New iPhones announced in San Francisco – iPhone 6S and 6S Plus

It does feel like the rumours around the new iPhones started the week after the iPhone 6 was announced this time last year, whatever the case, Tim Cook has put the rumours to bed by officially announcing the new iPhones here in San Francisco today.

Following the patterns of iPhone releases going back to the 3GS the 2015 iPhone the 11th and 12th iPhone models will be the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus.

Taking the same design as the iPhone 6 models, the 6S uses a new metal material for construction which was first debuted in the Apple Watch which will give added strength and perhaps distance the device from those crazy “Bend Gate” videos and stories.

This year, you’ll be able to buy the iPhone in a new Rose Gold, along with existing the Silver, Gold and Space Grey.

Lets take a look at the key features of the new iPhones

3D Touch

Rather than using the term Force Touch as per the MacBook range, Apple have introduced 3D Touch.  They’ve described this as the future of MultiTouch, adding a new dimension.

Basically, the phone can detect how hard you press the screen, and take actions related.

The best examples we saw demonstrated were from the home screen.  Rather than tapping the camera, then tapping the switch camera button to take a selfie, press and hold the camera button and swipe up to “Take Selfie”

Same with Messages, press and hold, and get the options to Send a new message.

Apple are calling this “Peek and Pop”. Peek in on an app, and if you want more hold and push harder to Pop into the content.

Simple, effective, and will genuinely add some great features to many apps.

Camera

Apple has excelled with their camera over the years, while not the best on paper when you compare megapixel counts and other camera metrics, there has always been something solid about the iPhone camera, primarily the software.

Today Apple added to that a new sensor and claims a greater performance in low-light among other conditions.

It’s producing 12 Megapixel photos, and now for the first time 4K capable video recording

Touch ID

They’ve upgraded the Fingerprint scanner to make fingerprint recognition faster with a second generation Touch ID

Processor

As always, the processor is faster, using a new 3rd generation 64-bit chip – the A9.

It’s 70% faster at CPU tasks, and 80% for graphics.

All this is going to mean more great games, more great apps.

When?

Pre-orders for the iPhone commence this Saturday via Apple and the Telcos.

On-Sale date is September 25 as foreshadowed by EFTM.

How much?

OUCH!  No iPhone under $1,000.  Seems that Aussie dollar is a killer.

iPhone 6s – A$1,079 (16GB), A$1,229 (64GB) and A$1,379 (128GB). Available from 25 Sept 2015.

iPhone 6s Plus – A$1,229 (16GB), A$1,379 (64GB) and A$1,529 (128GB). Available from 25 Sept 2015.

Optus, Vodafone and Telstra are all at the ready to announce their pricing, with huge data plans likely to dominate pushing the monthly prices over $100 to the $130 mark..  We will analyse all the plans for you this week.

We’ll have more details updating this article throughout the day.

Trevor Long travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Apple.