Apple has finally put an end to the rumors and anticipation by announcing its ninth generation of smartphones: the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s plus. Available for pre-order September 12, 2015, and fully released on September 25, the new phones will come in gold, silver, space gray, and a new color: rose gold.
Designed similarly to the iPhone 6, the 6s will have the same round edges and buttons, with a 4.7-inch screen, but will be slightly thicker. There will be an important change to the body: a new 7000-series aluminum alloy, the same found in the Apple Watch Sport.
Largest among the new features on the iPhone 6s will be Apple’s 3D Touch, a pressure-sensitive trackpad, which allows you to press down on the iPhone's screen to pull up new menus, activate shortcuts, and generally interact with the device in different ways. The touchscreen will be able to tell how hard you’re pressing, differentiating between a tap, standard press, and a deep press, which will help you navigate around your phone quicker.
Pressing down lightly lets you take a peek at things, while deep pressing causes a screen to pop out for further touching. For example, if you deep press on the phone icon, it goes straight to voicemail. You can deep press on a song in Music to get different options. If you press extra-hard in Maps, your phone will start turn-by-turn navigation without further prompting.
Apple’s Tactic Engine is also built into the new phones to provide feedback. The screen has tiny motors behind it that buzz in a particular way when you touch it, and may feel like a clicking trackpad.
The iPhone 6s’s camera will have new modules, including a new front-facing camera with a larger sensor, capable of taking 1080p video or 5MP stills. You’ll also be able to take ‘selfie panoramas’ (something this generation will love), slow-motion video, and use the phone’s screen as a makeshift flash.
While the front-facing camera seems very promising, the real magic happens with the back: a new 12-megapixel camera, able to take better stills, and can capture 4k video. New technology such as the ‘deep-trench isolation,’ a sensor improved to give better color accuracy, less noise, and superior low-light performance, can be found in the camera.
Equipped with an A9 processor, the iPhone 6s is 70 percent faster at CPU tasks and 90 percent faster for GPU, according to Apple. A motion co-processor that tracks your activity is integrated right into the phone. TouchID also comes equipped, operating 2x faster, and its Wi-Fi is twice as fast with 300Mbps LTE Advanced with 23 LTE bands.
With a new iPhone comes a new OS: the iOS 9, Apple’s latest mobile operating system. The always-listening ‘hey Siri’ feature, which only used to work when your device was plugged in, will now work whenever your phone has charge. A new feature called ‘Live Photos’ is included in the update, which is a series of still photos with a few seconds of video and audio integrated around them.
On-contract or with an upgrade, the iPhone 6s will be available for $199 or $27 per month and the iPhone 6s plus for $299. Apple also introduced an iPhone Upgrade Program, which gives you a new unlocked iPhone every year on the carrier of your choice and AppleCare+ for $32 a month.
Source: Gizmodo
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