The long-awaited and extensively leaked special edition iPhone is finally upon us, and it’s called the iPhone X (pronounced “iPhone 10”). This new super flagship phone from Apple features an edge-to-edge screen with a notch at the top to accommodate the front-facing camera and new Face ID sensors. It’s also, along with the new iPhone models, one of the first iPhones to support wireless charging.

Apple CEO Tim Cook teased the introduction of the new device with the following words:

“Over the past decade, we've pushed forward with innovation after innovation, bringing us to this moment, when we can create devices that are far more intelligent, far more capable, and far more creative than ever before.”

The iPhone X has glass on both the front and the back, and it has “surgical-grade” stainless steel around the sides. It is water-resistant and comes in two colors: space gray and silver. It also has the highest pixel density (458ppi) display ever in an iPhone, with Apple calling it a Super Retina display. It measures 5.8 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 2436 x 1125. It’s the first OLED display in an iPhone, which Phil Schiller explains bluntly: it’s “the first OLED display great enough to be in an iPhone.” Like the iPhone 8, the iPhone X also has True Tone display technology.

Apple has omitted the home button for the first time, replacing it with an upward swipe from the bottom of the phone. Along with the home button, which used to house the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, Apple is also moving away from fingerprint authentication. The method that replaces it is called Face ID and does what the name suggests: it unlocks the phone just by having you look at it. It’s based on the tech in the notch at the top of the phone: it combines an IR system with the front camera and a so-called flood illuminator that beams a light at your face so it can be recognized even in the dark. Apple even went the extra step of building a dedicated neural engine — based on a dual-core custom chip design — to process face recognition in real time.

Face ID, according to Apple, is orders of magnitude more secure than Touch ID. The company claims a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of another person being able to look at your phone and unlock it through Face ID (with that chance increasing for people that share genetic lineage with the user, so, as usual, be wary of your twin). The new face authentication will also work with Apple Pay and all third-party apps that already supported Touch ID.

Photos and video playback on this new iPhone will both wrap around the notch at the top of the device, which is liable to grow irritating over time. Multitasking will also be something people will need time to adapt to: opening the iOS Control Center, for instance, requires a swipe down from the screen’s top right corner. All the swipe-based interactions have been tried by other phone companies before, with varying degrees of success.

The iPhone X has dual 12-megapixel rear cameras, and it’s equipped with optical image stabilization on both lenses. The sensors are both larger and faster than previous generations, says Apple, and the main camera has an f/1.8 aperture while the telephoto lens has an f/2.4 aperture. In between the two cameras is a quad-LED True Tone flash that is claimed to provide scene illumination that is twice as uniform as previously. The new phone also offers 4K video recording and stereo speakers for better audio playback.

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iPhone 8 and 8 Plus first look

IPHONE 8 AND IPHONE 8 PLUS HANDS-ON REVIEW

Apple’s iPhone 8 improves on the iPhone 7, but adds some upgrade-worthy features

 

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HIGHS

• Wireless charging
• Portrait Lighting is intuitive and useful
• ARKit is speedy and polished

LOWS

The iPhone 8 – don’t call it the 7S! – looks almost exactly like the iPhone 7. It feels almost exactly like the iPhone 7. And it works and costs almost exactly what the iPhone 7 did. But it’s what you can’t see that really counts.

Following the launch event in the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple’s spaceship-ish new Apple Park campus, I had a few minutes to play around with the new iPhone 8 – the larger Plus version, to be specific. I brought an iPhone 7 along for comparison purposes, and while the Apple folks manning the display station wouldn’t let me take side-by-side photos (noting that my phone has more scars and cuts than Nick Nolte), it was readily apparent they’re essentially the same.

THE IPHONE 7 CLONE

The iPhone 8 has the same bezels above and below screen, the same home button, and largely the same screens, although the 8 now supports True Tone for adjusting the contrast of the screen dynamically in response to lighting. Was it just me or did the screen look a little too warm? We’ll clearly need to test this feature out a little more.

The major design change is the switch to an all-glass design, front and back, which facilitates the integration of wireless charging. If you’ve been using a case with your iPhone – and you HAVE been using a case, right? – you’ll never notice that this newer phone is slightly less slippery.

WIRELESS CHARGING AND PORTRAIT LIGHTING

The addition of wireless charging is one of a few key new “at last!” features Apple has brought to the iPhone 8 that’s useful enough to make anyone consider upgrading. Wireless charging is fabulous when it works. The Qi protocol has one limitation, however: It doesn’t transmit effectively through thicker cases (and you ARE using a case , right?). We didn’t get a chance to try Apple’s new charging mat, which purports to juice up several different devices at different speeds simultaneously, but we look forward to testing this out.

The iPhone 7 introduced Portrait Mode , and iPhone 8 enhances it with Portrait Lighting, which lets you switch the lighting scheme for a portrait among the various styles professionals might use in their studio. It wasn’t clear how to find Portrait Lighting, so I dug into the Photos app and clicked edit on what looked like a suitable shot. A new wheel pops up at the bottom of the screen that simply and intuitively let me shuttle between the different modes, from Stage Light to Studio Light to Portrait Light. Easy to discover and inspiring, this is exactly the sort of thing that prompts people to upgrade.

Indeed, Apple has made steady, smart improvements to the cameras in its phones for years, and the iPhone 8 is no exception. Yes, it looks a lot like the 7. But the new cameras are more powerful, there’s optical image stabilization in both the 8 and the 8 Plus, and the autofocus is improved, according to Apple. Indeed, there are many under the hood improvements to battery life and processing power, and the base model jumps up a bit in terms of storage too.

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