WSJ reviews the iPhone 6s: great performance, fine camera, but no battery life improvement

As the iPhone 6s review embargo fell, crashed, and burned, the authoritative Wall Street Journal published its review of Apple's new flagship smartphone. Things seem perfectly peachy for the 6s, as expected from an iterative upgrade over an already successful product, but author Joanna Stern did land some righteous punches at Apple's historically stubborn noggin!

According to her, not only is there no battery life improvement over last year's model, but the iPhone 6s Plus lasted only 20 minutes longer than the 6s, despite carrying a higher capacity unit. We cannot comment on the publication's proprietary battery test procedures, so stay tuned for our opinion once we've put the iPhone 6s through our own test's paces!

Despite battery life remaining at iPhone 6 levels, the iPhone 6s’s new A9 processor and 2GB of RAM result in a noticeable speed boost. Ms. Stern says that exporting an HD video is "three times as fast", while browsing was smoother and multitasking feels noticeably quicker. Unlocking the phone is also much faster, with the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor being "at least twice as fast". Right on, Apple!

A slightly better iPhone 6.

And finally, a word about the improved camera. The new 12MP sensor does deliver a bit more fine detail that's available for cropping, but image quality remains essentialy unchanged from the iPhone 6, meaning that daytime shots are superb, but low light ones leave something to be desired. However, 4K video recordings are "very crisp", but also take up "six times the space of a typical 720p video", which means those buying the 16GB base model are at quite the disadvantage. Also, Joanna Stern and other reviewers seem to universally agree that Live Photos is pretty cool, for a gimmick.