iPhone X Review: Yes, There Are Reasons to Pay Apple $1,000
The first 48 hours with the iPhone X elicits a feeling similar to the one you get assembling mail-order furniture using a poorly drawn 45-step instruction manual. After a lot of fumbling and missteps, you wonder: Am I an idiot, or is this thing’s maker out to crush my soul?
But then comes the moment when the much-hyped new iPhone feels so natural to use that when you go back to even the brand new iPhone 8, it’s like picking up an old BlackBerry.
The iPhone X is a huge change—no more home button, no more fingerprint sensor, no more wide-as-a- Costco -aisle edges around the screen. The surprise for me was, it’s also a fabulous smartphone, one I can recommend even for its $1,000 price tag.
How to Use iPhone X… Told by Animojis
With no more home button, how do you see all your open apps? How do you take a screen shot? Launch Control Center? WSJ's Joanna Stern morphs into Apple's new animated emoji characters to provide 10 key tricks for using the all-new iPhone. Photo: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal.
Typically, Apple has given me about a week to review its new devices, which can result in discovering flaws or shortcomings. (Just see my Apple Watch Series 3 review or my iPhone 6s review.) When Apple provided the iPhone X to me and other technology reviewers on Monday morning, leaving a window of only 24 hours before I could share my initial impressions, my first thought was, “What are you hiding, Mr. Cook?”
So began my search for every possible problem with the iPhone X.
Funny enough, the first iPhone X Apple gave me did have a bug: When I tried to send the all-new Animojis, the phone failed to track my face correctly. But that was a minor and (as far as I can tell) one-off software glitch. I soon resumed testing with a second phone.
This week, I’ve quickly and reliably unlocked the phone with my face in numerous different scenarios. I’ve run multiple battery tests, taken hundreds of photos and spent far too long becoming a talking poop head. While I do have some real gripes, they are outweighed by many reasons for me to give the thumbs-up emoji, especially to those who have long wanted Plus-model features in a smaller, more manageable size.
The iPhone X Manual Apple Forgot
This all-new iPhone brings all-new gestures. Until you get familiar with them all, you may want to keep this little guide handy.
The Dream Screen
The lack of a home button means your thumb is about to turn into one of those inflatable waving tube-men outside the car dealership. To get around the stunningly sharp, edge-to-edge OLED screen, you must master a list of thumb wiggles, waves and swipes.
The most important one? Swiping up from the small bar on the bottom of the screen to get back to the home screen. It so quickly became muscle memory that I inadvertently did it on my iPhone 7.
The other gestures, however, are buried. Many moves require almost surgical precision. For instance, depending how far you swipe from the bottom, the phone decides whether you’re asking for the home screen or the app switcher.
The iPhone X, center, falls between the iPhone 8, left, and the iPhone 8 Plus, right, in body size. PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
While the iPhone 8 Plus has a 5.5-inch display in a much bigger body, the iPhone X has a taller but slimmer 5.8-inch display in a phone closer in size to a smaller iPhone 8. The design is reminiscent of the most recent Samsung Galaxy phones— Samsung has been packing larger screens into smaller bodies for a few years.
The screen’s extra height means that many third-party apps, like Gmail and Google Maps, don’t yet reach the top and bottom edges of the display, leaving big black bars. (Some third-party apps also crashed or became unresponsive during my testing. Hopefully, these problems will resolve when developers get new phones of their own.)
The opposite problem arises when you turn the phone horizontally to watch a 16:9 widescreen video. Black bars flank both sides, unless you tap the stretch button to fill the whole display. Still, watching a video on this vibrant, high-contrast screen is just awesome.
The iPhone X playing video horizontally, with “stretch” option, top, and regular. PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
So is listening to that video: The new stereo speakers are so loud, you’ll likely be turning down the volume. That also translates to great speakerphone calls. Yes, this thing still makes phone calls, and they sound crisp and clear.
So what about that notch everyone’s been complaining about—or widow’s peak, as I like to call it? The indentation at the top of the screen really wasn’t a big deal to me, until I realized that less info up top means no more battery percent meter. To check that, you have to swipe down from the upper right corner to launch the Control Center. I took this change almost as well as that time my mom turned my childhood bedroom into a guest room.
The Selfie Scene
That widow’s peak contains the TrueDepth cameras and fancy depth-sensing tech that make the facial recognition work. As I detailed here, I’ve found FaceID to be just as fast, secure and reliable as TouchID… in most situations. I still miss the fingerprint sensor when I am:
- In bed. When I’m lying down and wearing glasses, it struggles to unlock—likely because the rims obscure my eyes, or I’m holding the phone too close to my face.
- At my desk. When I want to unlock the phone quickly, I have to pick it up and look at it. I know, life is hard.
- At the cash register. You now have to double-click the side button to initiate Apple Pay, then look at the phone. Placing a finger on the home button was simpler.
iPhone X Review: Testing (and Tricking) FaceID
But let’s talk about the real significance of the improved front-facing camera: extremely detailed selfies and those talking emojis.
Like the dual cameras on the back of the phone, the new front camera array collects depth data used to blur the background around your head, or create dramatic lighting effects on your face. In some cases, it struggled to differentiate my face from the background, but no more than the rear cameras do. See example here.
Animojis—“animated emojis”—are a fun trick to showcase the impressive face tracking. In Messages, tap the app icon and then the little monkey. Select one of the 12 emojis (unicorn or bust!), hit record and begin talking. The phone maps your voice and facial movements to the character. As goofy as it seems, it could be a sign of the next wave of virtual communication—3-D FaceTime, anyone?
The iPhone X has two cameras on the back, and two on the front. PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The iPhone X has nearly the same dual-camera system as the iPhone 8 Plus, and side by side, most shots looked the same. There’s one key difference: The X has optical image stabilizers on both the wide-angle and telephoto cameras, while the 8 Plus only has it on the wide. In low light, when I zoomed in heavily, I could in fact capture slightly sharper shots with the X. Low light shots taken with the X are very good, though Google’s new Pixel 2 XL seems to have the edge.
The Battery In Between
In my daily use, I could make it from wake-up (7 a.m.) to just about bedtime (11 p.m.) without charging the phone. That’s similar to what I get with the iPhone 8 Plus, and far better than the iPhone 7 or 8. With the smaller phones, I often charge at least once midday.
PHOTO: F. MARTIN RAMIN/ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
In my more controlled test, which cycles through a series of websites with all screens set at the same measured brightness, the iPhone X lasted nearly nine hours—40 minutes longer than the iPhone 8, but an hour and 20 minutes less than the iPhone 8 Plus.
Like the iPhone 8 models, the X also supports wireless charging. The $60 Mophie Wireless Charging Base I tested required me to carefully place the iPhone X at its center, and even then, it took an hour to charge from just 20% to 40%. And at $1,000, the thing that’s billed as “the future of the smartphone” deserves better than the tiny charging cube that has come with every iPhone for the past 10 years. The X feels like a sports car, so why won’t Apple give it a fast charger?
In many ways, the iPhone X seems like a bridge between the past and the future. Sure, you have to learn some new tricks, but much of the interaction is still very iPhone-like… for now. The X’s faster processor and depth-sensing tech—along with Apple’s new augmented-reality initiative and embrace of talking speakers and ever-more-powerful wearables—lay a foundation for bigger changes to come. One day, the iPhone X will feel old, but today, at the risk of sounding like a Hallmark graduation card, it’s the start of something new.
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