iPhone X Review Roundup

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Because I’ve only had about 24 hours with the iPhone X, I’m in no position to write a review yet. But my quick take:

• Face ID works great. In practice it’s like not even having a passcode on the phone. You just swipe and you’re in. It’s also very quick to set up — way quicker than setting up even a single fingerprint in Touch ID.
• I don’t really notice the notch while using it.
• I do notice the lack of a home button. I think I’ll get used to the new no-home-button UI soon, but 10 years of habits die hard.
• The device feels great.

I was far from alone in not getting an extended period of time to test the phone before the review embargo lifted.

Here’s what others are saying in their reviews.

Matthew Panzarino used iPhone X for a week, and stress-tested it with a family trip to Disneyland. (He did the same thing with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus three years ago — it’s a great conceit for a review.) He also got on-the-record interviews with Phil Schiller, Dan Riccio, Craig Federighi, and Alan Dye. Riccio flatly denied reports that Apple was scrambling to get Touch ID working with iPhone X:

“I heard some rumor [that] we couldn’t get Touch ID to work through the glass so we had to remove that,” Riccio says, answering a question about whether there were late design changes. “When we hit early line of sight on getting Face ID to be [as] good as it was, we knew that if we could be successful we could enable the product that we wanted to go off and do and if that’s true it could be something that we could burn the bridges and be all in with. This is assuming it was a better solution. And that’s what we did. So we spent no time looking at fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side because if we did those things, which would be a last-minute change, they would be a distraction relative to enabling the more important thing that we were trying to achieve, which was Face ID done in a high-quality way.”

Panzarino, on the iPhone X’s OLED display:

I hate to say it, but it makes the iPhone 8 Plus LCD look kind of like butt. I love it, even though it is flawed in one noticeable way.

The one area where this display falls prey to standard OLED gripes is in off-axis viewing. Apple tells me that it has done work to counter the drop in saturation and shift to blue that affects OLED screens traditionally. I can tell you that, compared to other OLED screens, you have to get further “off of center” to see a real shift in color, holding the phone 30 degrees or more off of dead on. But it is still there. For people who share their phone’s screen or use it at odd angles a lot, it will be noticeable. On some phones, OLEDs go super blue. On the iPhone X it’s more of a slight blue shift with a reduction in saturation and dynamic range. It’s not terrible, but it definitely exists.

I see the same thing with mine.

Nicole Nguyen also used iPhone X for a week and wrote a great review for BuzzFeed:

Whatever. I don’t feel strongly about the notch either way, but it’s really the other end of the screen that feels awkward. It’s when the keyboard, in any app, is on screen (which, for me, is most of the time): There’s all this dead space on the bottom, where Apple could have put common punctuation, frequently used emojis, or literally anything, but instead left it blank. Other full-screen apps on other phones put navigation or other design elements in that area, and it doesn’t look crowded or crammed. It looks fine. It’s puzzling why Apple didn’t put something more useful down at the bottom, or why it didn’t add a row of numbers or emojis up top and push down the keyboard to make it more thumb-accessible.

It does look like a waste of space, but I wonder if testing showed that there needs to be some space under the keyboard to separate it from the virtual home button? If there weren’t a gap under the keyboard, you might hit the home button while trying to hit the space bar, and vice versa. Update: I’ve heard from a little birdie that my speculation is correct; also: it’s about typing comfort.

For a normal human who isn’t aware of the 30,000 invisible dots being projected on their face or the 3D map of their head encrypted somewhere deep inside their phone, there’s nothing “futuristic” about these interactions. Using Face ID is what life without a passcode — life before we all became paranoid technofreaks — felt like.

That’s my take too. It’s like not having a passcode set.

Lance Ulanoff, in his review for Mashable:

During my first 24 hours of using the iPhone X, I helplessly pressed the space where a button should be. It’s a kind of Phantom Home Button Syndrome that I expect all iPhone X owners will experience in the early days.

It fades, though, and rather quickly, thanks to a smartly designed gesture interface and something Apple calls Face ID. […]

One important limitation of Face ID: It only lets you register one face. That may strike many as unnecessarily limiting since Touch ID lets users register up to 10 fingerprints, but Apple says it found the number of people who register more than one person’s fingerprints is miniscule. There’s also the simple and obvious fact that humans have 10 fingers, but just one face.

I’m surprised it’s only a minuscule number. I’ve got a fingerprint registered on my son’s iPhone — I’m sure other parents do the same thing. And last week my wife let me put a fingerprint on her iPhone so I could use Apple Pay while pre-ordering her iPhone X while she slept.