Tag / Tech

by ibmacin

The Mighty Mini

I recently picked up the new iPad mini 6 and wanted to give some quick thoughts on it after about a week of using it.

I have always loved the iPad mini, going all the way back to the original one from 2012. I have owned each model, save for the 3rd generation. Most recently I got the iPad mini 5th generation when it was released in March 2019. I was so excited that Apple was updating the mini that I preordered it the moment it was announced. The iPad mini 5 was my constant companion up until back in January of this year when I unfortunately lost it. I have never lost an electronic like this in my life but after spending a few weeks trying to find it by retracing my steps as well as using Apple’s Find My app, it was indeed lost for good. 😢

I found myself craving another mini but by the time I had lost it, that model was about 2 years old and I hated to buy another one at full price. Apple complicates things for us mini lovers as they only sporadically update it. I decided to take a wait & see approach, and I’m glad I did as on September 14th this year, Apple unveiled the iPad mini 6th generation. Finally, I could have the mini back in my life!

Apple really went above and beyond on the new mini. I believe this is because they know that they only update it on occasion, so they make it count when they do. The iPad mini 6 introduces a lot of new features for the mini line. It has an all-new design mirroring the recent iPad Pros as well as the 4th generation iPad Air. This means saying goodbye to the home button as well as a introducing a squared off design and an edge to edge screen. The body of the iPad mini 6 is actually slightly smaller than the mini 5 it replaces but the screen has gotten slightly larger due to the reduced bezels, from 7.9″ to 8.3″. All of these are welcome changes in my opinion and make the iPad mini 6 truly feel modern again.

I picked up a Space Gray iPad mini with 256gb of storage and 5G cellular connectivity. As this is my favorite model of iPad, I don’t mind spending a bit more, although it does seem that Apple is reaching the upper limit for how much they can charge for the mini line. 💸💸💸 After using it for about a week, here are my thoughts so far:

  • One thing I love about the mini is it can just be an iPad. With Apple pushing the iPad Pros the last few years, with their keyboard cases, multitasking, and best in class performance, more and more people are now using their iPad’s as laptops and their main computers. This is fine of course, I use my iPad Pro in this same manner. However, there is something about the mini, with it’s compact size that is too small for a good keyboard case and a screen that is better suited for single-screen tasks than multitasking, that hearkens back to how we all used the original iPads, as just a fun device. I love using the mini full screen in portrait way more than in landscape. This is a big strength of the mini in my opinion.
  • As I mentioned before, the size of the mini is not conducive to a keyboard case. This means you are going to be doing a lot of typing using the mini’s on-screen keyboard, which is fantastic, particularly in portrait mode. I absolutely love thumb typing on the mini in portrait orientation, it is so so good.
  • I have been very impressed with the speed of the mini as well. Apple gave it their latest processor, the A15, the same chip they put in the also recently released iPhone 13 line, and it is fast. I have yet to find anything that can slow this iPad down. I would imagine that this chip will perform very well for years to come, which is great because it will most likely be years before Apple updates the mini again. Likewise, I appreciate that the iPad mini 6 has moved to 5G for its cellular data connection. This insures that it will get the best cellular speeds for years to come.
  • Another new feature for the mini 6 is support for the second generation Apple Pencil. While the 5th generation iPad mini did support the original Apple Pencil, I much prefer the gen 2 Pencil. It has a nicer matte finish, has a flat side, and most of all charges in a much more elegant way than the first gen did. Huge upgrade in my opinion.
  • Another feature the mini 6 added is support for Center Stage for the front facing camera. The was a feature first introduced with the M1 iPad Pros earlier in 2021. Basically, Center Stage utilizes the wide angle front facing camera by showing you a cropped view and then following you if you move to the left or the right. This allows you to actually move around a bit when on a long video call, knowing that the iPad will keep you in frame. It can also detect if someone joins you in the room and automatically zoom out to keep both subjects in the frame. It’s a great feature and it just works.
  • My favorite feature of the new mini is something it shares with all of the previous minis in the line and that is simply it’s portability. I love how easy the mini travels with you. It fits in my jacket pocket, my small sling bags, the back pocket of my jeans, & you barely even notice it in a larger bag. There is rarely a reason not to take it with you because of this. Having an iPad that is this powerful but also this small is a really useful thing.

These are my thoughts on the iPad mini 6. It really is a fantastic little device. The main way I am using it so far is for reading saved articles, going through my RSS feeds, playing Apple Arcade games, scrolling thru Twitter, and watching YouTube. I’m very glad to have the mini back in my life.

by ibmacin

The LG Tone+ Bluetooth Headset

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I didn’t purchase much on Black Friday 2014 but one of the few things I purchased was the LG Tone+ Bluetooth Headset. I had been eyeing them for several months and Best Buy was selling them for $39.99, which is considerably less than the MSRP of $69.99, so I picked them up. I have been using them heavily for the past several months and wanted to give my thoughts on them.

The LG Tone+ have a fairly unique design in that you wear them around your neck and the earbuds pull out and go into your ears. The neckband always rests on your neck and houses all of your controls. I really do like this design as your ears aren’t having to support hardly any weight. The neckband is comfortable, doesn’t bounce around much, and the earbuds magnetically attach to the ends of the neckband when they are out of your ears, which is a nice touch. I think the best way for me to do this review is simply list the pros and cons of this headset below.

Pros

  • They can be connected to two devices at once. So if you want to be listening to music from your iPad and still have them connected to your iPhone for if a call comes in, you can. I really appreciate this feature.
  • Call sound quality through this headset seems to be good. I use this headset heavily at work and answer and make 30 plus calls a day and I haven’t heard any complaints.
  • The controls are well thought out and easy to reach. It took me just a couple of hours to memorize where everything is.
  • The headset will vibrate when you are receiving a call which is nice if you are away from your phone and don’t have the earbuds in. I have been notified of several calls I would have missed because of this feature.
  • They are very comfortable in my ears. They come with 3 sizes of tips for various ear sizes and I find them to be very pleasant to wear.
  • Each time you turn them on they will tell you the battery level they are at. They also will show the battery level in the status bar on your iPhone. They will reconnect automatically if you go out of range as soon as you get back in range.
  • You can activate Siri from the headset by tapping the call button. This is really handy.

Cons

  • Battery life is good but not great. I can typically get a full 9 hour work day out of them but thats about it. Thats with me using them for several phone calls as well as several hours of podcast or music playback. It’s not bad but I do wish I could go two days on the battery instead of having to charge them every day. They do charge fairly quickly at least. (about 2 hours)
  • Sound quality is just average on this headset. Sure you can’t really expect incredible sound quality on a sub $100 bluetooth headset but I still wish it was a little better. This is not a deal breaker at all, especially as the majority of the time I am listening to podcasts instead of music, but don’t buy these expecting to have stellar sound.
  • This headset looks a little dorky. I definitely have gotten some questions while wearing it. It’s not a big deal to me at all but if you are really fashion conscious you may want to look for something a little more casual looking.

That about sums up my thoughts on the LG Tone+ bluetooth headset. Hopefully this will help you decide if you have been on the fence about them. For the price I got them at I highly recommend them. They are incredibly nice for my work and I don’t see myself going back to my EarPods anytime soon. You can find them on Amazon here.

by ibmacin

The iPhone 6 Plus

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As many of you know I got an iPhone 6 Plus about a month and a half ago. I have used it as my only phone every day since and think that I have had enough time with it to do a full review. The model I got is the AT&T 64gb Silver version. Let’s get right to it.

Design

The iPhone 6 Plus (as well as the 6) are quite a bit different design wise than the previous 2 models of iPhone. While the iPhone 4, 4S, 5, & 5S all had flat edges and a chamfered cut, the iPhone 6 & 6 Plus have curved edges with an all aluminum back. It’s quite a different feel in the hand and has it’s plusses and minuses in my opinion. While it feels better in the hand to me and is very pleasing when swiping from the edge of the screen to the sides it is quite a bit more slippery in the hand than the older models. Also, while I still think it is a beautiful phone, it just doesn’t have that classic Leica look of the iPhone 4 & 5. To me, those phones just felt and looked so solid. This is all just a matter of taste of course but I would have loved to have seen a bigger iPhone done in the style of the iPhone 5S.

The iPhone 6 Plus is really thin. At just 7.1 mm thin it is the second thinnest iPhone ever. Only the iPhone 6 at 6.9mm is thinner. So while it is a lot bigger phone than any of my previous phones, it is by far the thinnest phone I have had. I really appreciate the thinness & at just 6.1 ounces it is really light for it’s size as well.

Another change that the 6 & 6 Plus have is the sleep/wake button has moved from the top of the phone to the right side. This is necessary due to the larger size of the phone which would make reaching the top of the phone much more difficult compared to the previous models. The volume buttons and mute toggle switch all feel fine to me.

The screen on the iPhone 6 Plus is a 5.5″ 1080p display (1920 x 1080) which is good for 401 ppi. I have no complaints about this screen at all. It has excellent color reproduction, great contrast, gets plenty bright enough, and is a great size in my opinion. It is quite a change going from the 4″ display of the iPhone 5S to this. You can see so much more information on this screen than you could on previous iPhones and it is just a pleasure to read on. I’ve found that I am much more likely to read on my phone now than I did in the past. It has definitely cut into the time I previously would have used my iPad mini.

The iPhone 6 & 6 Plus have a new “reachability” mode which you access by tapping the home button twice. Doing this brings the top half of the screen down to the bottom half so that you can reach the icons at the top while using the phone one handed. While this is a cool trick I don’t really find myself using it much at all. Instead I have just started holding my phone higher up than I used to and I can pretty much reach everywhere without doing this. If you have small hands, this would probably be more useful. Here’s a gif of how it works:

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A few nitpicks about the design: One, the antenna lines on the back are kind of ugly. I appreciate the effort to go all aluminum on the back but to me, the glass on the top and bottom of the previous iPhone models looked better. Two, the back camera on both the 6 and 6 Plus sticks out just a little from the casing, causing the phone to wobble slightly if laid on a flat surface. I know most people (myself included) will use a case which will negate this but it still kind of sucks if you are one that likes to go without a case.

All that being said I do really love the design of the 6 Plus. It took a couple of weeks to get used to the size coming from an iPhone 5S but I have fully adjusted and have no desire to go back. I have picked up my wife’s iPhone 5 several times since getting the 6 Plus and I cannot get over how small it now feels to me. I know all of the Android fans are like “We’ve had giant phones for years” but it’s nice to have the bigger size in the iPhone. Better late than never in my opinion.

Camera

If there’s one thing about iPhones most people can agree on, it’s that the cameras they use are excellent. While both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are still sporting 8 megapixel cameras, I believe that they are the best smartphone cameras yet. I can’t go into near the detail that these guys go into but I can tell you that for everyday shooting the camera on the iPhone 6 Plus is great. It has incredibly fast autofocus and the built in optical image stabilization helps a lot in low light situations as well as when shooting video.

I still wouldn’t use it for taking vacation pictures or for something like my child growing up if I had one, that’s what my Sony NEX 6 is for, but for everyday photo taking for Facebook & Instagram it is more than sufficient.

It also takes some really nice panoramas, up to 43 megapixels. Here is one I shot downtown the other day:

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As far as video is concerned it seems to do a really good job. I have had a lot of fun playing with the new 240fps Slo-Mo mode. There is an excellent video of some skateboarders shot with this feature that I will put below. This was shot handheld with an unsteady hand and it still came out really smooth.

Performance

The 6 Plus comes with a 1.4 GHz 64 bit A8 processor. Performance on the 6 Plus is very good. I haven’t noticed any slowdown when using it. If I could change one thing it would be for Apple to give us 2gb of ram as opposed to the 1gb it has. This would seriously cut down on your safari tabs and apps in the background having to reload so often. Apple did give the new iPad Air 2gb of ram so I am hopeful that future iPhone models will as well. I have attached a screenshot of my Geekbench score below:

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Battery

This right here is probably the strongest part of the iPhone 6 Plus to me. This phone is an absolute beast in regards to battery life. I cannot kill it in a single day no matter how hard I try.

On weekends when I’m not using it much I can easily go 2 days without a charge. A normal work day of me getting up at 7:00 AM, using it hard throughout the day and night and plugging in in around 10:30 or 11:00 PM will have it at 40-50%. My iPhone 5S  could barely make it through a work day at all. I would normally charge it in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it dying that night.

I cannot stress how nice it is to not have to worry about the battery on my phone at all anymore. It’s one less thing for me to worry about everyday and that’s a very good thing.

Touch ID

After a month and a half, Touch ID is still working great for me. Touch ID is so convenient and it would be very hard to go back to a phone that doesn’t have it. I wish I had it on my iPad and my MacBook. It just works.

Apple Pay

I unfortunately have not had the chance to try out Apple Pay yet as my bank still doesn’t support it. I have emailed their support and they have responded saying they will probably be offering it sometime this year. If they do, I will be sure to come back and update this section with my thoughts on how well it works. Reports of people who have used it have been generally positive. This video does a decent job of showing how it works:

Accessories

I have bought a couple of cases for my new iPhone. As much as I would like to go without a case the phone is just too slippery for me to trust it. I am very careful with my phone though so I wanted something very minimal. I ended up buying the official Apple leather case a well as the Griffin Reveal. Both cases are very thin while providing much improved grip as well as negating the back camera bulge. The Apple case specifically gives the phone a really solid grip. The Griffin case has decent grip with the rubber bumper on the sides while having a clear back so you can still see the design of the phone. I really love both cases and switch between them constantly.

Wrap-up

So there you have it. Is the iPhone 6 Plus a good phone? Absolutely! Is it the right phone for everyone? Absolutely not! For some it will be just too big. Luckily Apple makes the iPhone 6 as well. But if you have been waiting for a big phone that runs iOS I would wholeheartedly recommend the iPhone 6 Plus. I am very satisfied with it and can’t imagine going back. Thanks for reading.

Extra

I love reading and watching tech reviews (big surprise). I have read and watched probably over 100 reviews of the iPhone 6 Plus. My absolute favorite one is by my absolute favorite youtuber MKBHD. Do yourself a favor and check out his video review if you are interested in this phone.