Overnight Apple officially announced the iPhone X (pronounced ten), along with the iPhone 8 and 8 plus. The new X was confirmation the leaks were true and Apple are ditching the home button, instead replacing it with a swipe up gesture. At the top of the 5.8″ Super Retina is an OLED display that spans the full length and width of the phone.
At the top there’s a cut out to make room for the 7-megapixel front facing camera, ambient light sensor, speaker, microphone, dot projector, proximity sensor, flood illuminator and Infrared camera. This is an efficient use of space for the amount of technology that lives in here. Apple have essentially shrunk a Microsoft Kinect and put it in their phone, not an insignificant engineering challenge.
The camera and sensors enable you to unlock your device just by looking at it and to avoid unintended unlocks, you have to swipe up from the bottom of the display. That 5.8” Super Retina display runs a resolution of 2436×1125 pixels, which equates to 458 pixels per inch, which will no doubt be gorgeous in person. Much like that new TV on your wall, the display also features HDR, meaning the colour accuracy and shadow detail should all look amazing. There’s a few HDR standards flying around at the moment and Apple supports 2 of them with this device, Dolby Vision and HDR10. You’ll be able to watch HDR titles from iTunes, Netflix and more.
The new phone sports a glass back which is supposed to be the most durable glass ever in a smartphone. We’ll be keen to test this as even devices with the latest gorilla glass 5 still manage to get scratches. The glass will feature an oleophobic coating that lets you easily wipe off smudges and fingerprints.
New to Apple’s phone lineup for the first time, is wireless charging. This was one of the features that made me leave the iPhone, when Nokia added it, followed by Samsung and many other device manufacturers in recent years. Apple’s implementation will come in the form of a charging dock that allows for other Apple devices like the Apple Watch and the Airpods to be charged from a single USB cable. Sadly this wireless charging base won’t be available till 2018.
The iPhone X comes in Space Grey or Silver and in just 2 storage sizes, 64GB and 256GB which is fairly limited given there’s no micro-SD card slot to expand after your purchase. The iPhone X will also include the new A11 Bionic processor, a 12-megapixel dual lens on the rear that has optical image stabilisation and their new portrait mode that allows you to remove the background around a person, or adjust the lighting in post.
Now for the hard part, price. The iPhone X is the best phone Apple offers so of course its also the most expensive. The starting price is a staggering A$1,579.00 for the 64GB model and the 256GB version comes in at a monumental, laptop-level pricing of A$1,829.00. That is massive, there’s no two ways to say it, that’s easily the most expensive phone to come to Australia (sans a few gold plated or car-themed phones).
For more information, head to https://www.apple.com/au/iphone-x
