It’s that time of year again: new iPhones! Apple showed off the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus at its September event for the first time, which come with a number of smaller, but impressive improvements to the phone.
The iPhone 6s will be available in a new rose gold aluminum finish, in addition to the existing gold, space grey and white models.
A new feature called ‘3D Touch’ comes with the iPhone 6s, which is the new name for Force Touch also seen on the Apple Watch and MacBook. It works within apps and directly on the home screen, offering new ways to interact with apps.
Apple added capacitive sensors between the display and backlight on the phone which measure tiny changes between glass and backlight pressure. The iPhone 6s also adds support for animated wallpapers — a feature that was added as part of iOS 7 but not extended until today.
Third-party apps like Instagram can take advantage of the new feature to offer options right on the home screen. A demo showed off Instagram being pushed to reveal a hidden menu for quickly jumping to take a photo.
It also adds support for saying ‘Hey Siri’ works even without power connected, and features a new Touch ID sensor that logs you in 2x faster.
Most importantly, the iPhone comes with a 12 megapixel camera, the first upgrade to the megapixel count on the iPhone since the 5 was released. Apple said it used a new “trenching” process to separate the pixels for better color quality — it spent a large amount of time showing off the ‘improved detail’ from the camera.
It also shoots 4K video for the first time, capturing 8 million pixels in every frame of video — that’ll fill up your phone fast… but will look super nice.
The front-facing camera is getting a major upgrade too, to five megapixels for the first time, and Apple will automatically use the screen as a flash.
The most impressive feature demo is a new feature called ‘live photos’ which automatically captures a little video when you take a photo. If you use 3D Touch on the photo, it’ll make the photo move — Apple captures 1.5 seconds on either side of the photo automatically and emphasised that it’s not a video.
Apple says the new iPhone is 70 percent faster at CPU tasks and 90 percent faster at graphics tasks than last year. The motion coprocessor that tracks your fitness data is now baked directly into the iPhone 6s’ CPU.
It features LTE advanced, which is twice as fast if your carrier supports it, which works in more countries than ever.
A new app on the Android store makes it easy to migrate from Android devices to iOS automatically — that’ll work regardless of what device you buy.
For iPhone 6s, a number of purchasing options will be available. You can purchase on a contract starting at $199 for the iPhone 6s or $299 for the 6s Plus, which leaves the handset pricing the same as last year’s models.
Apple will offer a new upgrade program in the US that allows you to upgrade to the latest for $32 per month, which is on a 24-month contract but you’ll be able to upgrade every year.
iPhone 6s will be available in the above countries from September 12 and iOS 9 will be available from September 16.
Don’t miss: Everything Apple announced at its September 2015 event
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