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This is not just another iPhone.
Spend enough time with an iPhone X, and every prior iPhone will feel surprisingly foreign. The radically new display and Face ID are not mere features of this new device – they are foundational pieces of a new iPhone experience that, once lived with, you’ll never want to go back from.
While Federico is hard at work on his full review of the iPhone X, I wanted to share my early impressions of the device after a few days of use.
I received my iPhone X earlier today, but because I didn’t add AppleCare+ to my shopping bag when the preorders opened (I wanted to be as quick as possible, and I was sleepy), today I had to buy it separately.
AppleCare+ came in handy earlier this year when I (inexplicably) bent my 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the repair’s cost ended up being €49 instead of €550. After Stephen Hackett pointed at the more expensive repair costs for the iPhone X, I was even more convinced to add the extra coverage to my new iPhone. Buying AppleCare online is surprisingly easy: you receive an email from Apple with a link, which takes you to iOS’ built-in diagnostics app that verifies your device’s eligibility with Apple’s servers. It takes a couple of minutes, after which you can continue with the checkout in Safari. I never did this myself before because I thought driving to the Apple store just to buy AppleCare was easier; it’s not. The diagnostics app has an iOS 11 large title design, too.
If you also have a new iPhone X without AppleCare, Apple has a support document that explains how you can purchase it here.
On paper, the differences between Apple’s iPhone cameras can be hard to discern year-to-year. That’s why I find photographer Austin Mann’s iPhone camera reviews so valuable. Every year, Mann puts Apple’s cameras through their paces while traveling around the world. In September, Mann took the iPhone 8 Plus to India. He’s back, this time from Guatemala, with a review of the iPhone X’s cameras.
Mann was particularly impressed with the iPhone X’s telephoto lens:
When we got the telephoto lens in the 7 Plus, it was a huge upgrade but the telephoto quality was noticeably less than the wide lens, especially in low light. This created a shooting conundrum… often wishing to zoom in but not wanting to sacrifice quality. Apple closed that gap this year by investing heavily into improving the telephoto lens.
The iPhone’s screen gets high marks too:
This probably the most amazing display I’ve ever seen. Colors pop, blacks are true black and contrast feels just right. I actually found it more rewarding to shoot & share because of how amazing the screen is.
During his tests, Mann also discovered that the iPhone X’s slow-sync flash has been substantially improved:
One of my favorite things about the iPhone 8 Plus review was the slow sync flash comparison against the 7 Plus so I decided to take the iPhone X to the streets for a similar test. While I set out to see the difference in slow shutter effects, what I actually found was the iPhone 7 was easily 2 seconds slower in focusing/firing when shooting moving objects in low light…
The technical differences between the lenses in an iPhone 8 Plus and X may seem small on paper. Austin Mann does an excellent job demonstrating the added flexibility those differences afford users in everyday situations. Be sure to check out his post for examples of what the iPhone X’s camera can do.
The combination of iOS 11 and iPhone X is pushing developers to reconsider many of their interaction paradigms and interface affordances that predated the Super Retina display and drag and drop. In a span of two months, iOS 11 made custom implementations of multiple item selection and reordering effectively obsolete, while the iPhone X now requires apps to embrace its display and novel status bar design.
Overcast 4.0 is a good example of how Apple’s biggest releases of the year impacted apps that needed a lot of work to be updated for the iPhone X and iOS 11. Released today on the App Store, Overcast 4.0 bears no groundbreaking additions to the experience; instead, developer Marco Arment focused on design refinements and simplifying the app’s navigation, modernizing Overcast’s appearance and flow while bringing smaller enhancements to the listening and browsing experience.
There are some notable changes in this version – drag and drop is present, albeit in a limited fashion – but Overcast 4.0 is primarily aimed at foundational improvements and laying the groundwork for the future. Despite this “Snow Leopard approach”, however, heavy Overcast users should still find the many optimizations as well as the “by popular demand” tweaks more than welcome.
Ahead of the iPhone X’s public debut tomorrow, 1Password received a significant update today that brings native Face ID authentication, plus enhancements for clipboard integration and iPad users.
I’ve been a fan of Unread, the elegant RSS reader for iOS, since it came out in early 2014. I stopped using it when I moved to Inoreader as my RSS service (and also because Unread wasn’t receiving major updates anymore), but Golden Hill Software recently acquired the app, and development pace has picked up again.
With today’s version 1.8, Unread is finally gaining support for Split View and Slide Over on the iPad, allowing you to read articles next to your favorite note-taking app or Twitter client. In addition to these iPad multitasking improvements, Unread is now compatible with the iPhone X, and its readability mode should be more accurate as it’s now based on Mozilla’s fork of the popular third-party tool.
I still would like to see Inoreader integration and support for the Taptic Engine as well as drag and drop in Unread. I would love the ability to pick up an article from the main list and drop its URL in another iPad app. For now though, this is another much needed update that modernizes the app’s codebase and puts it on the same base level of other iOS 11 RSS clients. Unread 1.8 is available on the App Store.
iPhone X first impressions and reviews were published today. Some reviewers have had Apple’s latest iOS device for about a week, while others have had it less than 24 hours. Here’s our roundup of the most interesting insights from what has been published so far.
An interesting tidbit from Steven Levy’s first impressions of the iPhone X: by default, the content of notifications on the Lock screen is hidden, and it’s only displayed once you look at the iPhone and thus authenticate yourself.
Alternatively, a good way to see when you’ve been recognized is to notice the generic messages on the lock screen saying “you have a notification” from Facebook, Gmail, or wherever. When you and your iPhone X make that turn-on connection, those flesh out with the actual content of the message. (This feature—withholding potentially private alerts until the phone was unlocked—had previously been available as an option but now is the default.)
What I find intriguing is the fact that – if I’m reading this right – the feature has been turned on by default for the iPhone X, as if to underline the role of Face ID. This option, in fact, isn’t new: on any existing device running iOS 11, you can go to Settings ⇾ Notifications ⇾ Show Previews and enable When Unlocked to achieve the same effect. On the Lock screen, the content of notifications (titles, preview messages, and media attachments) won’t be shown until you place your finger on the Touch ID sensor.
It seems like Apple sees Face ID as not only technically superior to Touch ID (more secure, powered by machine learning), but also as a better user experience for dealing with notifications – otherwise, why would they make it the default setting? I’m curious to play with this and see if I revert to the old option or not.
Ahead of any full reviews for the iPhone X arriving, today one writer and a host of YouTubers published their first impressions for the new device, which releases November 3.
Steven Levy was one of the handful of journalists who received review units of the original iPhone over ten years ago. Today he exclusively shared his early thoughts on what appears to be the biggest evolution of the device, at least in form factor, since that original phone. Despite his praise for the device’s advancements over previous iPhones, Levy concludes that some of the iPhone X’s greatest achievements may only come to fruition with the help of third-party developers.
Remember, as cool as the original iPhone was, it didn’t really begin changing the world until Apple let third-party software developers take advantage of its innards—stuff like the camera, GPS, and other sensors. Maybe something similar, albeit not on such a grand scale, will happen with the iPhone X. Those who shell out the cash for this device will enjoy their screen and battery life today. But the real payoff of the iPhone X might come when we figure out what it can do tomorrow.
As Craig Federighi quipped during the iPhone X’s introduction in September, taking some of the most advanced technology ever found in a smartphone and using it to create animated poo is, well, perhaps unsurprising, but certainly a bit anticlimactic. There are undoubtedly applications of the iPhone X’s TrueDepth Camera and other features that haven’t been dreamed up yet.
Speaking of which, among the YouTubers who were invited by Apple to get early hands-on time with the iPhone X, one of the guys from Highsnobiety performed (jokingly) what is perhaps the first relationship breakup over Animoji. How do breakups by Animoji rank compared to breakups by text?
Videos by UrAvgConsumer, Soldier Knows Best, and Booredatwork contain detailed walkthroughs of how to use the new phone, while Popular Science has a fun science-infused overview of the X’s new features, and FASHION Magazine has a short, quick-hit look at ten favorite aspects of the iPhone X.
Apple’s marketing strategy with the iPhone X clearly appears to differ from the company’s standard practices, with this wave of first impressions preceding any proper reviews. While we should expect to see more traditional reviews from the usual sources in the coming days, perhaps Apple is simply attempting to highlight how this isn’t just like any other iPhone launch.
