iPhone X: The review of the next era of Apple
19.11.2017
Translation: machine translated
Video: Stephanie Tresch
Apple has landed a major coup with the iPhone X. It's been a long time since a smartphone has made such waves. It's been a long time since I've had so much to say about a smartphone. Because the ninth iPhone with the number ten does a lot of things new, right, wrong, strange, good and bad.
With a heavy heart, I place the Apple iPhone X on my desk. A few seconds ago was the last time it showed that someone from the company had sent me an email. The test is over. Off. Finished. Too bad. Time to write a review. Because there's finally something to say about the iPhone X. Where the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 were merely upgrades and didn't really bring anything new to the table, the iPhone X does a lot more. Good, bad, new, old, the iPhone X has it all.
Goodbye, home button. I won't miss you
I'm back to working with an Android phone. The LG V30, if you want to be specific. One of the first things I realised while using the new phone was that the home button really pisses me off. Like, really. After testing the iPhone X, pressing the crazy button - whether it's hard or soft key doesn't matter - feels stone-age stupid. Because the designers around CEO Tim Cook and chief designer Jony Ive at Apple have sent the button on the iPhone X to the eternal hunting grounds. And that's a very good thing.
It's incredibly simple and, after about three seconds of getting used to it, feels more natural than any stupid pressing. It may only be a small change that Apple has made, but employees are much more relaxed and the phone flows better. I would never have noticed this before the iPhone X, simply because every phone had a home button or equivalent. I also like that the swipe up is more like a flick than a swipe away, so you don't have to swipe far for the home function to become active.
In short, if you're worried about the home button on the new iPhone, don't worry. Apple has thought this through and implemented it very well. The only annoying thing is that someone at Apple must have thought that users would forget to swipe up. Because there is more or less always a bar at the bottom of the screen, sometimes even over videos, reminding you of the Home button. Get rid of it! That thing is just annoying.
The bold frame on the pictures
If the current smartphone year has shown us anything, it's that bezels are out. Apple's competitor Samsung has delivered phones that look quite futuristic with its bezel-less series of eight. The iPhone X comes across as a chunk. Where the competition brings a certain lightness to the design by dispensing with bezels, Apple has gone for massive and given the iPhone X comparatively fat bezels.
The edges don't get any smaller, even when using the phone. The bulky appearance of the phone is emphasised by its weight, which is quite high for the size of the device. And then there's the wide notch, i.e. the indentation for the camera and sensors at the top of the display. This could have been solved better. This is also in stark contrast to the advertising for the device, which promises lightness.
The wide notch is less of a problem. Notifications are not so important on iOS anyway, because the app icons show the notifications straight away. So you only need a few status messages in the top line of the screen. The notch was much smaller on the Essential PH-1, but it was often annoying. Apps are or were simply not yet optimised for notches.
Since the iPhone X has an OLED screen, I thought that a background image with a lot of True Black, i.e. HEX #000000, might look pretty cool. It does. The bold edges and the notch seem to merge with the screen and so you get the illusion of a borderless display that even looks like hardware seamlessly blends into software.
A design mistake? Or the strangest intention of the year
The hardware design with notch and bezels may be a matter of taste, but one thing is simply strange: the camera hump. I praised the hump in the unboxing. It was a statement. It also looks stylish. After testing it, I can say that this is true, but the design with the protruding hump is extremely strange.
The iPhone X wobbles when it's lying on the table. If I place it on the table with the screen facing upwards, the camera hump is in the top left-hand corner. If I press or tap on the top right corner, the whole phone wobbles on the left-top/right-bottom axis. Has nobody tested this? With every other smartphone this year, it just works lying on the table, with or without a hump. Even the iPhone 7 on my desk does it. So why not the part that is being touted as the next generation of smartphone?
An edge is also noticeable. When the iPhone X is placed on the table as described above, the right longitudinal edge protrudes noticeably. But the left does not. This is also the case with the model of our colleague Lorenz Keller from Blick. If this is only the case with our two phones and not with yours, please let me know in the comments.
Why the iPhone X is still not for me
I like the iPhone, but I would never buy it. Why? It's not the horrendously high price that's the deciding factor, but the software. Apple's devices run software that is more or less half-open. What's more, the giant from Cupertino makes active attempts from time to time to make it as difficult as possible for the competition to succeed on their operating systems. It took Apple seven years to allow third-party keyboards on iPhones and they are still rubbish today. On Android, I use SwiftKey, a keyboard that learns your typing style through machine learning. You can also teach it Swiss German and expect some predictive typing there too. On iOS, the thing is close to unusable and seems to encourage the user to make spelling mistakes. Automatic spacing after the end of a sentence? Not a thing. Capitalisation doesn't always seem to work so well either. But you only notice this if you pay attention to correct spelling in WhatsApp and other messengers like I do.
The keyboard issue is just a symptom of the tough restrictions that Apple imposes on its users. I am a tinkerer. I like to change things here, customise things there. After just a few days, hardly anything on my Android phones looks the same as it did when it came out of the box. But above all, I change one thing: the speed. As a professional power user of smartphones, I'm quite fast when using the palm-sized calculating machines. Okay, I'll never type as fast as Digital Marketing Manager Sandro Hostettler, but I appreciate it when a long press takes only 200 milliseconds instead of 400. I want my icons grouped near the bottom right corner because that's where my thumb is.
I'm a tinkerer and someone who likes to change all the settings because I can. I often can't do that with Apple, or not to the extent that I would like iOS. Icons too big, too little effective usable space on the display, no settings with which I could influence that.
This makes using the iPhone boring after a short time. Not in the sense that I want to put the device down. The device just works. You can take your phone out of the box and never look at or change any settings and you'll have roughly the same experience as someone who has looked at every setting individually. The iPhone just works. Reliable, durable and good. It's just not fun.
If the most fun thing about a smartphone is image effects that have lost their "Wow, how cool because it's new" factor after two days, then it's too boring for me. Incidentally, these image effects don't have a live preview, so it's always a surprise what comes out.
The phone without limits, because you can't get there
The iPhone X is one of the first phones to be equipped with Apple's new chipset, the A11 Bionic. The system-on-a-chip (SoC) comes with six cores. This is somewhat unusual, as the number of processor cores usually follows the usual computer number sequence of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ... . However, this does not detract from the performance. On the contrary. The A11 Bionic is extremely powerful without draining the battery to any great extent.
In normal everyday use, you won't do anything that will push the A11 to its performance limits. No game, no app, no data transfer will impress it. On the contrary. The feeling you get from the Bionic is always one of "Yeah eh, easy, I've got it under control".
This doesn't mean that there's nothing out there that can push the iPhone X to its limits. Once the thing restarted spontaneously, reasons unknown. But otherwise Apple doesn't allow you to push the phone to its limits. Too bad. Good. Somehow both, but neither really. I suspect that Apple will come up with something that needs a lot more power than iOS does at the moment. This something will work with the iPhone and Apple is already planning ahead and future-proofing the phone, which in its cheapest version costs about the same as 499.58 bottles of Chopfab over at Galaxus.
I will miss the iPhone X. Not because it's the best phone ever or the smartphone of my dreams. But because it does everything it does very well and reliably. It's a solid everyday partner that looks good and does a lot. It costs an idiotic amount, performs well and lasts a long time. It does a lot of new things and doesn't forget its roots. I like it because it shows that things can still be done differently. That there are still new things that can be tried out with the "rectangle with rounded corners" concept and that it's not just a nice gimmick.
If you want a new iPhone, skip the iPhone 8 and go for the X.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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