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Alex Kidman from finder with our video review of the brand new Apple iPhone X. Now whilst it's spelled with an X it is the iPhone 10 according to the official
Apple guidelines, although I figure if you're spending this much on a smart
phone you can call it whatever you like. Call it Harold, call it anything. Stylistically it's almost a little bit of a throwback to the original iPhone
models because it's got this curved design around the side and if you look at an
original iPhone you can kind of see where the DNA is coming from.
It's also
the first iPhone with an OLED screen rather than the LCD screens that Apple's used to-date on all of its phones up to the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. OLEDs are really, really good at colour reproduction and especially blacks and
that's particularly important because of the notch
at the top of the iPhone 10. It's there to house the camera array but it creates
these little horns or ears at the sides and they're not terribly useful. I'm not
exactly sure why Apple didn't simply opt to have a full black bar across the top
housing that but they're there some apps handle them better than others.
An app
that renders them black, you essentially don't notice them, if an app renders them
in white however they're absolutely present and not all apps obey the fact that the notch is
there. Of course the other big thing with the iPhone X is that there's no home
button anymore. That's because it's been replaced by the notch with face ID for
unlocking. Now face ID is incredibly cool tech if you like your cool tech and it
mostly works, I've got to say it mostly works because it's a bit like when Apple
first introduced touch ID.
When it works it's absolutely magical, you just hold it
up, it unlocks and then you can tap to slide up or you can tap to authenticate and
that's grand and when it doesn't you left wiggling the phone in front of
your face like a bit of an idiot. There's still some work here, it's still very
much version one technology. The loss of the home button also means of course
that you need to learn new gestures for things like unlocking, and screen capture
and even hard resetting the phone, and there's a bit of muscle memory involved
there. It's not too tough to get to grips with and it's definitely a sign of where
Apple's going in the future.
This is definitely Apple's future-looking phone. On the camera front you get a slight beef up in camera specs across from
the 8 Plus. The most notable things being that both of the lenses at the
back have optical image stabilisation, which gives them slightly better low-light
performance, slightly faster focusing. There's not a lot in it but there is a
little.
On the front as well you now gain the ability to shoot selfies in Apple's
portrait mode. Now portrait mode is still in beta, the way the lighting works and
that's true for selfies as well, so sometimes it's grand and sometimes it
can get a little bit dodgy especially if you use the stage lighting effects. It's
still a very, very good camera as you'd expect from a premium device like this. On the battery front battery life is really good - for an iPhone - it is slightly
better than the 8 but not quite as good as the 8 Plus which was exactly what
Apple said it would be.
All day battery life is entirely
feasible if you're a moderate user and predictably if you're a heavy user you
can send this thing flat as fast as you'd want to. It's still not up there
with the absolute best of the best, which is a little disappointing giving its
absolute premium price tag. The other big new feature that face ID enables is animoji and facial mapping because the way face ID works is it takes an infrared
scan of your face and it can then use that within the camera to overlay visual
effects in apps like Snapchat or for Apple's animoji, which are iMessage
animated emoji. So you can finally be that talking poo you've always dreamed
of being.
So should you buy the iPhone 10? Well that's a tough call to make because
of the price of this handset. It's significantly more expensive then
any other handset regularly on the market today. And that brings with it
some challenges. If you absolutely want to have the latest and greatest iPhone,
if you want to have the latest tech that Apple has and you want a vision of where
they're headed in the future, then yep the iPhone X is the phone to buy.
This
is clearly what 2018's iPhones will look like and act like, although predictably probably a little faster and face ID will probably work a little
bit better. But there is that trap in that you are in the version one phase of
this technology and this approach. Apple will refine it over time, this is the
first take at it. It's a bit like buying that first iPhone, 10 years ago.
There's a
vision of what could be but it's not quite fully refined. So this is the best iPhone you can buy but it's not even necessarily the best
value iPhone, and realistically if you just want an iPhone, if you want to stay
within the iOS family I would strongly argue that the 8 Plus is actually the phone to buy this year, because you're investing in tried and true technology. The touch ID works pretty much flawlessly. The battery life is actually
better than on the iPhone X.
The camera isn't quite as sharp but it's still pretty
darned excellent. And you're paying several hundred dollars less for the same
processor, for the same performance in apps, and you're not dealing with the
screen notch for example. But if you're buying it for yourself, consider and compare to
make the best possible choice. Now we've got our full review of this phone up at
finder so I encourage you to go check it out there.
Thanks for watching..