Photo Source: Wallpaper
Jony Ive graced the cover of this month’s Wallpaper, a well-known magazine that covers design, and gave a lengthy interview that touched on the new Apple Park campus, some of his thoughts on his time at Apple, and of course, the new iPhone X. His words lend an interesting perspective to his latest creation, and shed light on how he views both it and the future of Apple devices.
Today, I want to circle back around to gesture navigation and interface on the iPhone X. While I have already touched on this, it is so critical to living with the device that you can’t help but keep returning.
There are already PLENTY of great how-tos out there regarding the new gesture controls, so I won’t belabor that. If you are looking for a good reference, Joanna Stern’s guide on Twitter and the guide published by Macworld have you sufficiently covered. I am more interested in the day to day experience of adjusting to using them to navigate iOS, and the implications of this significant sift in how we interact with our iPhones, and how some people are really not along for this ride.
I love digital photography, but I am by no means an expert shooter. I have a pretty good Samsung mirrorless camera with a few lenses. I’ve done some reading and research. I’ve taken an online course, and I’ve spent some time practicing. I know enough to be able to pick a lens that will work for a situation and put the camera in manual, adjust the settings, and get a usable picture out of it. Still, sometimes it can be a lot of trouble for a little bit of result. Sometimes you come up completely empty.
This is EXACTLY the reason why mobile photography completely killed off point and shoot cameras and relegated higher-end equipment to enthusiasts like myself and professionals. The cameras that you get with the iPhone 8 and X, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 and the Google Pixel 2 are nothing short of amazing at this point and the majority of people don’t need anything else to get not just good, but consistently great pictures. They require far less work to set up and take a shot, and more importantly, they are ALWAYS with us.
I’ve gotten some questions about how well Face ID works in different conditions, so I decided to go beyond the observations that I’ve had from normal use. I did have one failure in darkness while I was in bed this morning that I mentioned in a reply, but I didn’t have any other usage to compare it against.
Based on all this, I decided to test Face ID in some different challenging conditions and see how it fared. In my regular job, I spend a lot of time testing, troubleshooting, and performing service on controls, so this is right up my alley. I don’t claim that these test are scientific in any way, or that they are more than anecdotal evidence of my experience. However, they are controlled and repeated, and I used Facebook Live, so there can’t be any claims that I have doctored the results in any way. Let’s get to it.
I’m going to call yesterday Day Zero with the iPhone X, and frankly, it was kind of a dud. I was able to form some impressions of Face ID, the look and feel of the phone (which I posted on earlier today), the screen, and the basic gestures, but that was it. My difficulty in getting my phone restored to a current backup threw everything else off, and the fact that I left it restoring when my family and I went to dinner around 7, and then came home and fell asleep before 10 PM didn’t help, either. Thankfully, I left the X charging and connected to WiFi before nodding off, so all of my apps and data were there when I woke up this morning.
Rather than a formal review of the iPhone X, I’m going to be writing a series of articles over the next week or so detailing how it comes across in real-world use, as I spend time with it and learn more about how it works and performs. Frankly, there are already enough expert reviews of this new device available for you to dig into. I hope this series will add a little contrast by approaching the device from a practical perspective. Also, it will give me the ability to answer and respond to questions and try things that you, the readers ask about as they come in.
The UPS Man arrived with my iPhone X a little after 11 AM this morning, and I have been messing with it ever since. That is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good in the fact that the phone itself feels great in the hand, is buttery smooth in use, and that Face ID seems to work great, in spite of all the reservations that some, including myself, had about it beforehand. It really is an absolutely fantastic piece of hardware that feels premium as an object in a way that the original iPhone and the iPhone 4 did when first released. The iPhone X feels like more than just a phone in the hand. More on this later.
[Update: If like me, you are on a beta version of iOS and got your iPhone X today, then you are out of luck. There are no iOS 11.2 beta versions available for the X yet. This means you will NOT be able to restore from a backup until one is released. Your only other option would be to downgrade your older device, back it up, and restore from that file.
This is a bad move from Apple that completely ignores developers and power users. I hope they rectify this later today.]
Tomorrow is the big day! iPhone Xs will be showing up in the hands of users and the real fun will begin. Well, at least for those who take care of a few things first. For those who don’t, there may be a lot of sitting and waiting involved. The wise among you will take a little time to think about how you are going to setup your new iPhone, because some of the steps may take a little time without some preparation.
We are down to less than two days left before the iPhone X arrives for those of us fortunate enough to get them on launch day. We’ve already covered the merits of AppleCare+, Cases, and Screen Protectors and dealing with a lack of a headphone jack in preparation for Friday, so the major “extras” are covered. Now is a good time to switch gears and look at some options to enhance your charging experience, as well as options to make some of the $1000+ you just dropped on the X back on some older hardware you may be ready to unload.
The first wave of iPhone Xs will be here in just three short days. Time is growing short to finish up preparations that require purchases, so let’s take a look at two more areas that some of you will want to address before your X arrives. Screen protectors have been with us since the first iPhone, and with the price of screen replacements only going up (which I touched on in my installment on AppleCare+), they make more sense than ever. As for headphones, earbuds, aux cords, etc, this won’t be a problem for any of you who are coming from an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus. However, the rest of you need to consider the fact that the X will likely be your first phone without a built-in headphone jack. Let’s take a look at some of your options.
Yesterday I covered what I feel is the most basic step in the iPhone X purchase process- deciding whether to purchase AppleCare+. For a large number of us, step two will be finding a suitable case. I already mentioned the SaharaCase, which is available from Amazon with Prime shipping, a couple of days ago as a good “starter option” for those who need something to use until they find something more to their liking. Today, I’m going to cover some of the many other options, a few of which will require you to wait a while.