7 Minute Miles

One Week with iPhone X


As an Apple Upgrade Program subscriber, there really wasn’t much of a reason for me to not get an iPhone X last week. My iPhone 7 Plus was nearly as expensive last year, so the monthly payments were about the same. Apple really made the trade-in and pre-order process easy this time, so the only issue I had was not noticing the pre-order time was Pacific and not Central (which meant an alarm for 2am instead of midnight).

There are reviews all over the place (this Ben Lovejoy one for 9to5Mac is similar to my experience, although I wouldn’t say I love it as much as him), so I’ll just send you to Apple’s round-up page here for full-blown reviews. For my site, let’s just blow through a few bullet points:

  • I love the size compared to the Plus – the old phone was just too big for my hand (but I want the extra pixels).
  • Never really had a bad iPhone screen – this one is beautiful too.
  • Swipe up for home took about an hour to learn and now I hardly ever make the mistake of pressing that area of the screen trying to get home.
  • Face ID was easy to set up and works at about the same success rate I had with Touch ID, but it’s usually slower (sometimes a lot slower). I do like the private lock-screen notifications (until you get verified) and it’s nice you can just click on a notification and go right to that app once it sees your face.
  • Haven’t had a chance to take the new camera to a concert yet to test low-light conditions, but other shots have looked great. I’ve never been a big user of the “selfie” front-facing camera, so I haven’t really used the new portrait mode or other TrueDepth camera features yet.
  • Animojis: tried a couple to annoy my daughters, then accidentally sent one to a group chat. Karma says just stop now.
  • Yeah, this is an expensive phone. Unfortunately it is what it is (for all manufacturer flagship models, not just Apple).
  • I’ve always been a “no case” fan, but it scares me to think of dropping a $1K phone (even with the AppleCare+ that comes with the upgrade program). I don’t want something super bulky, as I usually carry my phone in my front pocket. Hoping Minnesota-based Twig Case Co. comes out with a line for the X soon (they were reportedly sighted at the Uptown store on release day).
  • I don’t have a wireless charger yet, so I haven’t tried that feature. Will probably wait for the Apple AirPower thing, as it would be nice to set the phone and my watch on the nightstand (plus Colleen likes her AirPods, so maybe I’ll get those eventually too). Also curious to know if it works with a case.
  • Restoring from my iTunes backup was pretty smooth – just had issues with songs, ringtones and playlists not coming back. Since then, I’ve decided to subscribe to 2TB of iCloud storage for backups, so next time I’ll just use that.
  • Most of my favorite apps have already updated and optimized for the X, which basically just means designing for “the notch” that everyone was so concerned about (including myself). Turns out I hardly notice it now and guess that will just continue to grow as app developers get used to optimizing for it.
  • Not sure if I’ve been impacted by the supposed cold weather screen issue, but I do occasionally have issues in Two Dots with actions happening that I didn’t intend.
  • Unrelated to the hardware, the “I” bug in iOS 11.1 was a pain in the butt – a situation that made an already bad auto-correct situation worse (which I didn’t think was possible).

MyPrecious became MyPreciousX and I’m happy…

Originally published by DK on November 11, 2017 at 5:22 pm in Longform, Technology


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