for a charging port. The iPhone 6 Plus eliminates this headache with its colossal battery life and standby time. When I’m traveling abroad I put the phone on airplane mode and it lasts for three days on a single charge, even when I’m clicking pictures all day.
When I turn off airplane mode to use Google maps and GPS, it still lasts one full day no matter how much I use it. What’s more, if you charge the phone with the iPad charger the battery charges up to 100% within an hour. Gone is the irritation of carrying bulky power banks. Apple is smart to use a 1080p screen instead of ridiculous battery hogging 4k and 8k screens on their phones.
The SD Card Tyranny
There are a couple of drawbacks though. First, there’s no SD card slot on the iPhone so if you’re being trigger happy and clicking photos everywhere, you’ll burn out of storage space on your phone soon unless you have a 64GB iPhone.
Coming from Android, where an SD card slot was a no-brainer, this could be frustrating for those who want all their music and photos on their phone. Samsung too has eliminated the SD card slot on their flagship, so the future is a bit worrying, unless phone manufacturers make 64GB the basic storage.
Transferring Photos is Restrictive
If you want to transfer photos from your iPhone to the computer it’s easy when you have a Mac – just plug it in and the Photos app syncs everything. But if you have a Windows PC, you’ll have to sell your soul to the devil to get things functioning.
There also isn’t any good standardised app that transfers photos quickly from your iPhone to other phones – you’re forced to use Whatsapp or Drive to share pics which is cumbersome and unintuitive.
Read the first part here.
Read Part 2 of Android Vs iOS here.
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