In case you hadn’t noticed, today was Apple’s big day in the sun, with the Cupertino based company announcing a pair of new iPhones as well as the Apple Watch – you know, that iWatch everyone was apparently holding their breath for. Back to the iPhones though, Apple announced the iPhone 6 with a 4.7-inch display and the 5.5-inch 1080p iPhone 6 Plus. That’s right, that company that was hellbent on never shipping a large device has shipped a larger device than those that are resting in many Android users’ pockets. So, with the iPhone 6 Plus, we can finally welcome Apple to the modern smartphone industry and no, not because large devices are the “new thing”, but more because choice is important.
Choice is super important and now that smartphones are pretty much the hubs of our digital lives there’s no one right answer. When taking Android as a whole, there’s an amazing array of choice out there; you could by a Samsung device and get all the features you never knew you weren’t going to use, you could get a polished and simple device from Motorola or get the best specs available in a mobile device from LG. However, narrowing things down to just a single manufacturer, pretty much every Android vendor sells a smartphone in different sizes, offering people choice. With the iPhone 6 Plus, Apple have finally, started to offer those locked into the beautiful, amazing, super-great walled iPhone garden, choice. Which officially makes them part of the modern smartphone industry, where no one user should have to use the same phone as everyone else.
More seriously though, Apple have stiff competition. This isn’t “stiff competition” coming from the mouth of an “Android fanboy” (I prefer “fanboy of good technology, thank you) but stiff competition from an industry perspective. Samsung have been making large devices, and more importantly making them work, for years now. For once, Apple find themselves genuinely having to compete with a South Korean giant that kicked off their career in smartphones by taking, shall we say, inspiration from the iPhone. Apple will need to prove that the additions made to iOS 8 will actually make the 5.5-inch display easier to use than say, an LG G3 or a Galaxy Note 3, otherwise they might find people asking the same questions of the iPhone 6 Plus that people asked of the Galaxy Note years ago.
Is Samsung’s big money spinner in trouble here? I’d say not. We can say what we want about TouchWiz, but the S-Pen and the extra software put into the Galaxy Note make a 5.7-inch display not only make sense, but also something I’d want in a phone. So far, the little additions in iOS 8 don’t seem to go far enough and it’ll be very interesting indeed to see just how well the iPhone 6 Plus sells with larger phones available from the likes of Samsung and LG. Do you think the iPhone 6 Plus could make a difference to how people look at larger devices or hurt the bread and butter of Samsung and friends? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!