iPhone X Review

Apple iPhone X In-Depth Review: Is This The Future Of Smartphones?

David Phelan , CONTRIBUTOR
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I’ve been trying out the iPhone X for nine days now, longer than anyone on the planet outside Apple, apparently. So I’ve had time to get to grips with the handset, check out the new interface, the battery life and just how intrusive the screen ‘notch’ turns out to be.


David Phelan
Apple iPhone X with its precisely even, if wider-than-expected, bezel.

Design

Before you turn the phone on, the design leaps out at you. It’s a different shape – a little wider and taller than the iPhone 8 – but with a shiny, polished stainless steel band around it, unlike any previous iPhone, and with the same stainless steel wrapping around the dual camera bump on the back.

The glass back, on the silver review unit I have, is a slightly different colour to the iPhone 8’s silver version; the iPhone X looks warmer and slightly darker.

The whole thing has an opulent, high-end feel to it. Looks-wise, it’s the classiest iPhone yet.


David Phelan
Apple iPhone X in silver.

The back glass has an oleophobic coating on it, but in my experience it still picks up fingerprints.

Turn it over and, with the power off, it’s hard to get a sense of the display, not least because space gray and silver models both have black frames.

Switch on and all is revealed. The frame that runs around the display is wider than many expected, roughly the width of the bezel that runs down the long sides on the iPhone 8 Plus. Why is that?

My guess is that it’s a design choice made on the basis that the bezel is precisely even all the way around the phone, perhaps instead of having wider bezels at the sides than the ends or vice versa.

The OLED that Apple has used is a flexible one that is folded underneath, with individual pixel control giving rise to the perfectly round corners all around the display. Very Apple. It’s a matter of taste but personally I like the way the bezel defines the screen.

Then there’s the TrueDepth camera system or, as many people call it, the notch.


David Phelan
The top bezel on the iPhone X with the TrueDepth Camera system, AKA The Notch.

There’s no denying it, it’s a dominant element on the iPhone X. It’s an unmissable feature that catches your eye every time you look at the screen. And then, suddenly, it vanishes.

After, I would say, about two days of using the phone, being indifferent or even gently annoyed by it, the notch became utterly unobtrusive. I had got used to it.

To the extent that even when I was viewing a photo on screen at maximum magnification, I liked the way the image sneaks round the notch, like spilt paint gently filling in the gaps between floorboards. In other words, it emphasizes the total screen available. In short, the notch looks okay.


David Phelan
The long, long screen on the iPhone X.

Display and Screen ratio

The display is noticeably longer than on other iPhones, or indeed other smartphones. This is not the 18:9 screen ratio of LG’s recent phones, or 18.5:9 as found on the Samsung Galaxy Note8.

No, this one has a screen ratio of 19.49:9, so no wonder it looks long and narrow. After a while this seemed fine, but it took longer for me to adjust to this.

And to get this much screen in a package this small is something worth the trouble to adjust to – it fits the hand perfectly.

This is also the first OLED screen on an Apple phone (though Watch users are familiar with the technology).

It looks fantastic: pin-sharp thanks to the 458 pixels per inch resolution and beautifully colored because of Apple’s work on color accuracy and the True Tone feature also seen on other Apple screens.

I have to say, though, the color changes notably when you angle the phone away from you. A bluish tinge is strongly evident. That’s a characteristic of OLED and is found elsewhere. And it may be because True Tone is so good that it’s more noticeable here.

It’s not a deal-breaker because it’s imperceptible when you’re viewing a movie in landscape mode from an angle, if two people are watching together, say.

Speaking of watching movies together, the speakers on the phone are loud and precise, so, actually, you could play a movie through them.

One more thing about the screen: not every app has updated to fill the display. For now, these apps appear in letterbox form, so actually they’re not quite as big as they’d be if they filled the screen of the iPhone 8 Plus, as I learnt playing Super Mario Run on both displays. For now, the 8 Plus is better for Mario.