Merry iPhone 6s-mas!

Today’s the day Apple’s latest smartphones go on sale in 12 markets around the world, and thanks to some threats I made to the local UPS man last week, my shiny new handset arrived before I’d even had chance to make myself a coffee this morning.

After putting it through its paces for a few hours, here are my first impressions on all that’s new. It’s super-fast, Live Photos are tons of fun, and 3D Touch is a must-have.

Your personal hero now has an S on its chest and, behind it, are some new superpowers. Behold, the iPhone 6s.

But wait: There’s still some money to be spent on a new suit of armor and some other accessories to exploit the talents of the latest hardware out of Cupertino.

Cult of Mac has drawn up a shopping list for you. You could probably squeeze the 6s into the same case and carry on with your current set of headphones, but hey — a new iPhone only comes around once a year.

The iPhone 6s has Apple’s best iPhone camera to date, but just how good is the company’s 12-megapixel marvel?

To give you an idea, Apple recently handed an advance iPhone 6s Plus to documentary and VR makers RYOT. They used it shoot a short documentary about a painter in Haiti, who uses colors to transform his poor neighborhood.

It’s a great demo of the iPhone 6s Plus in action — and a fantastic short film, to boot.

Check it out below.

Foster + Partners is currently making a name for itself by designing Apple’s new spaceship campus and flagship stores, but once it’s done taking over Earth, the London-based architecture firm wants to help NASA create human colonies on Mars.

Norman Foster’s firm revealed its plans for a 93-square meter habitat that would be 3D printed from the loose soil and rocks on the the martian surface. The firm’s designs were shortlisted as a finalist for the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge hosted by NASA and America Makes.

This is the same architecture firm that designed Apple’s spaceship in Cupertino as well as most of the flagship Apple Store. While the structures presented in the Mars plan are vastly different from what Apple uses, it shows the kind of crazy ideas that go into modern architecture, some of which can be implemented in one way or another here on Earth.

Here’s how the firm says it would put 4 astronauts on the red planet:

Although we’re not sure if it did much to damage sales, last year’s iPhone launch was marred slightly by the so-called Bendgate problem — most famously shown off by the man who bent an iPhone 6 Plus with his bare hands.

Given the notoriety that video enjoyed, it’s no surprise that this year’s customers would be willing to put their new iPhone 6s handsets through the wringer to answer the immortal question: Will it bend?

While his testing method isn’t exactly scientific, Australian YouTuber Christian from FoneFox took up the challenge with his brand new iPhone 6s — and the results look very promising indeed.

Check it out below:

Having Apple on your side can, unsurprisingly, be a massive boon to any manufacturer. But don’t try and play hard ball with Cupertino — as the Taiwan-based Largan Precision could be about to find out.

According to a new report, Apple may shift 30 percent of its orders for the lens modules for the iPhone 6s away from current contractors Largan Precision to Japanese rival company Kantatsu, over Largan’s refusal to lower its prices.

iOS 9’s new always-on “Hey Siri” feature promises to be a game changer for iPhone 6s-owning users of Apple’s AI assistant. For the first time ever, these owners won’t have to plug in their handsets in order to use Siri’s new voice activation tech.

So how exactly will this untethered “Hey Siri” improve your life? Let us count the ways…

The new iPhone 6s looks identical to last year’s model, but there are some major differences in the hardware, as revealed by the gadget gurus at iFixit, who have already torn apart Jony Ive’s fabulous new creation.

When you’re lining up for a brand new iPhone on launch day, the last thing you expect to see outside the Apple Store is a whole team of people from Samsung. But that’s exactly what iPhone 6s buyers in London were greeted by this morning.

Samsung sent a flock of people to gatecrash the iPhone 6s launch at the Apple Store on Regent Street to promote the Galaxy S6 edge and S6 edge+, and to hand out free goodies bearing Samsung’s “#NextisNew” slogan.

With watchOS 2, you can now use any photo in your library to make a custom Apple Watch face. And that gives you a lot of freedom to make the wearable your own, but sometimes, you and the watch might have different ideas for how to treat your pictures.

Here’s a quick and easy way to make sure that your Apple Watch looks exactly how you want it to.

iOS 9 was set to have a new feature that would let developers create smaller apps targeted to specific iPhone devices. Called App Slicing, it would allow developers to target specific devices with smaller versions of their apps, rather than just sending out bloated Universal apps that need all the assets for all device types, including iPads.

App Slicing has been delayed until an unspecified time in a “future software update,” according to Apple’s developer website.

We figured tonight’s iPhone 6s launch would draw some crowds, and sure enough, they are. Fans all over the world are lining up to be the first to get their hands on Apple’s latest hardware, and we have the pictures to prove it, starting with that massive batch of Hamburgers above.

Here are crowds outside of Apple Stores from across the globe.

If you want to record the smoothest 4K video with an iPhone, skip the 6s and go with the 6s Plus.

The two new iPhones appear to be identical in almost every way except screen size, but in a new 4K video comparing the digital stabilization of the iPhone 6s against the optical/digital stabilization on the iPhone 6s Plus, the new camera on Apple’s bigger-than-big iPhone is clearly superior.

Check it out for yourself:

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus haven’t gone on sale yet but Apple has already released the first bug fixes for the new smartphones.

iOS 9.0.1 with support for iPhone 6s and 6s Plus was seeded out to users this afternoon, bringing with it a number of improvements for Safari, Photos, alarms, and more. Apple released iOS 9.0.1 to the public yesterday, but it didn’t include support for the company’s newest smartphones. Once iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners receive their devices tomorrow, they’ll likely need to run a software update to install iOS 9.0.1.

Here’s a full list of the bug fixes:

Google voice searches just got faster and more accurate, thanks to new acoustic models that provide better voice recognition, especially in noisy environments.

This post is brought to you by Jutiful, maker of AZZL and other smart games.

Much as candy makers know what taste buds they’re appealing to, game makers have learned what makes people respond. Similarly, the “animation puzzles” in AZZL make it feel like a game that’s also a confection: sweet and a little addicting.

We want our iPhone case to look pretty and protect our investment. Beyond that, we ask nothing of it.

One technology company wants its case to do a little more, though. OAXIS is launching a case that also serves as a second screen, an e-ink display that gives you time, allows you to receive important messages and lets you read your favorite e-book.

You’ve got the perfect photo lined in your sites and so you push the button on your iPhone camera. Instead of a memory etched in pixels, you get a message saying “Cannot take photo. There’s not enough storage.”

An iOS app called IceCream lets you quickly free up space without deleting photos, instead saving them to a secure cloud server with the tap of a button.

The new camera on the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus have already been put to the test in the fashion world, and on the baseball diamond, and now ahead of the device’s release tomorrow, National Geographic is showing fans what the new 12MP sensor can do when it replaces your entire camera bag.

National Geographic sent Mark Leong to the Chinese city of Sanjiang to retrace the first road trip that set the tone for his career as a professional photographer. Instead of lugging around his DSLR and suitcase of extra gear though, Leong was only allowed to shoot with the iPhone 6s Plus, which he says turned out to be ‘incredibly liberating.’

Take a look at some of the stunning images he captured:

No matter how much slimmer the other stuff we put in our pockets might get, our keys remain the jangly, jagged mess they’ve always been. At least that was the case, until KeySmart 2.0’s Titanium Key Organizer came slicing into the scene, cutting the clutter and bringing the keeper of our keys up to the slim, sleek standards of the 21st century. It does all that and more, and it’s just $29.99.

Here’s a thought to make you feel old: With the launch of the iPhone 6s, Tim Cook will have officially overseen the launch of more new iPhone generations as CEO than Steve Jobs.

While Jobs was running the show at Apple during the original iPhone, 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 era, Cook has been in charge during the 4s, 5, 5s, 6 and 6s timeframe.

The party is on, but there’s a problem: There’s no stereo or Bluetooth speaker for the music.

But a startup out of Montreal has developed an app that allows partygoers to create a DIY sound system. AmpMe is an app that syncs streaming music across the many smartphones at that party to create one powerful sound system. That means iPhones and Android phones can join forces to save the day.

ROBLOX, the popular user-generated online gaming platform, introduces kids to game building and even helps them earn a few bucks in the process. Some ROBLOX game developers have earned enough money to pay for college.

Now some of the more successful developers will raise their gaming cred even higher as ROBLOX launches a free app for Xbox featuring 20 of its top games.

3D Touch has been the most widely-praised feature of the iPhone 6s in its advance reviews, so it’s no great surprise that savvy jailbreakers would attempt to replicate the technology in older iPhones.

One attempt at this is a new free tweak called ForceTouchActivator, which tries to impersonate 3D Touch by using long presses to expand the functionality of your iPhone.

And as far as free tweaks go, it’s not a bad effort. Sort of.

Sloppy coding in some popular iOS games allows hackers to give themselves and others thousands of dollars’ worth of in-app purchases for free.

The hole was discovered by developers at DigiDNA, creator of a backup tool called iMazing that allows iPhone and iPad users to access their devices’ hidden file systems. The developers found that the app backup/restore feature in iMazing 1.3 exposes weaknesses in the way games like Angry Birds 2 and Tetris Free handle in-app purchases.

To demonstrate how easy it is to hack in-app purchases using this method, the DigiDNA team tweaked Angry Birds 2 to start the game with 999,999,999 gems — the equivalent of $10,000 of in-game credits.