8 things we love about the Apple iPhone X – and 6 we don’t
Apple's most expensive iPhone is both a beauty and a beast, but it's not perfect
8 things we love about the Apple iPhone X – and 6 we don’t
The iPhone X is Apple’s new pride and joy, signifying the biggest revamp of iPhone design ever. Its show-stopping all-screen build and face-recognition security features make it feel like the truly exciting phone we’ve been waiting for Apple to make for a while, but it also starts at £999, which takes some serious justification. With that in mind, here are eight things we love and six things we don’t about the iPhone X. Will you still want one after reading?
Love… that striking design
With stainless steel along the border and glass on the back, the X’s design feels like a merging of the classic iPhone aesthetic with something new. That all-screen front is simply stunning, with just a hint of a bezel running around its edge. While some people hate the notch that houses the True Depth camera system, it fades from focus after using the phone for a while. Oh, and it’s got a nice heft to it too.
Love… the gorgeous screen
The X is the first iPhone with an OLED display, and the difference over an old LCD is clear. Its extra-tall screen offers deeper blacks and fantastic contrast thanks to HDR support and Apple’s True Tone tech, which automatically adjusts the colouring based on your ambient lighting. The 2436×1125 resolution is a little lower than you’ll see on some Quad HD Androids, but we found the difference to be pretty much imperceptible. It’s super sharp.
Love… its perfect size
The 5.8in screen might be physically larger than the one on an iPhone 8 Plus, but since it stretches upwards and there’s very little bezel, it actually feels much like a standard (but taller) iPhone 8 in the hand. That means you still get plenty of screen to play with but it brings back a level of one-handedness that had been lost with other Plus-sized iPhones.
Love… that it’s a true powerhouse
The iPhone X’s A11 Bionic chip has carved out a massive lead over its Android rivals in all benchmark tests so far, proving that it’s an absolute monster of a smartphone processor. In everyday use, it doesn’t feel dramatically faster than a top Android phone, but there’s extra power in store for whatever Apple and developers want to use it for. You won’t have any problem running flashy games, apps, and media on this handset for a long time to come.
Love… glancing to unlock it
We thought we’d miss Apple’s excellent Touch ID sensor but Face ID takes seconds to set up and works surprisingly well – most of the time. It has been spot-on in a variety of lighting and environment conditions, but occasionally just doesn’t spot you. That’s frustrating, but it’s still the best version we’ve tried of facial scanning to date, using the True Depth camera system to recognise your mug and unlock the phone, automatically input passwords, and authorize Apple Pay.
Love… its fantastic cameras
Together, the iPhone X’s two 12MP cameras provide one of the top smartphone shooting experiences you can buy. With the main camera, you’ll get clear photos with nicely saturated colours and excellent contrast. And the allied telephoto camera brings in an improved Portrait mode, as well as tweakable lighting conditions with the Portrait Lighting function. It also lets you zoom without losing detail, like you would with digital zoom.
Love… charging it wirelessly
Granted, we’ve been waiting for this one for a long time, but the glass backing of the iPhone X opens the door to wireless charging capabilities, meaning you can toss it onto a Qi-enabled charging pad to top up without having to worry where you left your Lightning cable. It’s a pretty solid battery inside, too, which routinely gives us a full day of usage, although you might make it tap out sooner with heavy gaming and movie usage.
Love… making poop sing
Thousands of years of human evolution have been working towards this point and it’s finally arrived. The True Depth camera system has given us Animoji – animated figures that match your facial movements 1:1, meaning you can make the panda or poop emoji belt out the chorus to Let It Go and record little videos to send to your pals. Surely worth the £999 alone, right?
Don’t love… the insanely high price
We thought £869 ($949 in the US) for a Galaxy Note 8 was pushing it but the £999 ($999 in the US) starting price for an iPhone X is sort of mind-blowing – and that’s only for the 64GB model. If you want 256GB it’ll cost you another £150 ($150 in the US) on top. We will say that the iPhone X feels appropriately premium in the way that the fancier Apple Watch models do but still – a grand!
Don’t love… the camera bump
The protruding camera on previous iPhones was mildly annoying, but the large, vertical bump on the iPhone X is almost obnoxious. Tap on the phone when it’s laying “flat” on a surface and it’ll wobble with every input. That’s no good. The glass surfaces also make it a bit slippery, so you might have multiple reasons to wrap it up in something sturdy and solid, which hides that lovely design. The gadget fan’s paradox strikes again.
Don’t love… the out-of-date apps
Many of the biggest apps and games have been updated for the iPhone X, filling the entire screen and working around the notch to show the potential of its big, beautiful display. But there are some that are still stuck in the 16:9 era, with black bars, or weird auto-fill workarounds that block the battery indicator or lose UI elements. They’ll all get updated eventually but for now it’s more than a little bit frustrating.
Don’t love… having to relearn iOS
The home button has been such a fundamental part of how iOS works for so long that removing it plays havoc with your iPhone muscle memory. Apple has done a really nice job of adapting the classic navigational routine to a phone without a button (swipe up to get back to the home screen and the little bar at the bottom to switch between apps) but it’ll still take you a while to get the hang of the interactivity overhaul.
Don’t love… that stupid headphone dongle
Bringing the headphone port back for the iPhone X would’ve been a U-turn of monumental proportions, like bringing Jar Jar Binks back for the next Star Wars film (but less annoying). We accept that wireless is the future. What’s not acceptable is the cheap little dangling dongle you’re forced to use if you can’t quite stretch to a pair of Bluetooth headphones having just shelled out £1000 for a phone. There’s a serious mismatch there, Apple.
Don’t love… that you can’t fast-charge out of the box
It’s one of those features that we’ve been waiting ages for and now that it’s here we can’t even use it right out of the box. Instead, you have to buy a USB-C to Lightning cable and a USB-C power adapter that supports USB power delivery if you want to fast-charge your iPhone X. Apple’s official set sells for a mind-boggling £75 ($75 in the US), and while you can find them cheaper elsewhere, this really should be standard.
