The Nokia Blog

How the taste of irony must taste sweet for iPhone fans this morning. The iPhone 6s Plus has been named by benchmark software AnTuTu as the best performing smartphone it tested throughout 2015, beating all of its Android competitors by a fairly huge margin.

Of course, many reading these pages will know that a criticism often levelled at Apple’s smartphones by Android fans is that the iPhone cannot compete with Android flagships in terms of raw performance. A comparison of specs between an Android flagship and the iPhone 6s Plus is usually used to try to embarrass owners of the iPhone.

It is an easy bat to hit with as on paper the 6s Plus does seem weedy. Apple A9, a chipset that integrates a 1.84GHz dual-core Twister CPU and a PowerVR GT7600 GPU, paired with 2GB of RAM. Huawei’s Mate 8, the second best device of last year boasts blistering specs that read as 4GB of RAM and a Kirin 950 SoC with four Cortex A72 CPU cores clocked at 2.3GHz, four Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.8GHz, and a Mali Mali-T880 MP4 GPU.

Both also sport 1080p screens so the drain in that respect is the same, so how then does the apparently under-spec’d iPhone 6s Plus get a AnTuTu score of 132,620 while the Mate 8 92,746? It’s simple, specs are not everything and the overall package and software are! As for the rest of the list, it is largely made up of devices powered by Samsung’s admittedly good Exynos 7420.

So Apple fans, when your Android rival says that the specs of the iPhone 6s Plus are poor, this should give them plenty of food for thought.

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Last year Apple put itself into the finance sector with Apple Pay, the company’s mobile payment system that has been well received by consumers. However, according to the Wall Street Journal, Cupertino has wider aspirations and is going to launch a rival to PayPal during 2016.

The outlet says that Apple is meeting with financial heavyweights JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One Financial and U.S. Bancorp with a view to starting a PayPal rival. Of course, Apple would be getting into this market late and eBay owned PayPal already dominates the space, with other rivals like Google also in place.

Whether Apple can make a major impact remains to be seen, but the company is adept at entering spaces and revamping them, so if any company can then Apple can.

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Apple’s giant iPad Pro is now available to buy the United States. The 12.9-inch slate is Apple’s most decked out tablet and is the company’s take on a true PC alternative. Launched two months ago, the iPad Pro is now available in a number of configuration and with optional accessories such as the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil.

As part of the roll out, Apple is saying that it will throw in a free engraving. Considering the size of the Pro, you could have a mini essay etched onto the back, but instead Apple allows just a brief message that will sit above the company’s logo.

There are two variants of the iPad Pro, a 16GB Wi-Fi version and a 128GB cellular LTE model, the former will cost $799 and the latter the $1,079. There is also a Wi-Fi 128GB version that will cost $949, but if you want to get the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil you will have to fork out $169 and $99 respectively.

The iPad Pro may spell trouble for the humble old small laptop, including Apple’s own MacBook Air, especially for those who only do minimal casual computing. It will also help Apple’s aspirations in enterprise and with the deal with IBM in place expect Cupertino to really drive this product to companies around the world.

This is probably the most decked out product Apple has ever made, at least in the mobile space. The Pro comes with a massive (it really looks huge) 12.9-inch Retina Display packing screen that sports a higher resolution than the MacBook Air Retina. Under the hood there is an A9X processor that is 1.8 times faster than the A8 found in the iPad Air 2. Apple says the result is the iPad Pro being faster than 80% of the portable laptops on the market and graphically better than 90%.

You may remember back in the day that Steve Jobs was pretty adamant that Apple wouldn’t ever make a stylus, so what do we make of the Apple Pencil? Well, firstly it is not a stylus says Apple, much the same way as Samsung’s S Pen is not a stylus. Ok, we get it, the Apple Pencil is much more functional and in the coming days we will be doing an extensive post on the Pencil, which brings a host of functionality to the Pro that pushes it past any other tablet on the market.

The peripherals do not end with the Apple Pencil as the company also launched a SmartCover Keyboard that connects to the device via three magnetic dots. This further adds to the enterprise leanings of the iPad Pro for those who want to type physically.

As you can probably guess, the iPad Pro is very expensive, insanely so probably. The standard entry level Wi-Fi model with 32GB of storage will cost a huge $799, while a 128GB storage comes in at $949, and the flagship 128GB LTE version is a dizzying $1079. Factor in the $99 price of the Apple Pencil, and frankly crazy $169 you need to pay for the keyboard then you have a very expensive product indeed. Of course, Apple can get away with these kinds of margins, but this is certainly not a casual purchase.

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While the Apple Watch has been a huge success and has become comfortably the most popular smartwatch on the market, it does have limitations. For example, it was not the game changer we thought it would be from a tech perspective and devices like the Microsoft Band have more robust health features.

Apple is not discarding health though and in fact CEO Tim Cook says the company is still very interested in developing a wearable that delivers true healthcare potential. Speaking to the Telegraph while visiting the Covent Garden Apple Store in London, Cook said that the company wanted to make a product that had full FDA approval, although it would probably not be a smartwatch.

“We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) process. I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it—maybe an app, maybe something else,” Tim Cook said in the interview for the Telegraph.

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When is the iPad Pro launching? The word from retailer Sam’s Club is that the device will start shipping on November 13th, with pre-orders starting right now. However, we have previously heard that the Pro will be landing in Apple Store fronts online and bricks and mortar in November 11th. It could be that the device comes to Apple first and then retailers later.

The iPad Pro may spell trouble for the humble old small laptop, including Apple’s own MacBook Air, especially for those who only do minimal casual computing. It will also help Apple’s aspirations in enterprise and with the deal with IBM in place expect Cupertino to really drive this product to companies around the world.

This is probably the most decked out product Apple has ever made, at least in the mobile space. The Pro comes with a massive (it really looks huge) 12.9-inch Retina Display packing screen that sports a higher resolution than the MacBook Air Retina. Under the hood there is an A9X processor that is 1.8 times faster than the A8 found in the iPad Air 2. Apple says the result is the iPad Pro being faster than 80% of the portable laptops on the market and graphically better than 90%.

You may remember back in the day that Steve Jobs was pretty adamant that Apple wouldn’t ever make a stylus, so what do we make of the Apple Pencil? Well, firstly it is not a stylus says Apple, much the same way as Samsung’s S Pen is not a stylus. Ok, we get it, the Apple Pencil is much more functional and in the coming days we will be doing an extensive post on the Pencil, which brings a host of functionality to the Pro that pushes it past any other tablet on the market.

The peripherals do not end with the Apple Pencil as the company also launched a SmartCover Keyboard that connects to the device via three magnetic dots. This further adds to the enterprise leanings of the iPad Pro for those who want to type physically.

As you can probably guess, the iPad Pro is very expensive, insanely so probably. The standard entry level Wi-Fi model with 32GB of storage will cost a huge $799, while a 128GB storage comes in at $949, and the flagship 128GB LTE version is a dizzying $1079. Factor in the $99 price of the Apple Pencil, and frankly crazy $169 you need to pay for the keyboard then you have a very expensive product indeed. Of course, Apple can get away with these kinds of margins, but this is certainly not a casual purchase.

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Numbers announced by Apple today show that adoption to iOS 9, including the newly launched iOS 9.1 is going swimmingly, with some 66 per cent of all compatible iPhone and iPads now running the software. iOS 9 is the latest full build release of Cupertino’s mobile platform, and it seems as though customers are eager to get it.

Indeed, over the last few days’ adoption levels have soared by 9 per cent as Apple said at the beginning of the month that levels were at 57 per cent. More people are getting new iPhones over the holiday season, so expect the percentage to rise considerably to almost full capacity over the next couple of month.

Android fans applaud Google when a new build reaches 25 per cent over a year life cycle, but Apple is the real king when it comes to getting sweeping adoption levels.

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Apple has had a busy couple of months, rolling out a number of new products, including two news iPhones and two new iPads. However, at the iPhone 6s/iPhone 6s Plus launch event, one variant of the all-conquering smartphone was not unveiled. We are talking about the iPhone 6c, which was widely tipped to land at the event as a replacement for the iPhone 5c.

A new report suggests today that Apple is still interested in the handset and that it will replace the plastic construction of the iPhone 5c in favor of the company’s familiar aluminum. The report says that the iPhone 6c will launch in 2016, likely in the fall when Cupertino raises the curtain on the iPhone 7.

However, we are not so sure. The problem is, the only thing that differentiated the iPhone 5c from the iPhone 5 (which it effectively replaced) was that it was plastic. If Apple debuts a metal c class smartphone then what is to differentiate it from just being an iPhone 6? We think the company is more likely to just use its outgoing flagship as its tier down smartphone.

However, there is the chance that the company is working on a smartphone that will feature a 4-inch screen, a form factor that Apple is still interested in. We do expect that handset at some point, whether it will be called the iPhone 6c is another matter.

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