iPhone 6 on Softbank in Japan

Well worth the 3.5 year wait

Well, after all the good intentions of keeping my iPhone 4S for one more iteration, I cracked on Friday. It didn’t help that the phone was really struggling to run iOS 8 (if you have a 4S, I don’t recommend upgrading to the new OS). On the way to work I stopped at a quiet, out of the way Softbank shop and had a look at the new iPhones.

I was originally inclined to get the 6 plus, as I liked the idea of having a bigger screen to read ebooks and surf the web. Then I saw the actual size of the thing…

The iPhone 6 plus is basically too big for me to use one-handed, which kind of negates the point of having a mobile phone. I also had trouble holding it comfortably. This thing really is big.

I asked what they had in stock, and ended up getting the 128GB space grey model. My thoughts so far:

The good

• light, smooth, and beautiful
• great display
• very fast and capable
• the fingerprint thing is amazing. Never going back
• battery life much better than old iPhone 4S
• tethering
• Softbank subsidizes the phone considerably, and they have a campaign to buy your old phone back too (I got 24,000 yen for my old iPhone 4S)
• camera/photos are amazing
• Softbank reset my contract, so it will expire around the same time I pay the phone off (instead of eight months beforehand)

The bad

• it’s bigger than I am used to, so still getting used to that
• pretty slippery without a case
• the camera lens sticks out
• Softbank has this obnoxious policy where they automatically sign you up for free trials of various services that will auto-renew and charge you, and won’t let you cancel them until the next day (call 157 to do this quickly and easily)

Overall

I love this phone. I’m impressed at how little it is costing me to buy it. It is a huge improvement over the iPhone 4S in every way. Right now I am really happy I upgraded.

I don’t know if it would be worth if for iPhone 5 or 5S users, but if you still have a 4 or 4S I would recommend checking the new models out.