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iPhone X Review: 12 Days With Apple's Most Important Phone Yet

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Update: This in-depth iPhone X review has now been rewritten with new insights and extra images. It now includes updates about apps like Super Mario Run which have just been updated to run full screen, how Android users may find the new iPhone easier to switch to, and more. It features responses to readers' comments and questions which are, as ever, very welcome.

The new iPhone X is arriving in Apple Stores around the world now. I've been testing it non-stop since Monday October 23. There's a lot to say about how the new facial recognition system works, how the absence of the Home Button leads to a whole new way of using the phone and whether you should be checking out Animoji (spoiler, oh yes, you should). I've tested the battery long enough to be sure it's settled in, studied the phone's day-to-day performance and more.

David Phelan

Design

Before you turn the phone on, the design barrels out at you. It’s a different shape – a little wider and taller than the iPhone 8 – but with a shiny, polished stainless steel band around it, unlike any previous iPhone, and with the same stainless steel wrapping around the dual camera bump on the back.

The glass back, on the silver review unit I have, is a slightly different colour to the iPhone 8’s silver version; the iPhone X looks warmer and slightly darker.

The whole thing has an opulent, high-end feel to it. Looks-wise, it’s the classiest iPhone yet.

David Phelan

The back glass has an oleophobic coating on it, but in my experience it still picks up fingerprints.

Turn it over and, with the power off, it’s hard to get a sense of the display, not least because space gray and silver models both have black frames.

Switch on and all is revealed. The frame that runs around the display is wider than many expected, roughly the width of the bezel that runs down the long sides on the iPhone 8 Plus. Why is that?

My guess is that it’s a design choice made on the basis that the bezel is precisely even all the way around the phone, perhaps instead of having wider bezels at the sides than the ends or vice versa.

The OLED that Apple has used is a flexible one that is folded underneath, with individual pixel control giving rise to the perfectly round corners all around the display. Very Apple. It’s a matter of taste but personally I like the way the bezel defines the screen.

Then there’s the TrueDepth camera system or, as many people call it, the notch.

David Phelan

There’s no denying it, it’s a dominant element on the iPhone X. It’s an unmissable feature that catches your eye every time you look at the screen. And then, suddenly, it vanishes.

After, I would say, about two days of using the phone, being indifferent or even gently annoyed by it, the notch became utterly unobtrusive. I had got used to it.

To the extent that even when I was viewing a photo on screen at maximum magnification, I liked the way the image sneaks round the notch, like spilt paint gently filling in the gaps between floorboards. In other words, it emphasizes the total screen available. In short, the notch looks okay.

David Phelan

Display and Screen ratio

The display is noticeably longer than on other iPhones, or indeed other smartphones. This is not the 18:9 screen ratio of LG’s recent phones, or 18.5:9 as found on the Samsung Galaxy Note8.

No, this one has a screen ratio of 19.49:9, so no wonder it looks long and narrow. After a while this seemed fine, but it took longer for me to adjust to this.

And to get this much screen in a package this small is something worth the trouble to adjust to – it fits the hand perfectly.

This is also the first OLED screen on an Apple phone (though Watch users are familiar with the technology).

It looks fantastic: pin-sharp thanks to the 458 pixels per inch resolution and beautifully colored because of Apple’s work on color accuracy and the True Tone feature also seen on other Apple screens.

I have to say, though, the color changes notably when you angle the phone away from you. A bluish tinge is strongly evident. That’s a characteristic of OLED and is found elsewhere. And it may be because True Tone is so good that it’s more noticeable here.

It’s not a deal-breaker because it’s imperceptible when you’re viewing a movie in landscape mode from an angle, if two people are watching together, say.

Speaking of watching movies together, the speakers on the phone are loud and precise, so, actually, you could play a movie through them.

One more thing about the screen: not every app has updated to fill the display. For now, these apps appear in letterbox form, so actually they’re not quite as big as they’d be if they filled the screen of the iPhone 8 Plus, as I learnt playing Super Mario Run on both displays.

Update: Super Mario Run has been updated to fill the screen thanks to cunningly reshaped backgrounds. It doesn't alter the play area, just expands the bits that were missing from the top and, mostly, the bottom of the screen.

Turn the page for details of the iPhone X interface and Face ID...

David Phelan

Interface

But the big changes, the ones that took me longest to find natural, were the ones caused by the removal of the Home Button and how the iPhone X works.

Of course, with a screen that stretches all the way to the bottom, further down than on most other phones, there was no way to include a button on the front. Apple chose not to mount a fingerprint sensor anywhere, on the back, on the side button or under the display.

Instead, of course, it went for Face ID, of which more later.

But as a result, there have been big changes to the iPhone’s user experience. The biggest changes for years, or possibly for ever. To open the iPhone X from the lock screen, you swipe up from the bottom of the display (after three seconds, a bar and the words ‘Swipe up to open’ helpfully appear to remind you).

When you’re in an app, it’s the same swipe that takes you back to the home screen, complete with an animation that sees the app shrink back into its shortcut icon, in just the right place.

All well and good, but this took me literally two days to stop me from trying to press the missing Home Button. Muscle memory is a powerful thing after years of iPhone use.

And there’s more. Losing the Home Button means no double-press to launch multi-tasking. Now, you swipe up and pause, and the open apps appear as before.

David Phelan

The new system provides extra features. That little ‘Swipe up’ bar rests at the bottom of the screen when you’re in an app. It vanishes when you are watching video or viewing photographs but otherwise it sits there.

Now, you can swipe left or right between open apps without going back to the Home screen in between. This is a real benefit, especially if you’re copying text from a message to paste in an email, say.

Apple Pay is another big change. I was unsure about this at first. Touch ID works brilliantly, quietly in the background looking for a card reader when you just rest your thumb in place. Now, you must double-press the side button and look at the screen while Face ID does its work.

It takes fractionally longer than on the Apple Watch, but is still fast.

Overall, though I miss the opportunity to surreptitiously turn on the iPhone under a desk in a dull meeting to check my emails, most other aspects of Face ID are better and more personal than Touch ID.

Notifications, for instance, are now for your eyes only. You don’t want your latest Amex transaction or text from your significant other revealed to just anyone, surely? With Face ID, as you wake the screen the notification gives the barest minimum information. But as soon as Face ID sees it’s you, the notification slides open to reveal more. It’s a surprisingly intimate-feeling effect.

One other thought about the new swipe-up gesture, inspired by Forbes reader Kieran Nee, who points out that the absence of the Home Button may actually make it easier for Android users switching to Apple to use the system. It's true that the latest Android phones increasingly eschew a physical front button and the swiping gesture is there as an element familiar to any Android user who swipes up to launch the app shortcuts page.

David Phelan

Face ID

As with other features, Apple is not first to the party with facial recognition – though, frankly, if you’ve gone to some of the parties I’ve been to, being first isn’t always the best thing.

Samsung has had face recognition for several Galaxy handsets now, for instance. But my experience of that was that it sometimes worked brilliantly, and sometimes not at all.

Here, there’s a very high level of accuracy. It has been working, for me, 99 times out of 100. It’s fast, too. Look at the screen and the padlock icon unlocks. It just works, as Apple is fond of saying.

You don’t have to wait for the unlock animation: raise to wake the screen and swipe, and nearly always it’s fast enough to unlock.

The exceptions occurred when the phone was lying flat on the table. For the first time, you can wake an iPhone by touching the display – though Tap to Wake is only available on the iPhone X.

To unlock the iPhone X when it’s lying on the table, you have to put your face in just the right place. I mostly found it failed because my head was too close to the phone.

Let’s be clear, when it fails, it’s annoying. It should work every single time. Too many fails and nobody will use Face ID. But you quickly learn how to use it and this is a quantum leap forward from other executions of facial recognition.

It works in bright light and dim, or pitch dark. It works with spectacles or without and contact lenses don’t bother it. It works with some sunglasses – though not all.

It needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth, so covering your lips contemplatively just doesn’t work.

Over the page: cameras, Animoji, performance and verdict...

David Phelan

Cameras

Like the iPhone 8 Plus, there are two rear 12MP cameras on the iPhone X. The wide-angle lens is similar to the one on the 8 Plus but the sensor on the telephoto lens has an f/2.4 aperture against f/2.8 on the 8 Plus. What’s more, this telephoto sensor has Optical Image Stabilization built in, too. Previously, if light was too low to give you a good picture on the telephoto lens, the iPhone would automatically switch to a digitally zoomed image on the wide-angle lens. Now, lower light is less of a problem.

Shooting after sunset on a walk on London’s Hampstead Heath, the camera found enough light for a striking shot.

David Phelan

When I tried the iPhone 8 Plus I found the camera to be significantly enhanced compared to the 7 Plus. There is an improvement here, too, but it feels like a gentler uptick. Though these are still early days, I’ll admit.

More striking is the ability to shoot selfies with Portrait Lighting – a bonus effect of the TrueDepth camera system in the way it maps your face on the front-facing 7MP snapper.

David Phelan

I was worried that the results might look a little sloppy, despite having seen that the Google Pixel 2 delivers great depth-of-field effects from one camera and the right software.

But my fears were misplaced: the selfies I’ve taken on this phone have been excellent. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of selfies, but these were some of my least worst.

David Phelan

Animoji

And the TrueDepth system that gives rise to these selfies, that powers Face ID, has one more gift to bestow: Animoji. These are no more than a gimmick but, oh my, what a gimmick.

Launch messages and in the available apps is one pre-loaded on iPhone X. Tap it and you’re presented with 12 characters. You’ll have seen them demonstrated and you’ll know that as you move your face the character’s face moves in the same way. But you need to try it for yourself to appreciate how remarkable it feels to see your facial movements and voice turned into a monkey, cat or panda.

It’s subtle, varied and imaginative. Once you’ve recorded a message in one of these personae, for up to 10 seconds, playback with perfect lip-syncing and every facial tweak, from a quivering lip to jutting chin is captured and copied. I’m not actually saying you should buy an iPhone X just for the Animoji but, to be honest, I’d be tempted.

Performance

The A11 Bionic, also found on the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, is a fast, capable processor and its neural engine plays a part in the iPhone X’s image processing, especially for the front-facing camera.

And it’s a big part of the success of Augmented Reality, something we’ll see a lot more of in coming months as AR apps arrive.

It’s certainly a fast, responsive phone that works well and delivers quickly. It never kept me waiting, whatever I threw at it and it did everything instantly.

Battery life is stated by Apple at being two hours’ more than the iPhone 7. In real-life terms I found that it lasted a full day of intensive use, with around 10-12% left over, so nightly charges are essential.

As this is a phone which, like the other iPhones this year, is Qi-compatible for wireless charging, it’s easy to just place it on a charging pad while you’re at your desk, say, which extends battery life considerably, of course.

Smartphones, almost all of them, need nightly recharges to be sure. Until the chemical breakthrough that delivers batteries that last weeks, and while every new phone sees us make extra demands on our phones, that nightly ritual won’t change.

Verdict

David Phelan

This is, of course, the best iPhone yet. At the price Apple is charging, it needs to be. But it’s a highly competent phone. It looks gorgeous, so you’d be forgiven for saying it had you at hello.

But, to be clear, it’s not perfect. Battery life is improved but more would be welcome. User experience changes take time to adjust to and the longer display with its wider-than-expected bezel and the distinctive, divisive notch all distract at first. Even if both became second nature eventually. The display, despite its shape is highly attractive and the classy, glossy materials and hand-friendly shape are seductive.

More than that, though, the iPhone X takes elements already found elsewhere (OLED screen, facial recognition, bigger display-to-phone ratio) and implements them immaculately.

Some features are the same as or only marginally better than other iPhones released this year, like the processor, wireless charging or the dual cameras, so for many, an iPhone 8 Plus will do.

There are a lot of changes, big or subtle, with which to get acclimated on this iPhone, bigger than in the last 10 years put together. On the whole, they’re worth it.

The complete package is a phone that looks and feels stunning, performs well and is a deceptively radical re-imagining of what a smartphone should be.

It’s hard to predict the future, even harder to stake your hardware and software on making it. But for now, Apple gives a persuasive argument of where we could be heading.

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