I was up at 12:01 AM on October 27th pre-ordering the iPhone X. I was hitting that refresh button like you hit the Like button below my videos: quickly and with satisfaction. Long story short, my 64GB iPhone X got delayed. As you can see here, it has finally arrived so that I can unbox it, stick my SIM card into it, use it, and review it.
What’s neat to see is Apple aiding the YouTube tech gurus by adding a flap to easily remove the plastic wrap protecting the box. After we remove the plastic wrap and slide off the top of the box, we’ll find a paper compartment holding some warranty paperwork and Apple stickers. The first thing we should see is the iPhone X not this paperwork but I digress, that’s just an issue ever since the iPhone 7. The iPhone X is sitting right below this paperwork in all of its glory. Underneath, there is a US wall wart, a pair of lightning earphones with a lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter. The last item in the box is a lightning to USB cable used for charging.
So the best part of unboxing a new product isn’t the box part-- it’s unwrapping the phone from the protective plastic for the very first time. One of the first things I noticed about the iPhone X was its shade of Gray, it’s color. Where previous Space Gray iPhones were more black than gray, at least to my eyes, the iPhone X appears more gray than black in ideal lighting conditions. The phone feels really good in the hands. Despite its 5.8-inch display, this phone feels like a normal 4.7-inch iPhone. I have pretty average-sized hands and I feel like I can reach all four sides of this phone pretty comfortably. There is a stainless steel frame that looks really good. It also feels very comfortable in the hands. The weight and rounded sides just scream “this is a $1,000 smartphone!”
The 5.8-inch display features a QHD resolution and OLED display type OLED, the first for an iPhone. It’s bright, vivid without content appearing too artificial, and the bezel-less design is very interesting. The display extends to the corners of the smartphone. When I gazed at this phone online, for some reason I thought the display would literally meet up with the edges but there is a noticeable separation that I imagine will help the palm rejection software. Overall, it looks great.
The notch has been getting a lot of bad press. I don’t even want to say that word, something bad might happen to me. But that’s just because there has to be something to complain about. It doesn’t bother me from a hardware perspective but the poor software implementation probably will. The notch has a camera and a bunch of sensors that enable Face ID, which is Facial Recognition software. After you scan your face by rotating your face around in a circle like some kind of hipster yoga pose, you will unlock your phone. And in my limited experience, it works pretty well even in low-light and when my phone is lying flat on a surface but I can’t say it’s any better than Touch ID, at least at this point.
There is no home button whatsoever so to navigate this phone, you have to swipe a lot with your thumb. I recommend you start an anti-inflammatory diet now because who knows what state your thumb will be in in a year or two. You swipe up to go home, you swipe up and hold or swipe up and go to the right to bring up your background applications. The notification panel is a swipe down from the upper left hand corner while control center is a swipe down from the upper right hand corner. It’s probably going to take me a day or two to adjust to this new user interface but it does work. Opening up the background apps is actually a lot quicker than what I read online. If you quickly swipe up into the right, it’s almost instant. I just wish we could run two applications on-screen at once.
Apps themselves are going to have to be updated to support the iPhone X. As you can see here, there are some apps that don’t support the 18:9 aspect ratio and don’t properly move content around the notch. The iPhone X is being powered by the Apple A11 Bionic processor and 3GB of RAM. it’s extremely fluid and quick even after I restored my iCloud backup.
There are dual 12-megapixel cameras: the main sensor has an f/1.8 aperture and the telephoto sensor has an f/2.4 aperture, both have optical image stabilization. There are portrait and portrait lighting modes. I have pretty high hopes for this camera and I cannot wait to test it out. The iPhone X carries over the same stereo speaker setup from the previous iPhones. It also has Qi wireless charging to power up its 2700mAh battery.
The iPhone X starts at $1,000 for the 64GB variant and is being sold in Space Gray and Silver color configurations. We should have the Silver variant to show you very soon so subscribe for it. Don’t break this thing though. It will cost you $279 to repair the screen if you are out of warranty. Apple plans to charge $549 to replace a cracked back glass panel. It’s a lot of money.
With that said guys, this is the iPhone X. Let me know your thoughts in a c
