The first Australian iPhone 6 and 6 Plus reviews have arrived down under, with ratings of 4.5 stars for each, detailing what’s new, what isn’t and what’s missing.
News.com.au has managed to put Australia’s first iPhone 6 and 6 Plus reviews online, beating a flood of coverage from other Australian tech publications to the iPunch.
The review looks at the various new features each iPhone offers, from larger screens through to improved cameras and a stack of iOS 8 features that many older iPhones will be able to enjoy from tomorrow once iOS 8 goes live.
The reviewer seemed mostly pleased with both new handsets, from the rounded edges and thinner design through to better battery life than the 5s and 5 that proceeded them.
We get rundowns of screen resolutions and sizes, camera specs and the quality of the ultra fast new focus pixels, how the phones feel, how fast they are and the rest of the usual observations you’d expect.
Then we get to the things the reviewer says are missing from both new iPhones.
These are the fact that neither new iPhone has the kind of waterproofing we see on select Samsung and Sony models, with the iPhones requiring one of those Lifeproof-style, tradie-friendly cases to do the job.
There is a complaint that neither iPhone has a heart rate monitor, but the reviewer probably hasn’t heard of the awesome Cardiio app that turns the iPhone’s existing camera into a perfectly good heart rate monitor – long before Samsung’s Galaxy S5 landed on the scene.
There’s also a mention of the fact the much hyped sapphire screens didn’t make an appearance on either iPhone, which we presume will come to the iPhone 6S or iPhone 7 – whatever Apple decides to call its 2015 iPhones – as well as the usual whinge that iPhones don’t have removable batteries.
The reviewer wasn’t able to discern yet whether the fingerprint reading TouchID sensor had received any improvements.
The last two complaints were that neither iPhone can shoot in 4K video, something the Galaxy S5 has been able to do for months, alongside a complaint that the front-facing iPhone camera is still only 1.2 megapixels even though it has been updated in various other ways to be a dramatic improvement on every other front facing camera most other iPhones have had before it.
In short, it was a pretty good review, but to review the review, it wasn’t as spectacular as it could have been, and there was no sapphire glass to read the review with, nor did the review come with 4K videos or any removable batteries.
We’ll have our own review early next week when we’ve had a chance to really play with the new iPhones and see just how they feel compared to earlier models and similarly sized Androids, so we’ll let you know our views then!
