Apple iPhone X (64GB) - Space Grey

I received my X on launch day and I absolutely love this phone. If you would like a list of just my thoughts on the phone, scroll down pass the introduction.The transition:NO home button! The staple of the iPhone is gone; well, moved to a little notch at the top. I was expecting this transition to a home-button-less iPhone to be difficult, but all of the gestures feel so natural. I find myself annoyed trying to utilized an older iPhone as the interface now feels clunky. Switching through apps, opening the phone, accessing everything, it's all so easy. Now, this isn't to say there isn't a transition and while everything feels natural, there is a period of time where you have to get used to the new interface and some aspects that initially seemed difficult become second nature. For example, reachability was a favorite feature of mine and while it was initially hard to activate, I have now learned how to activate it without an issue (reachability brings the iPhone screen down halfway to reach top parts of the screen without moving your hand).Face ID:I was skeptical to say the least, but Face ID works (almost) perfect. It does however learn from its missteps and if it fails to identify you, it will add that data to its cache. I personally scanned my face normally the first time and on the second scan did it at roughly a 45 degree angle so I could lean over my phone to view notifications. As I've adjusted to Face ID, it has gotten faster and faster at scanning my face and it's not something you need to wait on to open your phone. By the time you swipe up on your phone, it's unlocked and ready to go (I seriously forget I have a password). I also really enjoy the ability to utilize Face ID for my password for other logins and the ability to open up an app directly from the lock screen without having to then enter my fingerprint/passcode.It's important to note here that your privacy is well, yours. No one has access to the data Face ID gather's and it is truly yours. Apple has a good track record on keeping your data private as they are not in the data business (hello Google & Facebook).What I love:- The screen looks amazing. The colors are vibrant, the blacks are deep with black wallpapers flowing aimlessly into the phone (to the point you cannot see the notch in the screen if the wallpaper is black).- The Notch! Yes, the notch. Some people seem to hate it, I think it's iconic and makes the iPhone X stand alone in oled sphere. It fades into the user experience and I have not had any issues with it.- The screen size. I have always wanted a plus, but I always felt like it was too big for my hands. That I would drop the phone and there it goes. The X remedies this for me and I get to use a larger screen in nearly the same form factor as my 6S. The screen truly looks amazing and if you haven't seen one, check one out at a local store.- I'm not sure how much of this is just because my 6S was a few years old, but the taptic engine in the X is amazing. As in, when the phone vibrates, I can easily identify what it is through the vibration and the vibration itself feels smooth.- Force touch is also fantastic and the haptic feedback on everything from a like on twitter to moving apps around is wonderful. Makes the screen feel more three-dimensional in a way.- The camera takes wonderful pictures. I have taken a few pictures in portrait mode and some pictures genuinely look like they were taken with a DSLR camera.- The speakers are louder than I expected and sound very clear. Great for impromptu music listening.- The phone is a little heavy, but it is definitely comfortable to hold. It feels like a luxury device and has a certain weight to it.What I don't:Honestly, I do not have a genuine complaint at this point. The only complaint that comes to mind revolves around the lack of optimization I have faced in some apps, but that is a developer problem and even then, developers have optimized a majority of their apps and my issues have been few and far between.

The X might have the thinnest screen bezels of any iPhone, but it could only get there by ditching the physical home button. That also meant getting rid of TouchID fingerprint scanning, so instead we get FaceID facial recognition.It takes two cameras (one regular, one IR) an IR dot emitter and separate IR flood illuminator to accurately scan and recognise your face in less than half a second, and all that tech takes up space.The way it bulges out into the display is certainly unique. It’s a bit like Marmite - you either love the distinctive look, or you hate the way it intrudes on your screen space. After a week with the phone, I’m in the former camp - although the effect it has on software is another matter.Open an app that hasn’t been updated yet and you’ll get massive black borders at the top and bottom of the screen, or left and right when you’re in landscape. The notch is unmissable in this mode when you open Safari, with certain web pages looking downright ugly.Apps that use Apple’s autolayout fill the screen, but not always how you’d expect - sometimes blocking out the battery indicator or losing UI elements offscreen. Even apps that have been updated can look a little funky.The fact that big names like Spotify didn’t have updated apps ready to go on launch day is a bit of a joke.But anyway, back to the screen itself. It’s a 5.8in panel, technically making it larger than the iPhone 8 Plus, but the 19.5:9 aspect ratio means it’s more like an iPhone 8 stretched vertically. Add in the notch and that’s quite a lot of dead space in certain apps and games.Honestly, though? It’s difficult to mind that much - the screen is absolutely phenomenal. That’s mainly down to the switch from LCD to OLED, giving the X the impeccable contrast and deep, inky blacks that have been impressing us on Samsung’s Galaxy phones for years.Resolution has leapt up to 2436x1125, a big change from the iPhone 8 Plus and its 1080p panel. Pentile panel tech might not resolve as much detail as an RGB LCD screen, but some clever anti-aliasing on Apple’s part means it’s difficult to spot any lack of detail.OLED panels can end up so looking ridiculously vibrant you’ll want to wear sunglasses whenever you look at them, but Apple has been pretty restrained here: photos and videos on the X still pop with colour, but they stay on the right side of realistic.TrueTone colour calibration helps here, automatically tweaking the colour temperature to match the ambient light around you. It’s a subtle effect, but you’ll notice the difference when you flick it on and off in the settings screen.It gets impressively bright for an OLED panel, too. I had no problem reading the screen outdoors on a sunny day.That brightness comes in handy for HDR video - the X supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Netflix is already updated, and works great on a good connection, with a great range of colour and more depth to dark scenes.For all the pitchforks and torches banging on Google’s door over the Pixel 2 XL’s off-angle colour shift, the iPhone X isn’t immune from the effects either.With no home button, the X makes you rethink how to use your iPhone. And it all starts with FaceID.Instead of tapping the fingerprint sensor, you now raise the phone, tap anywhere onscreen or press the side button to wake it, then swipe up from the bottom of the display to get past the lock screen.Normally, in the time you’ve done all that, FaceID has fired out thousands of tiny infra red dots, scanned them with an IR camera, and mapped your face. All your contours, curves, bumps and ridges make for a unique ID that’s even more difficult to fool than a fingerprint sensor.As you’ve only got one face (I hope), you don’t have to consider which hand you’ll be picking up the phone with, or to hold it in a certain way so your finger lines up with a physical button - handy if you found the iPhone 8 just a little bit too small, or the Plus that little bit too big.When FaceID works, it works brilliantly, taking less than half a second to recognise you and unlock the phone. Over time, it’ll get better at recognising you, tracking things like hair and beard growth so as not to get confused. Go for a shave and buzzcut and you might need to retrain it, though.It worked through sunglasses, while I was wearing chunky headphones, and with a hoodie covering my hair, but leaning my hand on my chin could sometimes defeat it.Lying in bed, I would often hold the phone too close to get a match, and it’s harder to unlock while sat on your desk than the old TouchID system.It might not be 100% accurate, but it’s still better than any other face scanner we’ve tried on a phone, including the ones found on some Samsungs. When it does fail, you’ve got to tap in a passcode - just like you would with TouchID.It’s not exactly elegant, but it’s rare enough not to be annoying - unless you’re stood at a London Underground ticket barrier, with a queue of people behind you. Double-tapping the side button to invoke Apple Pay and waiting for a face match feels a little bit slower than the old TouchID system, but maybe that’ll change once it becomes second nature.All these face-scanning shenanigans might sound serious, but there’s a lighter side to it all too. Fire up iMessage and you can play with Animoji: animated emoji characters that you can move with your face.By motion-tracking your facial features, the phone can animate your eyes and expressions perfectly, recording your voice in sync for sending as messages to your mates. It’s purely for fun, and all but guaranteed to annoy your non-iPhone X equipped mates, but undeniably cute at the same time.While the notch might seem like a big deal, it totally disappears once you’ve spent a few hours with the phone. With most day-to-day tasks, you won’t really notice it, especially when using the iPhone X in portrait mode. What you will notice over time is how the entire iOS UI has been redesigned around it.Until now, iPhone models have had an ever-present (unless you are in the full-screen mode) bar that’s been used to display all kinds of important information from the time, to signal strength, and to even indicate if some app is using your location information. With the iPhone X’s notch, there’s very little space for all this information - the left side is taken up entirely by the clock, while the right only has room for the signal strength indicator, 3G/ 4G/ Wi-Fi indicator, and the battery icon.You no longer see things like the name of the network, which might not seem like a big loss, but there are two other compromises that will potentially be more upsetting for most users. The battery percentage and Bluetooth connection status are now only visible only if you swipe down from the right of the notch, and there’s no way to have them always visible. If you use Bluetooth devices like AirPods, speakers, or in-car units, you can no longer tell at a glance if your phone is connected.The notch will bother you in full-screen games and videos, or if you use the your phone in landscape mode a lot. By default, the aspect ratio of the iPhone X’s display means that most videos will play with thick enough black bands on the left and right that the notch will blend in without any problems. However, if you choose to zoom in - by using pinch-to-zoom in the YouTube app for example - you bring the notch into play, even as the video gets cropped like on any other device. We regularly watched videos zoomed-in and it didn’t bother us one bit, but your mileage may vary.On the other hand, we did like some of the changes that the notch’s presence has resulted in. One of our favourite iOS features is the ability to scroll to the top of any list or page by tapping the bar at top. However, if some app is using your location in the background, or if some device is connected to the hotspot on your phone, this functionality breaks as tapping on the bar then takes you to the app using your location in the background, or the Hotspot settings, as the case may be. With the iPhone X, the location/ hotspot alerts are restricted to the left “ear”, which means you can still tap the notch or the right ear to scroll to the top of any list - that’s right, the notch does recognise your taps.We’ve spent considerable time talking about the notch, but if you are wondering what exactly it is, this little section is for you. With the iPhone X doing away with the Home button - and with it the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, Apple needed a new way for us to quickly and securely log in to our devices and authorise payments. The solution is Face ID, and the notch contains the front camera and 3D sensing sensors that make this technology possible.The three main components here are the infrared camera, flood illuminator, and dot projector. The latter projects “more than 30,000 invisible dots” onto your face to build a 3D map that can be used to identify you. The flood illuminator makes it possible to do that in the dark by emitting invisible infrared light, and the infrared camera reads the dot pattern. The infrared image is sent to the Secure Enclave in the A11 Bionic chip - a special area that’s used to store biometric data on the chip that powers the iPhone X - to confirm a match. Like with Touch ID, Apple says no biometric data actually leaves the device at any point, which means that your privacy is assured.The day the iPhone X was announced - and well before we had spent any meaningful time with it - we said that Face ID felt like a compromise, that it could never be as fast as Touch ID, and that Apple would go back to using fingerprint scanners as soon as it could figure out how to embed them into the glass fronts of its phones . A couple of months into having used the iPhone X, it’s safe to say that while Face ID might not have the raw speed of Touch ID, a move away from Face ID won’t be because of any significant drawbacks in the technology.It works seamlessly on most occasions, and more reliably than we’d imagined it would going into our review. It’s almost like having any no passcode or security feature on your device. That might not be a change for many people - despite manufacturers’ warnings during the setup process, we find an uncomfortably large number of people continue to use their smartphones without a passcode - but for everyone else, Face ID reduces the extra step of unlocking your phone before you can use it.Granted, most of us had become accustomed to using fingerprints to the point that it never felt like an “additional step”, but now, at most times, you can just pick up your iPhone X and trust that Face ID is just authenticating you in the background.For all practical purposes, this feels like using a phone without a passcode. This is especially great when you are interacting with notifications. Before the iPhone X, tapping on a notification - say, to read an email - on a locked device meant using Touch ID or needing to enter passcode to unlock before you could proceed. With Face ID, the additional step is removed, and you can now interact with notifications as originally intendedThe ‘notch’ is where all the Face ID bits are housedFace ID isn’t perfect, though, but then neither was Touch ID; the fingerprint scanner was poor if your fingers were slightly greasy or wet. This isn’t a problem now. However, I have found that Face ID struggles if my eyes are a shrivelled mess, usually first thing in the morning, and if the phone isn’t close enough to my face. If you’re the type of person who tries to sneak a look at their notifications with your phone at pocket-level then you’re out of luck.Apps that previously used Touch ID as a means of unlocking will automatically be replaced by Face ID without the need for an update, and you can of course use it for Apple Pay payments too.iPhone X – ScreenThe iPhone X sees Apple switch out its usual LCD screen tech for an OLED panel for the first time. Samsung, Google and many other Android phone makers have been using this technology for some time now, and it’s nice to see Apple finally joining the fray with a product other than the Apple Watch. This is also the highest-resolution screen ever on an iPhone, with a slightly odd 2436 x 1125 pixels, plus there’s support for the DCI P3 colour gamut and Dolby Vision HDR.OLEDs offer better contrast, true blacks and a more colourful picture, but they’re not always perfect. The LG panels used by Google in the Pixel 2 XL have come in for plenty of criticism for poor viewing angles and an odd blue tinge. Even the excellent screen on the Samsung Galaxy S8 is prone to suffering poor viewing angles.Apple’s OLEDs come from Samsung, and while there’s a small shift to blue if you tilt the device off-axis, it’s far less noticeable than on the Pixel 2 XL. Apple says it’s made a fair few tweaks to this panel, and the company’s optimisation of it is certainly different to Samsung’s approach for its own Galaxy S8 and Note 8 panels. Colours on the iPhone X are more natural and the saturation isn’t quite so intense.At last......The Good A great blend of handheld comfort and a big, gorgeous OLED screen. Rear telephoto camera outshoots the 8 Plus in low light, and the front camera snaps impressive portrait selfies. Face ID generally works fine.The Bad New interface and no home button mean major adjustments, and key features such as the Control Center are harder to reach and use. It’ll take time for most apps to be optimized for notched screen. The phone is hella expensive, and the all-glass design means a case and an insurance plan are musts. Shorter battery life than iPhone Plus models.The Bottom Line iPhone X is an overdue and winning evolution of the iPhone, but you’ll need to leave your comfort zone to make a jump into the face-recognizing future.If you find this helpful vote helpful button.