iPhone 6s Wins Most Prestigious Title from Reputable Reviewer

Since the site was launched in 1997, Anandtech has been an acclaimed source for providing expert, unbiased reviews of anything from cellular telephones to desktop and laptop computers. Their highest level distinction to date, the “Editors Choice Gold” award, has only been given to the best of the best in its genre.

However, since the dawn of its inception, only two luxury smartphones have received the Gold Choice ranking — one of those being the HTC One, and the other being the recently released iPhone 6s and 6s Plus from Apple.

In a comprehensive, 15-page report, Anandtech editors Joshua Ho and Ryan Smith note that the Editors Choice Gold award is not only given to the best of the best devices, but those that push the smartphone user experience forward in significant ways.

To that end, Ho and Smith offer up a thorough review and technical observation of Apple’s A9 chip, among other key variables, in which they concluded,

“in a nutshell A9 and [its CPU core design named] Twister are a very potent update to Apple’s CPU performance, delivering significant performance increases from both architectural improvements and from clock-speed improvements.”

After compiling a series of benchmarks, including those of web browser and JavaScript performance, Ho and Smith noted that,

“according to Basemark OS II statistics, Apple is once again taking the lead; and in terms of GFXBench, the A9 SoC churns out top-of-the-line performance. Overall, the Apple A9 SoC is the best SoC in any phone shipping today.”

They also tested video game benchmarks via GFXBench, ultimately concluding that, “iPhone 6s and 6s Plus graphics are performing at the maximum possible frame rate for most of the infinite run of this intense benchmark … No other SoC we’ve tested this year can sustain this level of performance for this level of time.”

In terms of the revamped, 12MP camera module, the editors noted that, “Overall, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have consistently good cameras. In some ways Apple is losing out in raw detail for photos because they went with a smaller sensor size than most, but in general color reproduction, post-processing, and low light photo quality and overall camera UX Apple is leading quite strongly.”

In their conclusion, Ho and Smith stated, “After spending all this time with the iPhone 6s, we can’t find anything really wrong with this phone. On the contrary, the A9 SoC is a huge jump in performance even relative to other SoCs on the same process node to give impressive application performance. The camera’s overall user experience is just about the best that you can get on the market today, and 3D Touch is a big improvement in terms of user experience. Additionally, TouchID v2 and always-on Siri are worthwhile improvements in user experience, too.”

The only real issues, they thought, were that the iPhone 6s doesn’t have OIS and that the base model is still only 16GB. However, even despite those negligible flaws, they make a hard to to challenge argument that the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are the best phones that money can currently buy.