I've got an iPhone X for a brief loan and I'll be writing about it soon. But one of the things I noticed as I was using it is that the new, larger screen and redesigned keyboard fix one of my biggest gripes about iOS currently - that wretched voice dictation button.
To explain, I spend a lot of time writing messages in one of the 300 apps that I use to communicate with various people. When typing I will very often press that voice dictation button and end up with the phone trying to listen to my words, rather than letting me type.
Look, I get it, this is perhaps the most "first world problems" post anyone has ever written. But I use my phone a great deal, and do a lot of typing on it. I suspect I probably write more on my phone than I do on my computer. So the usability of that is key to me, and so is predictive text - which is one of the reasons I struggled a bit with the Note 8.
"But...", I can hear you say, "you can already turn off the dictation feature and remove the button". And of course you're right, I can. But the thing is, I like the feature. If you're doing something where typing is inconvenient, or want to compose a message that's a bit longer then it comes in handy.
And there's the other issue of it disabling dictation on your Apple Watch too. And that's a feature you'll use a lot if you opt to respond to text messages via your watch. So switching it off is irksome for a couple of reasons.
There's also a lot more to this than one button. For one thing, Apple's new, slimmer phone has now bottom bezel. If you use an iPhone, then you know that it's useful to have a "chin" so that you can keep the phone secure in your hand. The space on the keyboard makes this easier to achieve, and yes, this is all a problem of the weird demand of the public to kill off the bezel, but Apple does, at least, spend time thinking about the implications of design, as well as making things look nice.
The iPhone X is also about a shift in Apple's devices. Next year we'll see more emphasis being put on the X design as the way things are going forward for Apple. That means that these new design decisions will have a wide impact on a much bigger audience. The lack of iPhone X stock has been a massive source of frustration to me, for a number of reasons, but
And while I haven't had the iPhone X for long, I can already tell that the work Apple has done on perfecting its user interface has been productive. The new gestures, for example, work better than I thought. I had worried it would be a compromise, and that's not it at all. It's so much better than that and this is why Apple can implement gestures where a lot of others have failed - it's about giving users something they can, erm, use.
Anyway, I'm not going to tell you to go out and get the iPhone X for this reason, and I'm still getting to grips with my feelings on the device. What I will say though, is that the X has changed things in iOS more than perhaps the tweaks to the hardware have changed the phone itself. It's an interesting time for Apple right now.
