Apple’s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will land on 25 September

Apple’s new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are real. And so is 3D Touch.

While the new smartphones don’t have a radical overhaul in its design, their pressure-sensitive touch screen adds a new dimension to the way you interact with your iPhone. Rather than just tap and go, the amount of pressure you exert will determine how the phone reacts to it. A light touch gives you a preview peek at emails, links or whatever it is you’re lightly tapping. Press harder, and you go straight to the content.

What about the hardware? As expected, the new iPhones get an upgraded Apple A9 processor, 70% more powerful than its A8 CPU and 90% faster for GPU performance.

Siri is now always by your side, making sassy remarks when you need some recommendations. A simple “Hey Siri” will trigger the intelligent voice assistant to listen, and hopefully understand your queries no matter how heavily-accented it may be.

Camera-wise, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus get a bump up to a 12MP iSight camera. Also, selfie-lovers take note, the front camera is now a 5MP sensor. The same true tone flash for the rear camera is in place. Front-facing shots get a little help with the iPhone’s Retina Display, in the form of a simulated flash to cover all those blemishes and shadows.

Apple is definitely a master in presentation, with a new feature dubbed Live photos which takes a sequence of images 1.5 seconds before and after the shot. The effect is apparent when you press and hold a Live Photo, which presents an animation of that particular shot. It’s a nice touch, especially when you swipe through photos and see a quick animation of your next shot. Apple has created new developer APIs for Live Photos and indicated that apps such as Facebook will support Live Photos. Essentially, you can now upload GIF images to Facebook.

4K video recording has also been added to iPhone movie-making. With the new iPhones’ capability to record videos in ultra high definition format, that’ll make holiday movies even more amazing on that swanky 4K TV at home.

Any other new specs? Well, LTE Advanced offers faster upload and download speeds of up to 100Mbps if you’re on a 4G+ network. In theory, that should be lower due to traffic loads. Also there’s a new iPhone colour joining the Silver, Gold and Space Grey models – a swanky Rose Gold.

Last but not least, the availability. Mark these dates – 12 September is when you’ll be able to pre-order the new iPhones, both of which will be available on 25 September. The iPhone 6s starts from £539 while the larger iPhone 6s Plus starts from £619 for the 16GB configurations. Bump up the storage to 64GB and it’ll cost £619 and £699, while the highest 128GB version goes up to £699 and £789 for the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus respectively

We’ll be back with more hands-on of the new iPhones, so check in within the next few hours for our initial impressions.

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