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| Think different... because this is very different. |
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| Remember the click wheel? Pepperidge Farm remembers. |
Some of you guys may be aware already, I've been largely Android loyal since I first got a smartphone and the last phone I reviewed, also the one I am currently using is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 which I said was absolutely the best, most excessive phone I've ever used. Now predictably, I've never owned an iPhone; I've used iOS numerous times but never on the device of it's inception. So I'll admit, this is a first for me and with my slight bias towards Android, this will be an interesting review. I'll largely be comparing the iPhone X to the Note 8 and it's similarly speced sibling, the Galaxy S8 which is much closer in size to the iPhone.
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| Eventually the screens will consume the entire universe, and there will be nothing left. Not a single bezel. |
As before, we'll start with the build and feel. Apple has hardly been a slouch when it comes to aesthetics, hell even their products from 2004 still look striking. The iPhone X is no exception and this phone looks and feels very premium. The phone has scratch resistant glass front and back with a chromed stainless steel trim around the edge. Like the Note 8, it's rather slippery and picks up fingerprints like a magnet and like before, I wouldn't trust a finish this nice to keep looking this good after being dropped a dozen times. This a phone that demands a case.
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| Oh you ran out of storage? Sucks. |
The size of the device is nearly identical to the iPhone 7/8 and as some who has been accustomed to giant phones for years now, it feels a little weird and I expect iPhone Plus users might feel the same at first. Of course you cannot swap batteries with the iPhone X but this isn't anything new, and perhaps still a bit aggravating for some users. Also something that isn't new but still kind of sucks is the lack of a microSD slot which basically locks you into buying the correct memory capacity for your phone, be it 64 GB or 256 GB and praying you don't take too many photos or videos. At this point it seems more like a marketing ploy than a hardware limitation but at least they've long gotten rid of the god awful 16 GB models that were next to useless later in their life.
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| This wall adapter sucks. Like, no kidding. |
The iPhone X's battery is an interestingly sized 2716 mAh which puts it's well below the 3000 and 3300 mAh of the S8 and Note 8 respectively. So does iOS's butter smooth efficiency put it over those power hungry Androids? Not really, Tom's Guide reported that while it bests the iPhone 8 in a battery showdown, it still falls short of the iPhone 8 Plus, the Galaxy S8, and the Note 8 although I will say the differences in time in the latter three are hardly substantial. I haven't tested the phone for a full day of regular use yet but I'm fully confident it would handle 18 hours of pain like my Note 8 has been for a while now. On the off hand, charge rate is abysmal compared to the Note 8 at 0 to 100 percent in roughly 3.5 hours. This is largely due to the packaged charger being kind of shitty but it can easily be remedied to charge up to 50 percent in 30 minutes with a higher wattage charger.
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| "You're a funny guy Sully, I like you. That's why I'm going to kill you last." -Type-C to Lightning |
Like the previous generations of iPhones, the X uses Lightning which is a great, rather fast port that at the very least has my favorite feature, being able to insert it flipped either way. I'm slightly intrigued as to why Apple didn't go for Type-C with the iPhone X because it eliminates their own discontinuity they created by dumping all the ports in favor of Type-C on the MacBooks and also put the phone on a universal standard. Perhaps we'll see this in a later iPhone model but I have a feeling that if Lightning is going to die, it's going to die a slow and very controversial death. Or hell, maybe they should just get rid of the port completely. To be honest, I wouldn't rule out them actually doing it. They at least added wireless Qi charging which if you have multiple devices, can make a whole lot more sense.
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| If you think about this, it's not totally bullshit... but it's still bullshit. |
Speaking for getting rid of useful ports, Apple infamously got rid of the headphone jack starting with the iPhone 7 and it's been that way ever since. What? Did you really think they we're going to roll back on that one? Obviously the iPhone X lacks the beloved port and expects you to use Bluetooth headphones or the silly little dongle to use your wired cans. As I mentioned before this decision is a little more livable than it was at the time of of the iPhone 7's controversial "courage" excuse but it's still a kind of annoying change. You do however get a set of stereo speakers which makes the mono speaker in my Note 8 sound like... well shit. They're louder and noticeably clearer than any smartphone speaker I've listened to, and that's great.
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| Take it for a splash. Maybe. Actually don't. |
iPhone's have been pushing for added durability lately and the X is no exception, this device now packs an IP67 ingress rating which means it can survive in 1 meter of fresh water for 30 minutes but it won't withstand high pressures. The Note 8 bests the iPhone with a IP68 rating but seriously guys, try to avoid dropping your phone in liquids. Take comfort in knowing your phone can probably now survive being drunkenly hurled into a swimming pool whereas a few years ago it would just fizzle out as soon as it caught a lick of H2O.
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| It all looks fantastic but trust me, theres nothing to see on the very far left. Absolutely nothing. |
The iPhone X's biggest change arguably is the new HDR Super-Retina OLED display that covers almost the entire front of the phone. Apple's goal here was to try and remove as much bezel as is currently possible and eliminate the home button in the process. The result is that they managed to cram a 5.8" inch screen into a phone the size of an iPhone 7/8 and that's impressive. Although the bump in screen size is hardly an increase over the 7/8 Plus, the small body help give the impression the screen is actually bigger than it really is. Compared to my Note 8's display and the S8, the display on paper isn't as sharp as the two Samsung's but in actual use it looked just as good but not quite as saturated.
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| Some call it "cute". I call it incomplete. |
My biggest issues I have with this display is what it gave up for the sake of this bigger screen. First of all there is this kind of awkward notch in the top of the screen that houses the phone speaker, front camera and sensors. Okay, it looks kind of nifty when held vertically but the way it cuts into horizontal viewing is a little jarring. It also seems that as a workaround when you play games, they hardly utilize the full extant of the display, plus I couldn't find any option to fill the screen with any app that wasn't optimized for it. This especially bad if you take into account that the 8 Plus can full screen everything just fine. The notch at time feels like a bad compromise than some cutesy quirk for what is otherwise a pretty trivial design choice: getting rid of the bezels. If they went Samsung's route and gave you a full rectangular screen whist leaving some bezel at the top and bottom or at least options to freely zoom into any app to compromise for the weird resolution, that would have made the display seem much more worthwhile.
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| Getting here might be a bigger annoyance than you think. |
This also presents another slight issue regarding the home button, or lack of. While the volume, power, and silencer buttons are all in the same spot, the home button has been replaced with gestures. Luckily these gestures are relatively simple to understand although they will be undoubtedly be difficult to adopt for long time home button users. I won't detail all of them but I will say the most annoying changes are powering off the device which now calls for two held buttons; the power and the volume up as well as the App Switcher page which is now accessed by a single held swipe up, seemingly easy to mistake for the ever so similar swipe up and release gesture to go home. Also interesting is the inclusion of 3D Touch which even to this day I have no idea what it's used for especially more so considering Apple decided to forgo capacitive buttons in favor of gestures.
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| Say cheese. |
Also because the home button is gone, TouchID is also gone. This is big deal for a lot of users because it was a fast way to securely unlock your phone without much hassle but was ultimately scrapped due to the engineering challenge it presented with the new display. It's now been replaced by FaceID which effectively creates a 3D map of your face and allows you to unlock your phone at a glance. It's effectively more powerful than Samsung's face detection as it seems to progressively learn your features and improve results when you wear glasses or other facial garb, which it had a hard time initially with me. This advanced mapping also allows you to do neat but also semi-creepy things like send Animojis to people which basically turn you into a talking 3D Unicorn. That's cool... I guess?
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| Siri -"It's okay girl, you'll get there someday" "Oh, I didn't quite catch that."- Bixby |
There of course is also Siri whom I mentioned while I was giving Bixby flak for being a complete noob to the assistant AI game. Siri recently got an overhaul with the latest iOS update and it's speech sounds much more fluid than I last recall. While Siri lacks Bixby's more ambitious features like Bixby Vision, Siri is much more developed and it's responses are quick without many hiccups in recognizing what I'm saying. Again, Siri wasn't always like this and at one point was just as useless as Bixby in it's early stages but if assistant AI's are your game, Apple is home to arguably the most refined of them all.
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| Two times the fun. |
If there's anything that defines the iPhone more than anything else on the market, it's the camera. On the iPhone X you get dual 12 MP sensors that are basically the same as the ones you get on the 8 Plus. I will that while the Note 8 and S8 have much more elaborate camera apps, the iPhone is much simpler to use in that regard. The X is also capable of shooting up to 4K video at 60 FPS. While the simpler UI of the camera app was slightly off putting after playing around with the Note 8's Pro mode for a while, that doesn't mean it's a slouch in quality.
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| Oh look, it's going to rain. |
Here's the usual backyard shot, it was a bit muggy out today but one thing I noticed is the iPhone takes noticeably less saturated photos than the Note 8 by default but they're still fairly close. I'm very impressed with the amount of detail this camera captured and while I would like more fine tuning options, this just does such a nice job on it's own. However this is a top notch camera unit and it's performance is right on par with the Note 8. The front camera is a solid 7 MP unit that does a great job too. Again, another quirk about the phone that I can't wrap my head around why it's a still thing is the camera bump. It's particularly bad because the cameras are mounted in a vertical position in the top corner meaning the phone rocks like a seesaw on flat surfaces without a case.
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| POWER! UNLIMITED POWER! |
As far as specs go, I mean not like it's something people really care about anyways but those that do will be glad to know the X has received a substantial spec bump over it's predecessors. It now features an 6-core A11 Bionic, M11 graphics, and 3 GB of RAM. The S8 and Note 8 are more powerful phones but a lot of that is going to just end up as unused excess. I wholly feel the same way about the iPhone X; I believe this is phone has the capability to do everything you intend for it to get done but it's also probably more than the average user needs. Oh well, at this phone's asking price they better actually have the smartphone equivalent of a flux capacitor crammed in it. Also worth mentioning is the iPhone X has roughly identical specs to the iPhone 8 Plus, something definitely worth taking into consideration.
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| It's a walled garden, but it's a damn well maintained garden. |
The iPhone X ships with iOS 11 and while not too much changed since iOS 10, as I mentioned the gesture system makes figuring out how to navigate the otherwise familiar OS a little more interesting. The overall experience of iOS is very smooth and refined although it's starting to stand out less and less alongside the latest releases of Android. iOS's biggest plus is it's unparalleled security and it makes unwanted access into your phone a royal pain in the ass for anybody but Apple or yourself. While I'm a bigger fan of Android's greater customization, iOS is generally so no nonsense that it makes more sense for more users who don't care about Android's best feature. As for performance against the Note 8, I honestly couldn't find a point where either device was outright faster than the other. Android was at one point so garbage it was virtually no contest against iOS but now it's boiled down to just hardware and software preference. Both are excellent.
The iPhone X is a very cool but also kind of strange phone. It feels like something completely different from previous iPhones but still packs in some sense of familiarity that will appeal to longtime iOS users. The camera is absolutely excellent, FaceID is a solid replacement for TouchID, and iOS is a fantastic OS with some useful features. Like the Note 8, it's the most substantial update to the iPhone in it's whole lineup. However, I did say the iPhone X was a strange phone, and it does have some annoying quirks about it. The packaged charger sucks despite the X supporting fast charging, the new gestures can feel more aggravating at times than the old home button, the lack of the headphone jack, along with other weird design choices like the deliberate notch in the screen and the massive camera bump.
This all runs you a whopping $1000 bucks for the 64 GB model. The iPhone X honestly feels more like an experiment from Apple, a preview of what's to come in the future. Compared to the absolute refinement of the iPhone 8, the X actually feels slightly unrefined in some regards which coming from Apple, sounds ridiculous. It's a very good phone at it's core but it's radical design changes might put off users looking to switch from older iPhone models. It doesn't help that the cheaper iPhone 8 Plus has virtually identical specs across the board except for the screen. I'm sure the ideas presented with the X will be further refined in future generations of iPhones but at the moment I consider it to be far too weird and expensive for what it brings to the table. So bottom line, if you absolutely want something truly new and different from Apple, the iPhone X is an excellent phone. However if you're even slightly fearful of change or just want to save a big wad of cash, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have your back.
The iPhone X currently costs $999.99 for 64 GB or $1,149.99 for 256 GB.
Summary
- Beautifully designed and built.
- iOS 11 on the X is fast, smooth, and powerful.
- The camera is one of the best on the market.
- FaceID works great, but needs a few tweaks.
- The screen is excellent but terribly underutilized at times due to the weird aspect ratio. (Seriously, screw that notch.)
- Gesture controls will undoubtedly take some time and frustration to get used to.
- The iPhone 8 Plus is nearly identical in most specs and costs $200 dollars less.
- In hindsight, it's honestly way too damn expensive.
Is it Better Than?
Samsung Galaxy S8- Depends, the S8 is the closest offering from Samsung to the iPhone X. It's on paper, a more powerful device than the iPhone X with it's own slew of great features although Bixby is pretty half baked compared to Siri. The display on the S8 is slightly better than the display on X, maybe just out of the lack of a notch alone. The camera on the iPhone X is outright better than the S8's single 12 MP sensor but the S8 is also several hundred dollars less than the iPhone X and can be expanded with microSD to best Apple's 256 GB model. Really it's all about hardware and software choice here. You can't go wrong with either.
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