Using an iPhone 6s in 2017

george ward
Aug 25, 2017 · 7 min read

The iPhone 6s was Apple’s flagship in 2015 — it had an incredibly similar design to its predecessor, the iPhone 6, bar a few differences — most notably a new colour, dubbed “Rose Gold”, and a new “S” logo beneath the branding on the back of the device, and a new strengthened chassis to avoid another round of “Bendgate”.

Inside, however, there were masses of changes — including the revolutionary new multi touch system, “3D Touch”, a 12 megapixel rear camera with 4K recording at 30 FPS, a new 5 megapixel front facing camera with Apple’s all new “Retina Flash” and another mind blowingly fast in-house Apple A9 chip with 2GB of RAM.

In this brief review, I will be going over the physical device, and the operating system, which is iOS 10.3.3 as of writing.

Hardware

My 64gb 6s purchased around the 18th of July 2016, and I’ve had the device around a year and one month and it’s held up pretty well. It has a lot of cosmetic damage — the display has cracked in the bottom left and the rear paint has chipped off.

The display was cracked after it fell from a pocket on a sports bag, but honestly, I have seen far worse off screens than mine. I keep it covered with a tempered glass screen protector which is well worth the £9 it is.

My 6s was cracked as it fell out of a pocket from my sports bag.
The paint coat has chipped a lot, a lot less at the top of the device.

The back of the phone, is a different story — I’m not sure whether the chips are due to crud and dirt getting behind cases, or its corrosion — some users on the Apple discussion boards have the same issue as me but mine is to a far lesser extent.

To keep my 6s protected but to also make my phone last a day and a bit longer, I use the official 6s Smart Battery Case. Costing £99, it’s a bit pricey for it’s small battery capacity (1877 mAh — a bit larger than the 6s battery) but for the price, you get a Lightning charger, removing the need to think about Micro-USB, and you get a cut out for only Apple EarPods and you get a lovely little widget for your case (iOS 9+). In regards to the battery, Apple released a replacement program for “Unexpected Shutdown Issues” which has plagued devices manufactured around Sept-Oct 2015 and obviously, my device wasn’t included. The battery itself has held up well — I get decent battery life without the case (5/6 hours SoT, 8 hours standby) but sometimes it randomly dies when it’s cold, but that can be expected.

The batteries widget for iOS 10 — your Watch battery, and any connected speakers will have their battery level displayed here. Would be lovely to have iCloud devices battery percentages displayed here too.

Software

My device originally came with iOS 9 and whilst that was good, stable and fast, iOS 10 included the biggest UI overhaul since iOS 7, and it really expanded on the use of 3D Touch and sped up the system overall. 3D Touch was one of the 6s’ flagship features, and before iOS 10, it was really just used for seeing app shortcuts from the home screen, peeking and popping into different websites and message threads. iOS 10 gave it a far more extensive feature set and most importantly a reason to use it, and by incorporating it into every day tasks, it forces users to adopt it. One way Apple have managed to do this is redesigning notifications on the lock screen. By 3D Touching an iMessage notification, a redesigned reply view is revealed — far more attractive than iOS 8/9’s design.

iOS 10’s new lock screen reply feature

I won’t be going over every single new change in iOS 10 (it’s almost a year old), but some of the biggest changes that I enjoyed were the changes to Control Centre, Music and the “new” Lock Screen.

Music had a massive redesign from it’s aged old look from the days of iOS 8.4, into something brand new and bubbly and good looking. People will always hate or love the Music app (as with Maps), but I think it’s a well deserved change and well thought out — it makes the UI much larger but at the same time it feels more youthful and nicer on the eyes, and it matches the way things are going with iOS 11 — brand new, bubbly and large.

iOS 10’s new Now Playing screen

The Now Playing screen received a new redesign and it is based on a card UI, which bounces around when it’s moved, and the album art increases it’s size when a track is played, and then gets smaller when it’s paused.

Album pages have also changed in iOS 10

Throughout the new Music app there have been significant changes and the whole UI overall looks much cleaner and modern. A nice change, and it places more emphasis on similar items, such more albums from The xx.

In iOS 10 the “For You” section has also seen a revamp and iOS 10 places a lot of emphasis on music discovery, and it’s curated playlists, which are actually very good. These adapt and change to music which you either “Love” or “Dislike”, which has been present since iOS 8. I use Spotify and Apple Music and I can say whilst I enjoy Spotify’s “Your Songs of 2017” and so on, these curated playlists are far superior. Unfortunately, Apple has removed the ability of being able to Love tracks from the Lock Screen or the Control Centre.

iOS 10’s “For You” page

iOS 10 also received a new widgets page on the Lock Screen and Home Screen, which, for me, is my most under utilised feature from iOS 10 as I just forget it’s there, or I only use it for application shortcuts.

Widgets

Since the release of iOS 10, it’s had a lot of support from third party developers including Google, Snapchat and more, they have become remarkably more helpful and useful. Quoting Apple, “widgets show you useful information from apps”, and also these widgets can be accessed from the Home Screen with devices that have 3D Touch. Some widgets are more useful than others, and Snapchat’s widget is a highlight for how widgets can be utilised for ease of access due to it’s placement of the users “best friends”, allowing quicker contact.

Snapchat’s new widget

Control Centre too received a well deserved update, and this is another example of one of those “either you love it, or you hate it”. For me, I like it, but I have some annoyances with it (that don’t really matter as it’s changing again in iOS 11).

On the most part I like it. You will see that the media controls have been removed, but in fact, they are just on a separate page now. I like this change as it means there is now space for the album art and overall, it just flows nicer. Some do say that it just adds an extra step into turning down the music, or changing a track but, in reality, it’s only a short few seconds it adds. One thing that bugs me is that Night Shift has a whole section devoted to it — most people who use Night Shift leave it on a schedule and don’t worry about it — and if they needed to change a setting I’m sure they wouldn’t mind going to Settings to do so. There are now 3D Touch interactions within the 4 icons on the bottom row: torch has light settings, clock now has preset timer shortcuts, calculator has.. “Copy last result” and camera has the usual take a selfie, slo mo, etc. It would be a nice addition if we got the same 3D Touch shortcut treatment for WiFi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb but that will be coming in iOS 11 anyway.

Conclusion

The iPhone 6s is a remarkable piece of hardware, beautifully designed inside and out, and despite the wear and tear and the cracked display, my 6s is still one of the best phones I’ve ever had. It’s look is timeless and iconic, and Rose Gold is a lovely colour (although I won’t be getting that next time). iOS 10 on the 6s is brilliant. It’s fast, fluid, and it looks great and it brings more and more use to 3D Touch. Despite iOS 7’s massive changes in 2013, iOS 10 is the biggest change since then and I like the way things are going with iOS 11, redesigning more and more apps. Despite the 7 and 7 Plus now being the flagship devices, with even more fantastic features, such as being water resistant, stereo speakers and the A10 chip, the 6s is still fast and can keep up. Even with iOS 11, (still in beta), it seems to do well.

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george ward

Written by

I’m 18 years old, about to study journalism, and aspiring to become a video game/tech journalist

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