高級閱讀_04 The New Galaxy Note 4 and Apple's iPhone

04 The New Galaxy Note 4 and Apple's iPhone

Despite Apple's best efforts, iPads are still the best tablets in the world.

Last week, the company took the best of the bunch, iPad mini, and shot it through the foot with an update where they added a fingerprint sensor and little else, and whacked ￡100 on the price tag for the mini 3.

Even so, I'd still buy iPad mini over any rival—albeit while cursing Apple underneath my breath.

There are some fields, though, where Apple is the still very much the new boy at school—namely, big phones, an area the fruity tech giant dipped its billion-dollar toes into earlier this year with the giant six-inch Apple iPhone 6 Plus.

Sadly for Apple, the school bully, Samsung, has swaggered up and walked off with its lunch money without even making an effort.

Next to the Galaxy Note 4, iPhone 6 Plus looks like a bodged-together mess.

Samsung has been making huge phones for years—greeted at first with ridicule, then grudging acceptance, before finally being granted the ultimate accolade of Apple producing its own knock-off.

But the 6 Plus really isn't fit to shine Galaxy Note 4's bovver boots.

There's always a Marmite element to really big phones—maybe more so than there is to the brown sludge itself.

I've spent the last fortnight having people looking at me like I'm holding a flatscreen television as I ostentatiously doodle on the Note 4's six-inch slab of a screen.God only knows what people are doing behind my back as I talk on it.

It weighs 176g, and is 8.5mm thick, which at least ensures it won't bend into a boomerang shape in your pocket, unlike those (slightly laboured) videos of bendy iPhones, where desperate bloggers destroy their pride and joy in the hope of a few microseconds of fame.

But if you can overcome your quite natural human revulsion at the thing's size, it's a delight.

The screen is the first bit I'd wave at Apple fanatics who dare to opine that their Johnny-come-lately phone is in any way a match for the great-grandchild of the phone that invented the ‘phablet’ market.

Apple's iPhone 6 Plus's jaded HD screen isn't fit to hold a candle to the eyeball-searing 2560 x 1440 pixel screen here.This thing is sharper than most 60in televisions, but it fits in your pocket.

OK, it only just fits in your pocket, but if you keep trying, you'll get it in there.If you're looking for a big, detailed screen for browsing proper websites on (not the cut-down mobile versions), there's really little that can beat this.

It's blazingly fast, bright, colourful, and the ‘Back' button and home button are located off the screen, which gives you more space to do stuff.

Fish out the built-in stylus, and you can instantly take a screenshot, doodle notes over it then email the result to Apple fans saying, ‘Nyah nyah nyah'.Or something equally childish.

Add to that a truly splendid, metal casing (a first for Samsung), a blazingly fast processor, and built-in pedometer and heart-rate monitor, and you have, for my money, the best phone on Earth at the moment.Apple's 6 Plus doesn't come close.

I'd really nearly caved in and bought an iPhone for the first time in half a decade.But having tested this giant metal beast, I won't.

Apple's iPhone 6 Plus might keep the fanboys happy—but if you bother to put it side by side this one (which Apple fans won't), there's only one winner.