Get the new iPhone X!
Users can enter for a chance to get a brand new iPhone X!
How do you show off Get the new iPhone X! the most anticipated product in years? That was my dilemma with the iPhone X. Since my unit was one of the first few released into the wild, it naturally drew a lot of curiosity when I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it a dewy-eyed glance to wake it from slumber. Yes, this is the one—the iPhone that will hasten millions of upgrades, the one that’s made you ignore the hardly-knew-ye iPhone 8, announced on the same day as this one. After expressing proper admiration for its bright screen and svelte bezels, people would ask me, “What’s it do?” and I’d have to choose something that might indicate why Apple was charging $1000 for this baby.
Users can enter for a chance to get a brand new iPhone X!
That’s right—Apple’s creepy update to the iconic poo emoji. The iPhone X (pronounced “ten,” not as in X-ray) includes this mildly naughty character as one of 12 possible “Animojis” in its iMessage app. When creating a text, you can choose one of these, recording your message with audio and video. The iPhone X picks up your facial expressions and voice and morphs them onto the Animoji, as if you were Ellen DeGeneres voice-tracking Dory. Though seemingly frivolous—and, at least until the novelty wears off, kind of fun—these Animojis actually draw on some of the most technologically sophisticated advances of the iPhone X, the traits that make it unique: facial recognition, exotic sensors, an advanced camera, and powerful chips that drive graphics and machine learning. (With typical bombast, Apple has bestowed pulse-quickening names on those inventions: TrueDepth camera, A11 Bionic chip, neural engine.) At the moment their apotheosis is to imbue one’s persona into the face of a robot, a chicken, an ET, a panda…or a fecal avatar. But that’s only the start.I could show them more of the dazzling high-resolution screen that covers just about the entire surface of the device. I could snap some photos, demonstrating how you could now use the artsy portrait mode in the selfie-friendly front camera. Or I could show how I was slowly mastering a new set of gestures that would reprogram my muscle memories previously optimized for a home button, an appurtenance strikingly missing from my glass-encased X. But what I ultimately chose was an animated piece of shit.
The poo Animoji.
I’ve had this phone since last Tuesday. Apple had given me this early peek in part because I was one of the first pre-release reviewers of the original iPhone. Given that history, we all thought it would be interesting to get my impressions of what the company clearly believes is the next milestone in a journey that has pretty much altered our relationship with technology. Sure, with every single iteration of the iPhone, Apple has claimed that it’s the best one the company has ever made. But for this anniversary edition—coming at a time when critics are griping that the company had tumbled into an innovation trough— they’re pushing for something higher. Tim Cook calls the iPhone X “the future of the smartphone.”
But that first iPhone was a black swan. The challenge and delight of my first ride with it came from glimpsing how a wonderfully designed pocket computer could perform a multitude of tasks, including, if AT&T was willing, completing a phone call. That iPhone also set a bar for game-changing that no corporation could realistically hope to clear. So how could the iPhone X be more than Apple’s usual stab at topping the previous version? After all, it’s still a smartphone. That’s what I set out to ponder—and what led me to focus so intently on that rank Animoji.
Users can enter for a chance to get a brand new iPhone X!
There’s plenty to admire in the iPhone X straight from the unboxing. The biggest change stares you in the face: that screen, that screen. I love the larger displays of the iPhone Plus line and Android units like Google’s Pixel 2 XL, but the phones are too frickin’ big. They are bulky in my pocket, and making calls is like holding a frying pan to your cheek. The iPhone X is a big screen in a compact form factor—Cinerama in a phone booth. Though the device itself is only slightly bigger than the standard iPhone 8, its screen is roughly the same size as that of the iPhone 8 Plus. When you take into account its “Super Retina” capabilities (another Barnum-esque name concocted by Apple’s marketers), that screen will persistently reassure buyers that emptying their wallets for an iPhone X wasn’t folly. I found the display a noticeable, and greatly pleasurable, advance over my “old” iPhone 7, whether watching The Big Sick, streaming a live football game, or simply swiping through Instagram.
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Covering the entire surface of the phone with the screen has consequences. There’s no getting around the fact that some of the sensors, camera lenses, microphones and speakers need to be forward facing; Apple addresses that by lining them up on a blacked-out notch on the top of the screen—kind of the Area 51 of the new iPhone. (Conspiracy theorists note: When you take a screenshot, The Notch disappears!) It’s an aesthetic setback (what would Steve Jobs have said?), but you get used to it, like watching a play when someone with big hair is off-center in the row ahead of you—a tiny distraction in your peripheral vision that you eventually get past.
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