Apple’s new and expensive iPhone X is a radical departure from its previous devices with their iconic Home button, but does it work? Here’s our review of Apple’s first thousand-dollar iPhone.
One could easily describe the design of Apple’s iPhone as iconic. If you asked someone to draw you an iPhone, even a child, they would draw a rectangle with rounded corners, with a rectangle on it for the screen, and a small circle underneath the screen for the Home button.
But this year, Apple is resolving to change all of that, as the iPhone X features a radical redesign. The Home button is gone in favor of stretching the screen across the device, and the aspect ratio has changed.
This also means that the entire user experience has changed, as the Home button has been replaced by swipe gestures and facial recognition. But Touch ID was so good; can Face ID really measure up? Can users really be trained to use their iPhones in an entirely new way when they’ve been using it one way for ten years?
And most importantly, what the heck does it mean for the future of the iPhone lineup?
Normally I kick off a review with an introduction followed by specs, but there’s something that I feel I need to get out of the way first.
Apple released three new iPhones this year, which is unprecedented. The company used to be predictable; there was one new iPhone every year, and every two years there would be a redesign with an ‘s’ model in-between. The firm changed that up when it introduced the iPhone 6, offering two phones every year with the Plus. The 6s came and went, and then Apple changed it up a bit.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus offered no meaningful design change over the 6 and 6s . This year, the company introduced two more iPhone 6 clones, the 8 and 8 Plus. There are some minor changes, such as a glass back, but the design remains the same. They fit the more cost-effective price point, starting at $699, whereas the iPhone X comes in at $999.
It’s easy to make a decision between the three, as we’ve talked a lot about the difference between the three devices. But what exactly does it mean for next year? The future of the iPhone has never been this hard to predict.
Typically, Apple’s new iPhone costs about the same as last year’s model, with the old one dropping by $100, so let’s assume that the iPhone X drops to $899. The firm could produce another couple of iPhone 6 clones, although that seems quite ridiculous given how dated the design already is, especially when Apple has already introduced something new.
The other option is what’s currently rumored, that Apple will introduce multiple new phones with the iPhone X design, and all of them will include more powerful internals than the current X. If this is indeed the case, charging $899 for the X seems quite unreasonable. But whatever the case, it seems likely that you’ll be able to get something similar to this next year for a substantially cheaper price.
In other words, it’s hard to make a recommendation as to whether or not you should buy a device, when it’s so hard to predict what’s coming next.
Design and display are going under the same category this time around because the two things are so closely related in this case. Despite the fact that I’ve made dozens of “top notch” jokes about the iPhone X, I really do like it.
The iPhone X has narrow bezels all around, except for a small area at the top of the screen. In the corners, you’ll find your battery indicator, cellular status, and things like that. And here’s the thing: while I don’t love or hate the notch itself, I’ll still take it over the massive bezels of the iPhone 8 Plus, which I also reviewed.
Another thing that I really appreciate is that while the bezels are very slim, Apple didn’t go overboard, which is something that I’d argue that Samsung did. Samsung uses its ‘edge’ display, so it can actually make it hard to hold properly.
Samsung makes the Super AMOLED display, and just as you’d expect from a Samsung OLED screen, it looks awesome. The colors are vibrant, and the blacks are black.
If you’re not familiar with OLED, it stands for organic light-emitting diode. Compared to LCDs (liquid crystal displays), OLEDs produce true black colors because individual pixels can be turned off. LCDs are entirely backlit, which is why when your TV shows you something black, you can still tell that it’s on.
As for the rest of the design, it’s 70.9mm wide, making it much smaller than a Plus model iPhone. It feels much more like a standard iPhone 8 when holding it, which is great. I’ve always preferred the non-Plus iPhone for the form factor, but have used the Plus for the battery life.
The frame of the phone is stainless steel, so it will certainly scratch, although you should be able to polish it out using old iPod tricks like, you know, using polish. I got the silver model, so the back is white (rather than silver) and covered in glass, which allows for wireless charging.
On the right side of the device is the power/sleep/wake/Siri button, and on the left is the volume rocker and toggle to turn sound on or off. On the bottom, you’ll find a Lightning port, microphone, and a pair of speaker grilles, just like you’d expect.
Apple switched up the camera design for this model. The dual camera configuration is now vertical instead of horizontal, probably just so it stands out from the iPhone 8 from the back.
Just as much of a change as the design is, the user experience is completely different, and there are parts of it that I just don’t understand, but we’ll get to that.
There’s no Home button anymore, so to return to the Home screen, you’ll need to swipe up from the bottom. To get to the multitasking screen, you need to swipe up from the bottom, and hold the middle of the screen for a second. Since you can no longer access Control Center by swiping up, you need to swipe down from the top-right corner to do that. The notification center is the same, and you can get there by swiping down from the top.
So, here’s where it gets a little weird. If you go to the multitasking screen to close apps, you can’t just swipe them away anymore, for some reason. Now, you need to hold the tab for a second, and then you can swipe them away or tap the new ‘-‘ icon.
There are other things that have changed for seemingly no reason as well. There’s now a line at the bottom of the screen that represents where you should swipe up from, and if you swipe to the right from there, you can go to the last app that you used. Because of this, you can no longer 3D Touch from the left side of the screen to switch apps.
And that 3D Touch action seems like it should have been the logical way to launch multitasking and switch between apps, as it was already built into the app. But it would seem that Apple has chosen otherwise.
Siri can be launched now by holding the power button, which makes sense and is easy to get used to. In fact, everything is pretty easy to get used to; it’s just that some of the changes seem unnecessary.
I had very low expectations for Face ID, mainly because I’ve never seen facial recognition work well on a phone. It’s great on laptops, since your face is already positioned in front of the screen, but that doesn’t work out as well with a phone that might be in different positions. I really thought that I was going to buy the iPhone X, miss the Home button, and return it for an 8 Plus.
But that’s not the case. It actually really works well. In general, the bar for biometric authentication for me is whether it ends up being more convenient to use a PIN over time, and the iPhone X does very well in that area. But this is an iPhone, and Apple set the standard for fingerprint sensors on phones with Touch ID on the iPhone 5s.
And no, Face ID still has a bit of a way to go before it’s as fast as Touch ID. For me, it’s really only a matter of speed, as accuracy is about the same. There’s the occasional time that the X doesn’t recognize me, such as when I’m in bed and looking at it with my eyes squinted at a weird angle, but it doesn’t happen any more often than when Touch ID didn’t recognize me, such as if I just washed my hands in the bathroom. When it comes to accuracy, they both have their faults.
I was pleased to see that Face ID does work from various different angles. I was very afraid that I’d have to position the phone as awkward angles just to get it to unlock, similar to Microsoft’s iris recognition on the Lumia 950.
If Apple can speed up Face ID a little bit, I think that this can actually be better than Touch ID. Facial recognition is awesome when it’s implemented properly on anything. Because when it works, it’s like having no security at all, and that’s what we all want. We want the ease of no security, but with actual security.
When Apple first announced this phone, I thought that Animoji were the stupidest thing in the history of stupid things. As it turns out, they’re slightly less stupid than that.
They’re actually a lot of fun, at least as a novelty. I’m pretty sure that I won’t be using these things at all within the next six months, but for now, it’s a fun way to send messages to friends. You can record messages of up to 10 seconds, using any of 12 emoji.
It really just feels like it’s a showcase for the new face sensors that are included in the iPhone X. It uses those sensors to capture your facial expressions and then put that on an emoji. It’s also something that can almost certainly be done with just a standard front-facing camera, but again, Apple is showing off its new technology.
Animoji aren’t exactly a reason to shell out $1,000 for an iPhone X, and really shouldn’t even make your top five reasons. Still, they can be a lot of fun.
You’ll never hear me say that a certain smartphone camera is the best. That’s simply an impossible determination to make. The truth is that different things are important to different people. A great example of this is the Nokia Lumia 1020; with its 41MP camera, it took some of the best pictures of its time, but could take over five seconds to launch the camera app and snap a picture, so while the shot came out great, you might have missed your kid’s first steps.
Other features come into play now, such as speed, and the ability to focus quickly. The reason I bring all of this up is because Apple has a new feature called Portrait Lighting, which doesn’t make the camera better at all, but it does add some cool effects to your images.
It builds on top of Portrait Mode, which was introduced with the iPhone 7 Plus. Using the dual cameras, a depth effect is created. With Portrait Lighting, you can choose different lighting scenarios.
Portrait Lighting is available on the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X.
