Buster Hein:

The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 is one of the most beefed up and powerful smartphones the world has ever seen. In terms of raw specs, the Note 5 blows the 2014 iPhone 6 out of the water with 4GB of RAM and a zippier processor, but as Apple has taught us for so many years, specs don’t always translate into better performance.

To see how fast the Galaxy Note 5 is compared to last year’s iPhone hardware, DroidModderX pitted the two devices against each other in a speed test designed to mimic everyday use, and the results were quite surprising. The iPhone is running on weaker hardware, but thanks to Apple’s software it managed to blow the Note 5 out of the water, thanks to Samsung’s horrible TouchWiz UI that bogs down all the memory.

Better specs does not equal better experience.

Smarter software > beefier hardware.

I've already said my piece about how much I hate the 16GB model of the iPhone from the user experience perspective. But here's a great look at what keeping this model does for Apple's bottom line.

Jony Ive:

Many years ago, we made prototypes of phones with bigger screens. We made notebooks with bigger screens; it was a concept that we were familiar with. There were interesting features having a bigger screen, but the end result was a really lousy product because they were big and clunky like lots of the competitive phones are still…And we thought there is a danger you are seduced by a feature at the expense of making a great product. And so years ago we realized well this is going to be important that we have larger screens, but we needed to do a lot of things to make that larger screen yield a really competitive product.

It was very important to making [a phone with bigger screen] comfortable and actually feeling less wide than in reality it was.

AppleInsider:

Despite Apple's A8 being run at a slower clock speed, and being dual core rather than quad core as many high end Android are, the new iPhone 6 beats the fastest phablets and flagships from LG, Motorola and Samsung. It's not only faster, it's more efficient, running longer on a slimmer battery.

It's definitely an adjustment, sacrificing one-handed accessibility for a larger screen. It's a little harder to take food pics lol, and I found myself having to use both hands when reading while lying in bed. But because of my bad vision in my right eye, I can definitely appreciate the larger screen for reading.

I have yet to really play with the camera but I've definitely noticed it's improved ability for taking photos in low-light conditions.

I'm really excited to test out the quick autofocus with my puppy; taking non-blurry pics of a hyper pup is one of the hardest thing to do.

My only real complaint is a temporary one -- most third-party apps haven't been redesigned to support the larger screen yet, so they all look like blown-up zoomed versions of the 5S. Surely this will become a non-issue soon.