When the iPhone 6 specs were first released, I was completely underwhelmed. The upgrade that finally put me over the edge was the improved camera which performs much much better in low light situations that previous models (see comparison below).
Photo taken with iPhone 5
Same photo taken with iPhone 6
The killer feature I found after making the purchase however was both unadvertised and buried in settings! Here’s the back story:
When I got the iPhone 5 back in October of 2012, I had just moved to Los Angeles and the AT&T network was performing extremely poorly. I took my purchase of the iPhone 5 as an opportunity to switch carriers to Verizon which people said was better in Los Angeles. When I was making the decision, a bunch of people warned me that by moving to Verizon I would no longer to access the internet while on the phone. This seemed like a silly feature that I never used and so I was quick to dismiss these warnings. After making the switch, I immediately discovered this is something you do all the time. You’re on the phone and you need to update directions while driving. You’re on the phone and someone asks you about an email that was just sent. You’re on the phone and you absolutely need to update your twitter feed! So many random things reasons you want to access the internet while on the phone…all things you don’t appreciate until they’re taken away from you.
Flash forward 2 years: Verizon has updated their LTE network and the iPhone 6’s hardware provides the capabilities to access data and voice at the same time. The big caveat to this however is that this capability is NOT turned on by default and is not advertised by Apple or Verizon at all. I think Verizon is trying to save on data costs while still achieving feature parity with AT&T.
Anyway this post was written to expose the easy steps to turning on this killer iPhone 6 feature.
The feature is hidden under Settings -> Cellular -> Enable LTE
The default setting is “Data Only” and all you need to do is change it to “Voice & Data”.
Et voila. Simultaneous phone calls with internet access!
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