As Christmas looms and professional discount shoppers ready their arsenal for the annual Black Friday raid, this year’s hottest products will be in steep demand. 2014 has seen a handful of impressive handsets released that have scored well with our reviews team. But deciding which handset is right for you often means trudging through a minefield of information.
READ: iPhone 6 Plus: The 5 Top Reasons to Buy This Powerful Phablet
Fortunately for you, this brief guide will sum-up the five best reasons to buy the handset in focus - this week it’s the iPhone 6. In future posts I’ll be breaking down the iPhone 6 Plus,
It’s an all-rounder
The iPhone 6 stands toe to toe with the best of 2014 and it does so with aplomb. In design, performance, camera and battery it does more than pass. Where other devices might have one standout feature and other serious failings elsewhere, the iPhone 6 is competent across the board with several standout features. As my colleague Gordon Kelly explains, it’s consistent:
“What impresses is the iPhone 6’s consistency. The LG G3 and Note 4 have problematic UIs. The Nexus 5 has a poor battery. The HTC One M8 is beautiful but bulky. The Sony Xperia Z3 is ugly. Meanwhile the iPhone lacks any major flaws and this means it can compete with the very best.
READ: Better Battery Life And Faster Charging: 11 Tricks For The iPhone 6
“And this is perhaps the most remarkable achievement of the iPhone 6: it can take on the very best smartphones on the market despite being blown away by many of them on paper. That’s not damning with faint praise, that’s as big as praise gets as it shows up how significantly its rivals are underperforming with what they have.”
Despite the very public clash between Apple and Walmart over mobile payment systems, Apple Pay is still likely destined for big things. Apple has teamed up with most major banks and a number of high-profile retailers, with more to come. The very fact that Apple has so many partnerships makes Apple Pay far more worthwhile than other services, simply because it will work in places you need it.
READ: Google Nexus 6: The 5 Best Reasons To Buy One Over Every Other Smartphone
The data shows that it’s popular too, within 72 hours of its announcement 1 million credit cards were registered. And recently Whole Foods told the New York times that 150,000 transactions had been completed with Apple Pay since its launch. Apple’s 42% market share in the US and overflowing number of partnerships suggests that it’s the horse to back when it comes to mobile payments.
Swift
A new programming language isn’t generally a reason to buy a smartphone, but the potential impact of Swift could have a direct impact on the consumer. In short, Apple launched its new programming language alongside the iPhone 6 in September, after releasing a trial version back in June.
Swift, according to developers who have been getting to grips with it, is a significant upgrade on the previous language Objective-C. What’s important is that Swift is far easier to use and easier to learn, which means even novice developers can easily tackle it.
READ: iPad Air 2 Vs Nexus 9: Everything You Need To Know
Naturally, this is a boon for the iTunes app store, because more developers will be attracted to making apps for iOS. The immense popularity of Apple’s products (top smartphone manufacturer in the US with 42.2% market share) makes Swift a very attractive proposition for new and existing developers. As WIRED puts it:
“It’s [Swift] designed for coding even the simplest of mobile apps, and with a rather clever tool Apple calls “Playgrounds,” it offers an unusually effective way of teaching yourself to code. But the larger point here is that such an enormous number of programmers have an immediate reason to use Swift.
“Today, hundreds of thousands of developers build apps for iPhones and iPads using a language called Objective-C, and due to the immense popularity of Apple’s consumer gadgets, these coders will keep building such apps. But Swift is a significant improvement over Objective-C—in many respects—and this means the already enormous community of iPhone and iPad developers are sure to embrace the new language in the months to come.”
READ: The Top 5 iPhone 6 Accessories And Cases
Accessories
The popularity of the iPhone 6 means that accessory manufacturers are constantly scrambling to ride Apple’s coattails. Other devices and manufacturers simply don’t have the same breadth of accessories to support their devices. From the BuQu PowerArmour case to the Olloclip (although a Samsung Galaxy version has just been released) The iPhone 6 accessory market far outtstrips any other newly released handset. There are simply far more ways to customise and protect your iPhone than any other handset.
READ: The Top 5 Super Robust Cases For Your iPhone 6
Camera
The quality of any camera on a smartphone is open to much debate, and labelling a single one as ‘the best’ is a serious cause of contention. But that’s exactly what lens and camera experts DxO Labs did back in September, naming the iPhone 6 camera as the king of the competition.
The iPhone 6 camera got the highest ever smartphone camera score of 82 in its tests, which included; exposure, colour rendering, autofocus in both low and bright light conditions, detail preservation and the performance of the flash. All of which it came out on top and proved that it’s not all about the megapixels. However, it’s worth noting that the Sony Xperia Z3 and Galaxy S5 were close behind with scores of 79.
