Apple iPhone X long-term review

The 'Notch'

Cyclops eye, or the 'notch' as it's now known, still divides opinion around here. For some of us, it's faded into the background while for others, it's a constant irritant that we never quite got used to.

The biggest bugbear results from the reduced status bar area created by the 'notch' - we can't believe we've come this far into smartphone evolution that we have to swipe across the screen just to see the precise battery percentage. We would like to see iOS 12 making this whole area configurable - but that's not the Apple way.

Face ID

Turning our attention (pun intended) to Face ID and our experiences don't paint a good picture. For two of our team, to be blunt - they would happily revert back to using just Touch ID if they had a chance and only one would settle to have the system on board as long as it's coupled with a fingerprint sensor as a backup.

The reality is that Face ID didn't meet our expectations on many occassions. For what should have been a transparent technology (just there and working without you thinking about it) it requires way too much effort on the user's part - which was never the case for Touch ID.

We've encountered a wide range of issues with Face ID, including forcing yourself to look at the phone - which depends on the placement of the phone means you have to pick the phone up or taking it out of the car dock.

Additional niggles include Face ID not working when the phone is held in landscape mode, or often refusing to recognize our faces while walking in the dark and an overall general sluggishness.

We would stop short of calling Face ID unreliable, it works most of the time, but it is slow and requires effort. Pity that such a fast computing device is slowed down because of the unlock method, especially considering how often we unlock our phones on an hourly basis.

One of the team was getting frustrated that notification content that appears on the lock screen is kept secret until you look at the phone and Face ID identifies you. You can configure this within Settings, but it isn't obvious straight off the bat. For this and other tips see our iPhone X tips & hints.

On other occasions, when relying on raise to wake to activate the screen, the screen doesn't wake up quickly enough, so you decide to push the power button, but just as you do, the screen wakes up, and the result - your pressing of the power button turns it off instead. Total disaster. Happens more often than we thought.

Gestures

The removal of the Home button means that you need to use a new set of gestures losing some of the intuitiveness in the process. The simple process of killing an app can now take 2-3 attempts.

The Home indicator also causes issues in some apps. In Pokemon Go, the fundamental task of flicking the ball can cause the app to close as you hit the Home indicator and swipe up accidentally, its easily done.

The Home gesture also causes problems when rotating the phone into landscape mode, the Home gesture also remains accessible when swiping from the side that was once the bottom. With the gesture staying active for around 7 extra seconds after you turn the phone to the side, this caused us to close the app just by attempting to swipe through content such as photos, for example.

iOS 11

iOS 11 probably had one of the rockiest starts of any iOS release in recent memory, with issues ranging from bugs to some questionable design decisions. We don't intend to cover them all here, but one of us has constant problems with the reliability of his iPhone X, which is suffering from multiple occurrences of freezing with some of them only resolvable by performing a forced reset. This phone has had iOS reinstalled so it could be a hardware issue and will probably require a visit to the Apple store.

Another example how the lack of a home button has changed the UI for the worse on the iPhone X is app downloads. Authenticating for app downloads is different now that there is no fingerprint reader. To have FaceID authenticate you upon a download, you have to double-click the phone's side Power button. For us, around 20%-30% of these attempted double clicks actually were misinterpreted and the screen went off instead. And that's extremely annoying when you are trying to download an app.

But to end this section on a high note, the sheer choice of high-quality apps found in the Apple AppStore is what's keeping our three editors firmly on the iPhone train and none of them has actually considered changing their iPhone X for another device despite all the niggles listed here. It seems, after all, that for them the phone's Pros outweigh the Cons. All three of them, however, acknowledge this phone may not be a universal recommendation so you better know well what you are getting into when buying one so hence the reason behind this article. Check out what our verdict is on the next page of this review.