iPhone X first look: Face ID passes our quick tests and 'animojis' are addictive

As the first iPhone to ditch the home button, go all-in on facial recognition and, oh yeah, crack $1,000, the iPhone X has generated more palpable interest than any iPhone since the original a decade ago.

What's it like? The basics: It has a beautiful edge-to-edge 5.8-inch OLED display, a glass front and back, and a camera system that's very similar to the iPhone 8 Plus camera I favorably reviewed a few weeks ago, with the clever Portrait Lighting effects on those phones now also available for selfies on the X. Supplies are tight, but if you're able to get one, it will cost $999 with 64GB or $1,149 with 256GB.

More:iPhone X first look: Intriguing, fancy and pricey

More:The iPhone X is now available to pre-order, but be ready to wait

More:iPhone 8 review: An excellent phone forced to the shadows by iPhone X

Does Face ID actually work?

This is probably the number one question on people’s minds—it certainly was mine—and so far Apple has passed the test with flying colors. The goal is to use Face ID to unlock the phone in lieu of a passcode. And without a home button on the X there’s also no Touch ID, the method of unlocking other iPhones with a fingerprint.

Apple supplied my own test unit of the X less than 24 hours ago, well short of the time that I’m typically given to review an iPhone. So over time, new issues may crop up. 

What I found out in the first day was that setting up Apple’s facial recognition system is remarkably fast—less than 15 seconds in my tests. You accomplish this by positioning your face in a camera frame and moving your head around in a circular fashion to show off all the angles of your face. Only one person’s face can be set up to work with the phone at any one time.

If you want to let someone else share your phone, you would either have to remove your face and set up theirs, or, if you trust them, let them log in with your passcode.

Inside the phone’s settings you can flip on a setting that requires the person trying to verify that the person whose face is being used to unlock the phone is actually paying attention to the screen. That prevents your kids, say, from attempting to unlock the phone by pointing it at your mug as you sleep.

In any case, you're meant to look at the display from a distance of between 10 to 20 inches. Face ID properly recognized my face when I wore a funky hat, sunglasses or both simultaneously. It also worked in the dark—Apple uses infrared technology to map your face. 

I also tried Face ID it on a number of officemates, both men and women of various ages. It also worked with my 10-year old son’s face.

The most impressive test came when a fully-bearded colleague set up Face ID to recognize his face. After volunteering to shave his beard off, Face ID still properly ID’d him on his next attempt to unlock the phone.

Even so, Face ID is set up to detect modest changes in your face over time, so if you suddenly alter your appearance in some dramatic fashioin, you may have to enter a passcode. 

Face ID also lets you authenticate Apple Pay purchases—you double-press a side button to initiate the payment feature, which I was able to successfully complete in a Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had no way to independently verify Apple’s assertion that Face ID is so secure that the chance that any other person could unlock your device is 1 in 1 million, compared to one in 50,000 for the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

But one thing I was unable to do after several tries was trick the system by placing a picture or video of my face in front of the screen.

No home button: mostly no problem

The absence of the home button means you have to learn a few new navigational gestures, and while by no means hard, well-worn habits are tough to break.

You get to your home screen on the X by swiping up, which is a breeze. Sign of progress: When I went back to my iPhone 7 Plus, I tried swiping up instead of pressing the Home button on that phone.

You get to the multitasking or app switcher on the X by swiping up and pausing for a second, slightly less intuitive than before. To remove a running app, you must press down for a moment on a card representing an app until a circled red dash appears. You deep-six the app by swiping the card up.  Again, not difficult, but a bit less friendly.

You swipe down from the upper right for Control Center, and swipe down from the upper center or left of the screen to pull down notifications. At some point you’ll retrain your muscle memory so you don’t have to think twice about such actions.

The look and feel of the phone

The glass iPhone X feels like a fancy phone the moment you pick it up, though whether it is fancy enough to justify spending a grand will be up to the beholder—and your budget. The display, the largest screen ever on an iPhone despite the fact that the overall size of the X is only marginally taller than the iPhone 8, is beautiful.

Except for this one thing. Though Apple has dramatically cut down on the bezels, a notch on the front of phone sticks out like a tab in a file folder. It covers the camera array at the top of the screen. Though I reckon I’ll get used to it, I found the notch a bit distracting, especially when viewing a web page in widescreen mode. It is a small blemish on an otherwise stylish device.

Animojis are addictive

The very idea of creating animated emoji strikes you as kind of silly at first. Only I predict that every one of you who buys the iPhone X will quickly fool around with them and send off such Animojis to your friends. You do so inside the Messages app. Your pals need not own an iPhone to receive Animojis. (They click a video file to open it.)

How do Animojis work? The camera system on the phone analyzes and mirrors more than 50 different muscle movements of your face. When you smile, your Animoji smiles. When you make an angry face, so does your Animoji. Blink and the Animoji blinks. And when you speak, your Animoji’s mouth moves in kind.

I was able to view an Animoji I sent to a Google Pixel 2 XL, though it seemed to play worse on Android. I also noticed a few audio hiccups.

Apple includes a collection of a dozen Animojis at launch, characters such as a panda, unicorn, or, yep, a pile of poo. The operative word here is “fun.”

Like the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus that seem like an afterthought with the impending arrival of this flashy new handset, the X supports wireless charging through an optional third party wireless charger that supports a standard known as Qi (pronounced “chee.”) Only I haven’t had the phone long enough to evaluate battery life, or even get a sense of how quickly I could juice up the handset. Apple claims you’ll get two hours more battery life than the iPhone 7.

I look forward to further testing the phone. So far, Apple’s sharp iPhone X leaves a strong first impression.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

Baig is co-author of iPhone For Dummies, an independent work published by Wiley