 People want big phones. First that idea was silly, then it was a little bit true, now it's just kind of obvious. We don't use our phones to make calls, we use them to watch movies and read books and get work done and send weird videos on Snapchat. So we want phones with big screens and great cameras and good battery life and lots of apps. So Apple made that. Exactly that. This is the iPhone 6. There's really nothing more accurate to say about the iPhone 6 than it's a big iPhone. It's taller and wider and slightly heavier than last year's iPhone 5s, though it's actually a bit thinner. It comes in the same three colors as the 5s, silver, gold, and space gray, plus three storage options. You either get 16GB, though I wish the base option were 32, plus 64 or 128GB if you upgrade. It has much slimmer, rounder edges than the 5s, which makes it both a little more comfortable and a little less starkly impressive. Because it's thinner, it's still easy enough to hold in one hand, though I definitely have more trouble using it than the 5s. It's about the size of your average flagship Android phone, somewhere in between last year's Moto X and this year's HTC One M8. Moving up from a 4-inch phone takes a minute to get used to, but it really is worth it. The iPhone 6 looks a bit like the very first iPhone, actually. There's no question this is an Apple product. It's really well made, sturdy and high end, and even the buttons feel better than they ever have. The power button is on the right side now, which took forever for my fingers to relearn, but it's definitely the right location. And the volume buttons are a little longer and a lot clickier. The only real design flaw in my mind is the stripes along the back where the antennas go. They outline the top and bottom of the iPhone 6, and they almost look out of place on an otherwise clean design. Same goes for the protruding camera lens, which looks a little odd and makes the phone wobble slightly if you put it down on a flat surface, but it's really not that big a deal. The front of the phone is all about the new 4.7-inch 1334x750 screen. It looks great, like iPhone screens have for a while. I can't make out individual pixels, and it's totally visible outdoors. The screen curves into the edges of the phone, which makes swiping and tapping feel a lot more natural. The iPhone 6 doesn't feel like a box with a screen on top. It feels more authentic somehow. Most apps upscale pretty simply onto the bigger display. Developers can change them to suit the screen, or text and pictures just all get a little bigger, but I imagine most developers will pretty quickly update to show more at once instead of just the same but bigger. In some places, having a big screen makes a huge difference. I instantly started typing both faster and more accurately on the larger display since there's just more room. Movies look better, framing photos is easier, you can see more emails at a time on the screen. It's great. But I can't help but wonder if Apple could or should have done more with this big screen. You get an extra row of icons on the home screen, a neat recent menu in your multitasking window, and not that much else. There's a strange but sort of useful reachability mode where you double tap the home button and the screen literally slides down so you can reach it. On the iPhone 6 Plus, there are a few other changes like landscape mode in a few apps, but on the 6 even though there's a bigger display and a lot more space to play with, nothing really changes. It's bigger and better, but it's the same. That idea really persists across everything about the iPhone 6. It supports faster LTE, voice over LTE, Wi-Fi calling, and a handful of other new standards and upgrades. There's a new A8 chip which is noticeably faster than even last year's A7, and the M8 motion processor can tell you how many flights of stairs you've climbed in addition to your steps and lots of other health data. Even the speaker is louder, which I actually really appreciate. The battery is a little bigger and noticeably better. I could charge it one night and then not need to again until midday two days later, and that's with pretty heavy use. I'm still charging it every night, but I can forget and not worry about it. Those are all updates you won't really see, though. They just run in the background and make the iPhone 6 slightly better and faster than the 5S. The one you will see is the camera. It's still 8 megapixels, but the camera's been upgraded in a bunch of great ways. It uses what Apple calls Focus Pixels to do phase detect autofocus, and it is just insanely fast. You can't really notice it focusing, yet shots always come out right. You can take higher resolution panoramas now thanks to the faster processor, and they look amazing. But my two favorite features both have to do with video. One is that you can shoot slow motion video up to 240 frames per second, which turns quick moving action into this epic replay footage. The other is cinematic video stabilization, which does an incredible job of taking your shaky handheld video and making it still and smooth. You can see the frame warp and bend a bit as it works, but the effect is amazing. There's lots of new software here, time lapse videos, burst selfies, a new photos app, and more. The camera has always been the iPhone's killer app, and the iPhone 6 is a big upgrade. The rest of the story of the iPhone 6 is the story of iOS 8. There's now predictive typing on the keyboard, which is sometimes useful and sometimes hilariously not useful. The Health app plugs into the M8 processor and eventually into the Apple Watch to tell you your steps, your elevation, and all sorts of other fitness data. Messages lets you talk with your voice and leave group messages, which, thank God. My favorite upgrade, though, is to Spotlight, which now also searches the App Store, the web, Wikipedia, and more, all from the one pull-down window. It's just super handy. Apple's software and its app ecosystem have always been what set the iPhone apart, and that hasn't changed here. The iPhone 6 is weird. On one hand, nearly everything about it is better. Bigger screen, faster processor, more impressive and versatile camera. It's the best iPhone yet, and it's the one I suspect most people will buy. For me, at least, the 6 Plus is just too big. I was hoping that when it made a bigger phone, Apple would do things or change its plan to really show off the promise of a larger screen, to make it easier to use and take full advantage of. But it didn't. Apple just made a bigger iPhone, the same thing I've used for years. That's okay, and again, this may well be the best smartphone on the market. But the iPhone 6 doesn't quite feel like a revolutionary device. It feels like Apple playing catch-up, just giving the people what they want and nothing more. I wish Apple had really taken the chance to rethink how we use a phone now that our phones are so big. Instead, we just got a really great big phone. Nothing less and nothing more.