So far with… iPhone X

Here’s one fact that sums up my iPhone X experience so far:

There are objectively only two good wallpaper choices: either plain black or the most wildly technicolour thing you can find.

It’s the most boringly exciting device I’ve ever had.

Let’s start with Face ID: this thing is pointing hundreds of infrared dots at your face, it opens the door to continuous authentication across all your apps, with no prompts. It’s a great achievement to a non-trivial technical challenge.

And at the same time, day to day, it consists of doing exactly *nothing*.

It is the black wallpaper (which you want to use because OLEDs consume no power, so your battery will last longer) and the technicolour gorgeous paint sploshes (which the screen makes look fantastic, esp on video with HDR.)

It’s both a big leap forward and completely unnoticeable a few days and an underwhelming demo.

Elsewhere:

Design + THE NOTCH

I’m on the “space grey” and find it incredibly boring and borderline ugly on the back. There’s a kind of charchoally/ graphite touch to it in my eyes.

The Notch is 100% nothing to the experience. Invisible as the rear view mirror in your car when you aren’t looking for it.

A bigger issue is the fact of how hard it is to orient. There are only so many times I can take pulling it out of my pocket and wondering why it won’t unlock, only to find I have it both backwards and upside down.

The phone role

This was my biggest concern. The fact is, I don’t want to use my phone. And liking my phone more makes me want to use it more.

The amount of times I have sat unlocking and locking my phone to play with Face ID is embarassing. Even “squeezy touch” (I’m not calling it Force Touch, the worst brand ever), is a fun little novelty.

But I have better things to do.

With my previous phone, I’d got to a nice point where it was so limited that I’d often see a notification on my Watch and jump straight to my 4G iPad Pro to take action, if it was anything that might take a minute.

The ideal setup for me is the Watch so I know what’s going on then the iPad when I want to act on it.

The gap in the middle is very very small. I hoped the cellular Apple Watch might kill it, but no such luck.

This thing is nice to use in a way you might enjoy if your phone is a glowing beacon of delight and hope in your otherwise barren life. But I thought we all agreed to move away from that threat ASAP.

(Another advantage of iPad Pro habits is that I was already using finger gestures to do almost everything already, so I almost haven’t even noticed the lack of home button on the X yet.)

Size

As a previous iPhone SE owner, I don’t understand why that isn’t the default and normal form factor. Every time I shimmy the iPhone X around, an angel dies. And the streets of heaven are not going to be crowded for long at this rate.

Reachability makes it easier, but a screen sitting lower on the device means that even activating that is a stretch.

It feels horrible in your pocket, unwieldy for anything but reading and at every moment still so slippery that it’s a matter of time before it gains the custom lightning scribble of broken glass across its face.

And that’s doubly inevitable because there’s no chance I’m going to put it in a case and it even more of a lump in my life.

The second they move this screen into SE size, I’m gone.