GOOD SHOWING AGAINST BOTH RIVALS AND PREDECESSORS
You've read the press release by now. You've also probably spent months poring over the online rumor pages. Now that they've finally officially broken cover and appeared in the shops, you might have even spent time playing around with them, contemplating whether now is the time to buy. Yes, we are - of course - referring to the recently unveiled iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
Now, there are many things that will dictate whether you actually plump for that final purchase. It might be those stunning Retina HD displays that do it for you, or perhaps the convenient Apple Pay payments system. Alternatively, you might be in the market for a 'phablet' and reckon that the iPhone 6 Plus is exactly what you have been looking for.
For others, though, it's all about performance. Alas, this is an area in which some observers might have glanced over the specification sheet and decided that the latest additions to Apple's iconic iPhone line just aren't up to scratch.
THE iPHONE 6 HAS STRONG COMPETITION
Let's explain what we mean by that. Yes, on one hand, it might seem difficult to be disappointed by an "Apple-designed A8 chip with second generation 64-bit desktop-class architecture for blazing fast performance and power efficiency", to quote the Cupertino giant's press release.
But it's Android that continues to pose the stiffest challenge to the smartphone supremacy of iOS, and one can't deny that there are some mightily formidable Android-powered handsets around right now, the iPhone 6's most obvious rivals probably being the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8. Those opting for the latter get a Qualcomm MSM8974AC Snapdragon 801 chipset with a unique Quad-core 2.5 GHz Krait 400 processor, along with 2 GB of RAM.
The HTC One M8, meanwhile, gives you a very similar Qualcomm MSM8974AB Snapdragon 801 chipset with Quad-core 2.3 GHz. The GPU of both devices is average adreno 330, and the amount of RAM is the same, too. When you run the above specifications past the Dual-Core 1.4 GHz Cyclone ARM v8 based processor housed in an A8 chipset, you might quickly imagine that the iPhone 6 will trail its Android rivals.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS CAN BE MISLEADING
However, if the stories of the tortoise and the hare or David and Goliath have taught us anything, it's surely that even with all of the theoretical advantages that one could muster, it isn't necessarily a given that one will actually win. That's why, whenever we get a new iPhone release, plenty of performance tests inevitably surface on YouTube, checking how the new device really does compare to both its competition and the iPhones that preceded it.
PhoneBuff was among those to step up to the challenge, devising a multi-tasking obstacle course for the three phones that necessitated them jumping from one app to another as quickly as possible. First of all, the various handsets were resetted and connected to the same Wi-Fi network, so that none of them enjoyed an unfair advantage as far as Internet speeds were concerned. Then, it was simply a case of starting the stopwatch and running through the likes of the camera, games and Google search apps on each device, the same pages and apps being loaded repeatedly.
As you might expect, it didn't take any of the smartphones too long to run all of the apps before returning back home - 2 minutes and 58 seconds in the case of the Samsung Galaxy S5, although that didn't stop it being easily beaten by the 2 minutes and 9 seconds of the FITC One M8. Winning the race, however, was the true 'tortoise' or David in this equation, the iPhone 6, in a hugely impressive 1 minute 55 seconds.
GEEKBENCH TESTS ALSO SHOW HOW GOOD THE iPHONE 6 IS
The iPhone 6 beating the Samsung Galaxy S5 has to be considered a shock result. However, the PhoneBuff speed test is far from the only one that has been conducted lately to show that Cupertino's latest means business. There have already been many tests carried out using the Geekbench software, which is a cross-platform processor benchmark that in its latest iteration, features a scoring system separating single core and multi-core performance.
In short, Geekbench is the widely trusted way of determining whether a given computing device truly delivers the speeds that it needs to. Even ahead of the iPhone 6's official unveiling on September 9, a Weibo user by the name of zzray revealed that they had conducted a test on an apparently working iPhone 6 with Geekbench 3. On the singlecore and multi-core tests respectively, the new device managed 1633 and 2920, a definite improvement on the iPhone 5s's 1305 and 2347 scores from its 1.3 GHz A7 chip.
But if you're wondering how the new iPhone compares to your current version of Apple's iconic device, don't worry, because the YouTube user Adrianisen conducted just such a test, lining up the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus with the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't a drastic difference in how the two new phones performed, with the standard 6's single-core and multi-core scores of 1620 and 2912 comparing to the 1630 and 2925 mustered by its bigger brother.
All of those scores represented a significant improvement, however, on the 1417 and 2550 delivered by the 5s, and an even more drastic one on the 721 and 1302 scores of the 5. All of these devices were, of course, installed with iOS 8.0.2 for the purposes of fair comparison. Adriansen also conducted a bootup speed test on these four devices, which illustrated just how much quicker the iPhone 6 started up than the iPhone 5.
BATTERY AND LTE TESTING, TOO
Various other tests have emerged scrutinizing aspects of the new iPhones - more than welcome, given that how many seconds it takes to load a complement of apps is hardly the only performance parameter that will determine your next choice of smartphone. One such test looked at the battery life of the handsets, comparing them to older iOS devices as well as the Nexus 5, just for good measure.
The test worked by playing a full episode of a HD TV show on the devices simultaneously and recording the remaining battery percentage, before running another episode - in each case, the same episode on each device. It was found that after the first episode, it was indeed the latest iPhones that retained the greatest proportion of battery life, at 92%, which only dropped to 82% even after the second running.
In third place overall in this test was the iPhone 5s, which managed 89% after the first episode and 78% once the second had played. This was an improvement on the iPhone 5's 87% and 73% respectively, shading the Nexus 5's 85% and 72% respectively. Predictably bringing up the rear was the iPhone 4, at 85% and 69% respectively. This test was courtesy of the YouTube user iTwe4kz.
Finally, we couldn't leave you without also citing a test of the LTE speed of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6, as recently posted on YouTube by iCIarified. The website looked for the best possible reception in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, before conducting the test late at night, a time of lower network usage. The results for the iPhone 6 were stellar, speeds in the high 90s being achieved, and the absolute highest download speed attained being 111 Mbps.
In the words of iCIarified's writer, "I'm confident that if the conditions were optimal we could have obtained even higher speeds."
AMAZING PERFORMANCES INDEED
All of the essential speed and performance tests, then, back up Apple's most bullish claims forthe iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, including that they mark "The biggest advancements in iPhone history". Even when their specifications don't seem to match those of rivals, these devices still come up trumps.
For us, these are signals that these two smartphones really are the stellar handsets that they have been hyped to be, and that you could do a lot worse than pick them up instead of even the most heavily-feted Android-powered competition. Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan