Apple iPhone X
A stunning phone that’s stuffed full of firsts, but for this price we expect perfection
PRICE 64GB, £833 (£999 inc VAT) from store.apple.com
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
The iPhone X is one of the most talked about phones in years and, for once, it isn’t because it’s simply the latest Apple handset. It’s because it heralds numerous firsts: the first time Apple has used OLED technology for its phone screens; the first time it has removed the home button, after a decade; the first time the firm has used facial recognition as a means of authentication.
Perhaps most controversially, though, the iPhone X represents the first time Apple – or any mainstream phone maker – has hit the £1,000 mark for a base-model phone. The question is, who’s going to spend this much money when they could buy an iPhone 8 for £300 less?
Special screen
The answer, as we’ve already seen, is hordes of people. And surely the biggest reason is that display: stretching from side to side, top to bottom, it really does look spectacular. In part that’s due to the OLED technology, which makes colours pop, and with a resolution of 2,046 x 1,125 it delivers a pixel density of 458ppi. It’s the best iPhone display ever made.
Unlike the Google Pixel 2 XL, there are no problems with viewing angles and odd-looking colours. Contrast, as you’d expect from an OLED display, is essentially perfect, and colour accuracy is spot on.
As with all current generation iPhones, the screen has adaptive colour profiling. That means that when in the browser, where most graphics and professionally produced photographic material is targeted at the sRGB colour space, it tweaks onscreen colours to match. During video playback, the phone will automatically switch to the wider DCI-P3 colour space.
I measured the average colour difference (Delta E) in the browser at 1.04 across all our tests. That’s astonishing accuracy in a phone, especially one with an OLED display. It supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision as well as Apple’s ambient light-matching tech, True Tone, and Apple adds the shiny cherry on top with a stunning peak brightness of 501cd/m2.
Black and white
The iPhone X is available in two colours: white, with a chrome silver trim; and black, with a shiny dark grey trim. Neither, to my eyes, look as
good as a £1,000 smartphone ought to. Next to the “mocha brown” Mate 10 Pro I’ve been using for the past couple of weeks ( see p61), it’s positively dour. The trim on my white review model starts picking up greasy fingerprints the moment I pick it up, quickly losing its box-fresh lustre, as does the rather plain white rear.
There’s no surprise about the positioning of the phone’s various physical elements. Aside from the lack of a home button and the power button, which has moved around to the right edge, they’re all in the places you’d expect. Other things from previous generations remain in place, with dust and waterproofing to the IP68 standard and no 3.5mm headphone jack. The removal of which, I still believe, was a mis-step.
Likewise, I’m not convinced by the camera module on the rear. It’s large, unsightly and juts out around a millimetre. This unbalances the phone when it’s placed on a flat surface, so it rattles whenever you swipe or tap.
The infamous “notch” on the front, which so many have scoffed at, doesn’t bother me at all. If anything, it lends the phone character – an identifiable X factor if you like – that makes it look different to other current flagships. Lord knows it needs something to help it stand out.
The positives are the same as they are with every other 18:9 aspect ratio, low-bezel phone I’ve used: it has an incredibly high screen-to-body ratio, which essentially means more screen real-estate for a smaller size of phone. So, while the 5.8in screen is larger than any previous iPhone’s, it’s considerably smaller and lighter than the 5.5in design Apple has been using for the past three years. And those trademark rounded corners and edges mean the iPhone X is just as comfortable to hold and slide into a tight pocket.
Face the future
The consequence of filling almost the entire front of the iPhone X with screen is that there’s no longer any room for a home button on the front nor, controversially, a fingerprint reader. Instead, Apple is moving to a new biometric approach, with Face ID the primary means of unlocking the phone and using Apple Pay.
Face ID works by using the phone’s “True Depth” camera to project infrared dots onto your face – 30,000 of them – and producing a 3D model of your face that it stores internally, alongside a two-dimensional infrared image. It then uses the same sensor to scan your face, match it against the stored model and unlock your phone – all in a fraction of a second. Apple claims the likelihood of someone who isn’t you unlocking your phone is one in a million, making it more secure than Touch ID. Aside from being fooled by identical twins, and one isolated case where a ten-year-old boy unlocked his mother’s phone, those boasts have so far proved to be true.
So what’s it like to use? Despite my initial scepticism, I must admit to being impressed. Setting it up is as simple as enrolling a fingerprint on an iPhone 8 Plus: simply line up your face in the provided circular loupe and move it around so the sensor can build up a full model of the planes and contours of your mug. Do this a couple of times and you’re ready to go.
Unlocking with Face ID works pretty much perfectly, both for those with glasses and without. I’ve yet to have a failure, and you don’t have to look straight at the phone either. Even with the phone placed to the left of my keyboard I only have to press the side button or doubletap the screen and it sees my face and unlocks.
I do have a couple of small complaints. First, unlocking for use at contactless payment terminals isn’t as convenient as before. You’re now forced to double-tap the side button and then raise the phone so it can get a good look at you before tapping on the reader. Before, all you needed to do was double-tap the home button and leave your thumb there so the phone could recognise your fingerprint.
Second, I’m still coming to terms with the fact that, even after Face ID
“Apple claims the likelihood of someone who isn’t you unlocking your phone is one in a million, making it more secure than Touch ID”
has used my face to unlock the iPhone X, I have to swipe up to get to the home screen. Three steps where you used to simply press and hold. Apple must learn from OnePlus with the 5T ( see p58).
Still, at least Face ID works more reliably than Samsung’s iris recognition, which doesn’t function at all if you’re wearing glasses. And it’s good to know that Apple provides protection against accidental unlocking – while you’re sleeping for instance – through a system it calls Attention-Aware, which checks that you’re awake and alert before unlocking the phone.
Delve into the settings, and you’ll also find that the same system can be used to prevent the phone dimming the display or lowering the volume of alerts if it detects your face is in the vicinity and your eyes are open. You can also use the Face ID camera to track your facial movements and map them onto an “Animoji”, and this is great fun. What isn’t quite so fun is the repositioning of the Control Centre. For, in addition to removing the home button, the action for calling up the place where you can quickly update settings such as screen brightness, Flight mode and volume has moved: you now have to drag your thumb down from the top right corner. I don’t like it.
Quick, quick, slow
Performance, as is always the case with the latest iPhones, is superlative. The new Apple A11 Bionic chip is inside, coupled with 3GB of RAM, and it produced very similar benchmark results to the iPhone 8 Plus. It’s basically faster than any other phone on the market in terms of its CPU and graphics processing grunt.
In really demanding games I’d expect the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 8 to marginally outperform it, but in most cases the limiting factor will be the screen’s 60Hz refresh rate rather than the graphics chip inside.
Finally, to battery life. First signs weren’t great: it lasted a mere 9hrs 22mins in our video-rundown test, falling well short of the 13hrs 54mins mark set by the iPhone 8 Plus (and short of Apple’s 13-hour claims too). In general use, however, you can expect the same kind of life as the rest of Apple’s phones. By the end of the day, you’ll be reaching for a charger.
Note that it can reach a 50% charge within 30 minutes when powered by the supplied USB-C power adapter, and naturally supports Qi wireless chargers too.
Snappy pictures
The camera is great, and for all the same reasons as the iPhone 8 Plus: two cameras on the rear, both with 12 megapixels and using Sony sensors. One is a wide-angle camera, the other a telephoto. The key difference between the iPhone X and the 8 Plus is that the telephoto camera has a slightly wider aperture at f/2.4. It’s optically stabilised, too, just like the main f/1.8 camera.
In theory, this means telephoto shots in low light should look cleaner and less noisy in poor light than with the iPhone 8 Plus. A quick glance at the EXIF data, though, shows that, as soon as the light drops, the iPhone X’s camera software simply uses a crop of a shot from the main camera. It’s effectively digital zoom and it hits quality. Badly.
The other camera is essentially the same unit as found in the iPhone 8 Plus, and the results from it in good light and bad are the same. It isn’t as strong as the Pixel 2’s camera, but it’s a match for all other rivals. Exposures are bang on, autofocus is reliable and it handles noise more elegantly than, say, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which has a wider aperture, but tends to soften images with over-processing.
Portrait mode works just as nicely as ever, and if you enable HDR you’ll find that it’s effective, yet subtle, lifting out details in highlights and shadows without making your shots look artificial. Anyone wanting to shoot 4K videos will be pleased with the sharp, stabilised results too.
Meanwhile, at the front, is a 7-megapixel camera. This produces decent selfies and makes use of the Face ID technology to produce portrait images with blurred backgrounds. It isn’t as good as the rear camera at producing flattering photos, though, and the edge detection leaves ragged patches where the depth hasn’t quite been detected accurately enough.
Let’s talk price
The iPhone X is a striking phone. Not just in terms of looks, but also through its innovative and effective means of accurately recognising faces and unlocking the phone. It’s also supremely quick, has a brilliantly colour-accurate display and the camera is sublime. Unfortunately, it’s the price that takes all the headlines.
With prices famously starting at £999 for the 64GB version, and jumping to a frankly lunatic £1,149 for the top-spec 256GB offering, Apple’s top-end smartphone is simply too expensive.
I realise other manufacturers have been moving their prices steadily north in recent times. None, however, have taken things this far. The question is, does the reality of the iPhone X justify the premium charged over the Samsung Galaxy Note 8? Or, more realistically, the Galaxy S8?
The answer to that question is no. The iPhone X is many things: it’s Apple’s best ever phone, it has an unbelievably good display, but there’s no way I could recommend it when there’s a phone that’s just as good, if not better in some ways, and will cost you barely half as much.
Perhaps the iPhone X’s strongest competition, however, is that which comes from within. The iPhone 8 Plus, although bulky for a 5.5in phone, is still brilliant and starts at £799. The only practical thing it lacks compared with the iPhone X is Face ID – and I can live without that.
SPECIFICATIONS
Hexa-core Apple A11 Bionic processor 3GB RAM three-core Apple graphics 5.8in OLED screen, 2,436 x 1,125 resolution 64GB/256GB storage dual 12MP rear camera 7MP front camera 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 NFC Lightning connector 2,716mAh battery iOS 11 70.9 x 7.7 x 143.6mm (WDH) 174g 1yr warranty