iPhone 14 Plus review – hits the sweet spot with a large screen and great battery life

95%

• VERDICT

The iPhone 14 Plus will be very popular with customers and offers a tantalising sweet spot with a larger screen, sleek design and the best battery life on an iPhone. It’s now more affordable to go big or go home.

The new 6.7-inch iPhone 14 Plus is an ideal choice for the user who wants to enjoy the iPhone experience with a larger screen and even better battery life.

In the last few years, the only way a customer could have larger screen iPhone would be to pay for the most expensive Pro Max model.

But now Apple has responded to customer’s suggestion and re-introduced the Plus model to the iPhone 14 line-up.

Having a bigger iPhone means you can either see the contents of the screen even larger (good for people like me who now needs glasses to read their screen) or you can fit even more content on the display.

And of course a larger Super Retina XDR display makes watching content and playing games even better as well.

Like the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Plus is made from durable aerospace aluminium and has a ceramic shield over the display so there’s no arguing about toughness of the product.

It is also water resistant to a depth of up to 6m for up to 30 minutes so casual spills with drinks should be no issue.

For our review we received the new purple iPhone 14 Plus – an impressive new colour.

Under the hood, the iPhone 14 Plus is running the A15 bionic which still makes it one of the fastest smartphone chips on the market.

The result is impressive performance whether you’re scrolling between apps, browsing the web, playing a game or viewing content on the go.

iPhone 14 Plus has a new 12-megapixel main camera and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera plus a larger sensor and larger pixels, so the resulting images and videos are even better quality.

The faster f/1.5 aperture on the main camera dramatically improves lowlight performance by 49 per cent.

Images we took even in low light still looked stunning.

Another thing we noticed was images taken with a strong backlight were also clearer thanks to the Photonic Engine, the new image pipeline, that can radically improve lowlight performance for your images

And on the front, the TrueDepth camera now has autofocus so your image – whether it’s just a selfie or group selfie – is going to look even sharper and clearer.

Action Mode is another excellent new edition which can stabilise your videos (up to 2.8K resolution at 60 frames per second) to a point where people will think you are shooting with a gimbal.

And like the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Plus now has crash detection and emergency SOS.

on the battery side, the iPhone 14 plus offers the best battery life ever on an iPhone, according to Apple.

And we have to wholeheartedly agree.

A bigger iPhone means a larger battery and that’s exactly what you get with the iPhone 14 Plus.

But why has the iPhone 14 Plus been singled out by Apple for superior battery performance and not the iPhone 14 Pro Max?

The iPhone 14 Pro Max has a similar size battery and capacity, but it is powering a ProMotion display which runs adaptive frame rates of up to 120 Hertz.

The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus have 60Hz displays and might not look as smooth as the iPhone 14 Pro but are far less taxing on the battery.

That’s why the iPhone 14 Plus is in that sweet spot when it comes to battery performance.

For our review we used iPhone 14 Plus as our daily driver from morning till night.

We started with 100 per cent at 8am and usually still had 50 per cent in the tank by 6pm.

The lowest it was at the end of the day when were out and about was 42 per cent.

One thing we would have liked to see was the newest Wi-Fi 6E standard. The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro both have Wi-Fi 6 and don’t offer that extra speed if you have a Wi-Fi 6E router in your home or office.

Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra, Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 all have Wi-Fi 6E.

The iPhone 14 Plus is priced at $1,579 (128GB), $1,749 (256GB) and $2,099 (512GB) and are available in blue, purple, midnight, starlight and PRODUCT(Red).

VERDICT

The iPhone 14 Plus will be very popular with customers and offers a tantalising sweet spot with a larger screen, sleek design and the best battery life on an iPhone. It’s now more affordable to go big or go home.