iPhone 6 Plus

Apple posts two new iPhone 6 ads: “Cameras” and “Huge”

Apple has posted two new iPhone 6 ads to its YouTube channel. The commercials are titled "Cameras" and "Huge," and they highlight some of the benefits of the updated cameras and larger displays found on the recently-launched handsets.

The two videos are very much inline with the spots we saw during the iPhone 6 event, in that they feature voice overs done by celebrities Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon running down various new features of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Track your iPhone 6 and 6 Plus availability live via this stock-checking web app

From the same team that brought you the iPhone 5s stock-tracker app last year in the form of the Stock5S.com website comes a new web app which allows prospective iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus buyers to check availability information across 21 countries where the handsets are officially available for order or pre-order.

Found at iStockNow.com, the website covers as many as thirty-five retail spots, mostly in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France. The information is refreshed daily and additional shops and countries are coming soon.

iPhone 6 Plus has ‘top performing smartphone LCD,’ DisplayMate finds

It's official: the iPhone 6 Plus has raised the bar for LCD display performance up by a notch and earned itself the title of the Best Performing Smartphone LCD display “that we have ever tested”, as per a detailed display shootout conducted by DisplayMate Technologies, a professional video calibration equipment producer.

Note that the benchmark did not take into account OLED screens from Samsung, which use a different display technology from the Retina HD screen on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

In terms of the best overall smartphone display, which includes both LCD and OLED technologies, Samsung's Galaxy Note 4 with its Super AMOLED display still comes on top, leaving the iPhone 6 Plus with the “Best Performing Smartphone LCD display” designation.

The iPhone 6 also has “a very good display” which is somewhat held back by its lower resolution and pixel count compared to the iPhone 6 Plus.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smoke competition in benchmarks

The new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus powered by the Apple-designed A8 processor leave the vast majority of Android competition in the dust in terms of CPU performance and battery life, according to a series of performance benchmarks conducted by the reputable hardware review website AnandTech.

The website's founder Anand Lal Shimpi recently joined Apple for an undisclosed role.

Speaking of the handsets' graphics performance, the site has found the iPhone 6 Plus performing a hair slower versus the iPhone 5s due to the increased screen resolution. It's also approximately fifteen percent slower in GPU performance than the Nvidia Shield-based tablets. Despite this minor setback, performance gains across the board translate into “a pretty solid lead over the competition for the iPhone 6/A8,” wrote the site.

According to Apple, the A8 processor has two billion transistors, twice as much as the previous A7 chip. The piece of silicon incorporates twenty percent faster CPU and a cool fifty percent faster graphics while enabling up to 50 percent more energy efficiency than its A7 counterpart, as per Apple's official numbers.

Apple announces record-smashing ten million iPhone 6/Plus opening weekend sales

After announcing record pre-orders for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus topping four million units in the first 24 hours, the Cupertino firm on Monday said it sold ten million units of both the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 during the opening weekend, including the four million units sold in the first 24 hours of preorder sales.

The figure breaks the previous record of nine million units in the first three days of availability held by the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c last year (the iPhone 5 sold five million unit during its opening weekend).

It must be noted that the iPhone 5s was not available for pre-order. On the other hand, unlike last year's iPhone launch, this time around the iPhone 6 has not launched immediately in China, Apple's second-largest market by revenue.

The new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were announced on September 9 and Apple started accepting pre-orders on Friday, September 12. This past Friday, September 19, the handset hit Apple and carrier stores across the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Video shows side by side speed comparison of all 10 iPhone models

YouTube channel EverythingApplePro posted an interesting video this weekend, showing multiple side by side speed comparison tests of all 10 iPhone models. This includes the iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 5s, iPhone 5c, iPhone 5, iPhone 4s, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3G and the original iPhone.

The clip, which is about 4 minutes long, shows a wide range of speed tests such as shutdown, startup, webpage loading, and even a GeekBench benchmark test. For the most part everything works out like you'd expect, with the newer devices outpacing their predecessors, but there are a few surprises.

Apple logo wallpapers for iPhone 6

With new phone upgrades and additional screen sizes comes the struggle to find newly created wallpapers to grace our screens. While the iPhone 6 Plus is 1080 x 1920, standard HD resolution, the parallax effect will add additional pixels to any true iPhone 6/Plus wallpaper image.

My goal with the Wallpapers of the Week section is to bring iOS wallpapers to you on a weekly basis. More importantly, when new devices are launched, we try to have wallpapers at-the-ready. This week is our first posting since the iPhone 6 launched on Friday. With this post, you will find parallax-ready images for iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6, and we still included the iPhone 5s.

Photographer tests iPhone 6/Plus cameras, Focus Pixels, Exposure Control, OIS and more

As Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus hit store shelves in the United States and a few major markets around the world, first hands-on videos are appearing online (and let's not forget about torture tests, too).

Teaming up with The Verge, professional photographer Austin Mann put the handsets' enhanced cameras through the paces on beautiful locations in Iceland.

He took a series of photographs and videos that do an excellent job showing off improvements such as the new Focus Pixels, manual Exposure Control, higher-resolution Panorama photography, Slo-Mo video enhancements and Optical Image Stabilization.

The results are quite impressive: the more accurate sensor, Apple's enhanced signal image processor inside the A8 chip and iOS 8's software improvements enable noticeably sharper images, despite the same eight-megapixel camera resolution.

What you can do with your iPhone’s plastic screen protector

So you just got your iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus. Or, perhaps you're waiting for it to arrive via the mail. Whatever the case may be, you just got (or are getting) a new device, and you're thrilled.

Now, the question that all of us have to ponder at some time during the day: What do I do with the plastic screen protector that wraps around my iPhone?

If you're like most people, the answer to this question is simple: Remove it as fast as humanely possible, and let your hands enjoy the build quality and curves of Jony Ive's latest creation.

But for me, and no doubt, others, the answer to that question is a tad more complex. Sometimes I find myself removing the plastic, yet at other times, I like to keep it on my device. It is free, after all...

First iPhone 6 drop-test videos surface

As Apple Stores around the world opened this morning to the legions of fans and early adopters eager to get their hands on the company's new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets, enthusiasts have already recorded first drop-test videos that provide non-scientific evidence as to whether the new phones are more easily damaged versus the previous models. I've included a nice drop-test video by YouTube users PhoneBuff who was among the first customers at Apple's retail store in Australia.

I've also put in another clip of a brand spanking new iPhone 6 slipping out of its packaging and slamming onto the concrete — as the cameras were rolling — much to the horror of its proud owner.

New App Store section highlights apps updated for iPhone 6

You may have noticed over the past 24 hours that a new section has appeared in the App Store entitled "Apps & Games for iPhone 6." As you'd expect, the section is meant to highlight apps and games that have been updated for the larger displays on the two new iPhones.

There are likely thousands of apps that are compatible with the handsets, with many more to come. Apple rounded up about 65 of them, and we thought we'd share 10 of our favorites, so you know what apps we'll be downloading when we get our new iPhones tomorrow.