Amazing OLED screen, Face ID, wireless charging
Closing apps is fiddly, screen ratio, price
Possibly the most anticipated smartphone in 10 years has finally reached the hands and pockets of the Apple-buying public. The media furore has been at times deafening, and the early first impressions ranged from considered insight to absurd gushing nonsense (sadly, there was far too much of the latter). But has it been worth the wait?
We've seen bezel-free screens already from a number of manufacturers, and the X's killer app of Face ID has already been beaten in myriad ways – but Apple often comes from behind to put out near-perfect products that solve the niggles other companies can't quite iron out.
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It changes everything! That unblemished Super Retina OLED screen, the peninsula of darkness that is the "notch". The X drastically redefines the iPhone as we know it. It's like using the future of smartphones, today. No, its more than that... it's a postcard from the edge of iPhone innovation!
Of course not. It's a new phone. Let's get some perspective here. That's just a taster of some of the effervescent hyperbole the X has generated so far. Don't get me wrong, the X is clever in many ways, and also disappointing in a few others, but it will not change your life. It should, however, confirm the way smartphone design is headed: all-screen, camera smarts, wireless everything. Oh, and if I ever use a phrase like "peninsula of darkness" in anything other than jest you can take me out and shoot me.
The screen, without a doubt. Apple calls it the Super Retina Display, but actually its a 5.8in OLED screen with High Dynamic Range (HDR), a 1,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio, and high resolution (2436 x 1125; 458ppi). It really is superb, and so it should be as Apple says it was "custom built to our exacting standards". The interesting thing is that who it was custom built by: Samsung. Indeed, Samsung's component division will likely make more money off the iPhone X than it will off its Galaxy S8. Let that sink in.
The reason is right now Samsung has 90 per cent of the global OLED market share, so Apple has to turn to its rival to offer this serious upgrade. There are some excellent details, such as how the OLED panel follows the curves of the device right into the rounded corners (achieved by an innovative folding and circuit stacking technology). Then the X uses a neat process called "subpixel anti-aliasing" to make individual pixels smooth for pretty distortion-free edges. The effect works. And, as you would expect from an OLED, the screen is vibrant with pure blacks, and combined with that HDR functionality you have a formidable display that will make the very best of hi-res video. It's easily the best screen seen on an iPhone. Then you have that notch at the top housing the camera and Face ID sensors.
Bugger off. Firstly, I don't have a problem with the notch at all. It looks fine and even almost disappears once you get used to it being there. What's more, I like the way the time, connectivity and battery info is hidden either side of it, out of the way. Most apps and web pages I use either have updated to adjust for it or the screen simply drops to start just below the notch. Yes, you lose a little screen real estate, but hardly anything to cry about.
What is slightly frustrating is that even though the X has the largest display panel of any iPhone, thanks to the odd ratio of that panel, video content has to run only on the main central part of the screen, leaving black bars on either end. The result is you get a much larger video screen on the 8 Plus than the X. Sure, you can tap to make the images fill out the entire front of the phone, and when you do this it looks lovely, but to achieve that you have to opt for chopping off the top and bottom of whatever you are watching. It seems an odd compromise that to make the best of the lovely, lovely screen you have to ditch parts of the content you want to watch on it.
Colours: Silver, Space Gray
Display: 5.8-inch 2436x1125 (458 PPI) HDR OLED
Storage: 64GB, 256GB
Chipset: Six-core Apple Fusion A11
Memory: 3GB
Connectivity: LTE Advanced/802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi‑Fi
Camera: Two 12-megapixel sensors with one f/1.8 wide-angle lens, one f/2.4 telephoto camera, 4K 60FPS video recording, 120FPS 1080p video recording, optical image stabilisation on both sensors
Front-facing camera: 7-megapixel TrueDepth camera with FaceID
Everything else: Apple-designed Image Signal Processor for sharper photos, hardware noise reduction, AI-powered Portrait Lighting, A11 Bionic chip for FaceID and Augmented Reality applications, IP67 water resistance
Price: From £999/$999
Endlessly. But in fairness this new Apple system is full of nerdy cool. Now, other mobile brands have been playing with facial recognition but some could be fooled by pictures as they operate in 2D. Apple's Face ID uses its TrueDepth camera to fire more than 30,000 infrared dots (so it works in complete darkness) at your visage to create a precise depth map of your face. The whole setup takes seconds and is surprisingly effort-free. Once it has your face map (the system focuses on your mouth, nose and eyes in particular), you can use Face ID to unlock the phone, authenticate stuff and pay for things.
Those familiar with the Xbox Kinect camera will have already used a very similar system. Why? Because Apple bought PrimeSense, the Israeli company that created the infrared depth-sensing kit for the Kinect, back in 2013. It's taken the company this long to miniaturise it and put it in an iPhone, which should give you some idea of how innovative this is.
Yes. I found it unlocked the phone about 19 times out of 20, which is more than respectable. It's also fast, too, so a look at the screen combined with a swipe up from the bottom sees the iPhone X wake, unlock and open to the home screen all in one. Using it for payments is just as hassle-free. Your cards can be instantly "pre-loaded" for ticket barriers etc, and after just a day you are fully used to this form of authentication.
Apple says the probability that a random person could look at your X and unlock it using Face ID is approximately 1 in 1,000,000 (versus 1 in 50,000 for Touch ID). That said, of course, some have already cracked it using various methods from lookalike family members to 3D models. No system is completely safe, so this is all about how much safer it is than Touch ID (which was also hacked, if you recall) – on that, time will tell.
Face ID also adapts to changes in how you look, such as wearing makeup or growing a beard. If there is a significant change in your appearance, like shaving said beard, Face ID asks you to confirm your identity with your passcode before it updates your face data.
Hold on. It's not all gravy. I am not convinced that Face ID is actually quicker than Touch ID, and if this is the case then it leaves you with the odd feeling of why make users switch. Also, one of the cool things about Touch ID was that you could let family members store a fingerprint on the phone so all could unlock it if needs be. Face ID only allows one profile to be stored. Also, since Touch ID had become lightning fast, once practiced you could reach to pay for something and while pulling the iPhone out your back pocket. You could wake and pre-arm the ID fingerprint sensor before you had even drawn the handset round to the front to tap and pay. Face ID spells the end for this type of slick manoeuvre and requires you to take out your phone, look at it, then pay. It's not quite as fluid.
Actually, no. I'd trade the home button for a bigger screen any day – even if you do have to unlearn 10 years of muscle memory to forget about reaching for it. Apple has gone to a lot of trouble to come up with a series of gestures to get around the lack of the home button, such as a swipe down from the top right to bring up the control centre. Nearly all of which work well.
The one place this fails though is if you want to force close apps – essential for keeping that battery charged (especially with satnav and map apps). To do this now, rather than double clicking the home button and simply swiping up to close an app, now you have to swipe up from the bottom of the screen to about halfway, then pause, then the open apps appear in gallery format. Here that muscle memory will be screaming at you to swipe them up to close them. Don't. I can't tell you how many times I have made this mistake so far. From here you hold a finger on one of the open apps, then red dots appear in the top left corner of each. Now you can swipe up to close it. What a palaver! Yes, it's the one crappy element to the gesture control, but it's really bad. I can only imagine Apple will think of a quicker, more intuitive way to do this in future.
Give over. First released in 2008, Qi wireless charging (the kind used in the X) had by last year been incorporated into more than 140 smartphones, tablets and other devices. Still, that hasn't stopped some posting videos of their iPhones magically sucking in charge from thin air as if it were some kind of sorcery. It's a case of better late than never for Apple, here. Still, this does now mean that as a result of the might of Apple finally wading into the wireless power fray we will now see wire-free charging units pop up absolutely everywhere - which would be very welcome indeed.
The wireless charging on the X is facilitated by a new glass back, which looks nice, but we all know what happens with glass on phones. The more there is, the more there is to crack. Apple says the glass is as tough as it gets on mobiles, but will not provide data to support this claim. Get a protective case.
The fast-charge battery itself in the X is great. It lasts two hours longer than the one in the iPhone 7, which is certainly a noticeable bump up and means easily a full day of use on normal operation. Since switching to the X, I have yet to get into power trouble, in fact. Achieving a 50 per cent charge in 30 minutes is welcome, too. Even screen-intensive video playback does not seem to drain the battery appreciably.
I am afraid so. The unspoken fact in the tech world is no normal person really cares about exactly how good the camera on their phone is, they just want it to work well and take nice pics. Still, in a world of near parity on smartphone hardware, it remains one of the last battlegrounds. That's why we write so much about the cameras when reviewing phones – it's normally the only place where we can say anything appreciably different is on offer.
The TrueDepth camera system on the front not only operates the Face ID gubbins, enables Portrait mode selfies (with that all-important blurred background), Portrait Lighting (with those instant lighting effects) and Animoji. Yes, we have arrived at the age of singing poos. God bless technology. What can I say? Animoji works just fine, if you really go for this sort of thing, analysing over 50 different facial muscle movements to achieve the effect. I guess some things can only be conveyed properly by gurning faecal matter. I really am getting too old for this particular shit.
The redesigned dual 12-megapixel back camera system is very capable indeed, with dual optical image stabilisation. The ƒ/1.8 aperture on the wide-angle camera is now partnered with an improved ƒ/2.4 aperture on the telephoto camera. There's a new colour filter, an improved image signal processor, faster autofocus in low light (the X takes in 36 percent more light than its predecessor) and better HDR photos. A Quad-LED True Tone flash has something called Slow Sync, which means more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds.
That dual optical image stabilisation is killer, though. I shot the video above leaning out of the window of the new BMW X3 as we were driving at high speed on a dry river bed in Morocco. You can see how rutted and rough the ground is, yet the dual sets of minute magnets providing that image stabilisation are working overtime to compensate for rapid and sharp movements to make it look as smooth as it does. Bravo, Apple. And this isn't even at 4K at 60fps, which the X can indeed produce should you tell it to. Slow motion can also be specced to record in 1080p HD at 240fps.
With the new A11 chip complete with better CPU, GPU and built-in neural engine (600 billion operations per second), this was always going to be a powerful phone. And it is. For those, like me, who find the Plus-size iPhones too much to handle, this is the perfect size where you get a big screen in a smaller handset. The OLED screen is great, too. Though one wonders how bad things would have been had my X not had a "fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating", as it stands it picked up prints with considerable ease.
The main thing here with the X is Face ID, because most of the rest we have seen before elsewhere (bezel-free screens, done; wireless charging, done). So is Face ID and the first OLED for an iPhone enough to upgrade? Certainly not if you have the 8, and probably not if you have the 7. Anything below that and you should definitely go for the X. Or wait for the new iPhones coming next year, which will more than likely also have the new screen and Face ID abilities.
This is indeed the best iPhone created yet. Was it worth the hype? No. But then nothing was ever going to be worth the hype the X garnered. Sadly, my world remains unchanged. Is it worth the price? At full price it's hard to say yes. But who buys phones outright these days, anyway? And I always question the sanity of people who want to scrimp on the one device you are going to use every hour, if not even minute, of your waking day.
The iPhone X may well be able to recognise you, but you should also recognise what it is, too. A damn fine phone and, while not quite the pioneer some have made it out to be, a confirmation of things to come.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
