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3 Family-Friendly iPhone X Features You Might Have Missed

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We've had an iPhone X in our family for a while now. Although I'm not advocating rushing out and buying one for every teenager in your home, there are some family benefits I hadn't expected.

Credit: Andy Robertson

Firstly the animoticons are a big hit with the kids - no huge surprise there. This is the ability for the phone's front facing cameras to track your face movements and animated a cartoon animal in real time with what you are saying. It's a lot of fun and we now have a stock of funny videos of us and the kids in animal-message form.

This novelty had some practical benefits. Trying to get the kids to practice their spellings is always a battle. However, sending them as an animoticon got them eager to practice. The combination of sound and seeing how the words are formed in the mouth of these cartoon animals seemed to help them make better guesses of spellings too. They now ask us if its time for their next set of words to practice, rather than us chasing them to get on with their spellings.

Credit: Andy Robertson

The second benefit I'd not seen written about a lot elsewhere is the Attention-Aware Feature that Face ID provides. Turn this on in Settings > Face ID and the TrueDepth camera will check to see whether you are looking at the phone still before dimming the display.

Generally this is pretty useful, particularly when you are reading a long article or detail image without touching the screen. More specifically, though, it's perfect for cooking. Previously, I was forever getting my phone covered in food when I had to repeatedly wake it up. This wasn't helped by Touch ID which doesn't work so well when your fingers are covered in flour.

The Face ID makes it easier to wake up. But the Attention-Aware feature makes the biggest difference. As long as I'm looking at the recipe as I crack eggs, add butter etc, the phone doesn't dim or sleep the display. My iPhone X has escaped being covered in food and I get my cooking done with fewer interruptions. One tip here is that you need to keep the phone in portrait orientation or the Face ID doesn't see you correctly and the screen will still dim.

Credit: Andy Robertson

The third benefit is for the runners in your family. Trying to unlock an steamed up iPhone with a sweaty finger rarely worked for me. I'd have to resort to popping in the Passcode. In the rain, though, this is even harder with a wet screen.

With Face ID I can unlock my phone no problem. Sweaty faces are easier to recognise than sweaty fingers, it seems. This not only means I can check my phone much easier when out on a run but it also avoids getting it too covered in sweat -- which isn't the kindest bodily fluid to consumer electronics.

The other features of the phone have been well received as well. Perhaps predictably, my daughter is glued to the self portrait pictures. We've also found ourselves listening to music via the phone's native speakers rather than connecting to a bigger bluetooth output. It's both louder and better quality than previous phones we've had.

I miss not being able to have the battery percentage on the main screen, and my kids were disappointed that it only supported one Face ID but the other benefits have won us over.

Of course, this is a high end product. It's not something you are going to get for each family member. As such it's even more important that having one in the family offers multiple benefits to deliver good value. It's perhaps too early to offer a definitive answer on that for my family, but early impressions have been surprisingly good.

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