iPhone X - Changing The Face Of Apple's Smartphone

From £999 from Apple, apple.com.uk features 5.8-inch Super Retina HD display with True Tone, Face ID, A11 Bionic chip, 12MP camera, wireless charging (charging pad not included)

- Gareth Beavis

A side from the original iPhone in 2007, the iPhone X is set to have the biggest impact on Apple’s smartphone direction. Losing key, reliable elements such as Touch ID and the Home button, and introducing new methods of navigating and unlocking – and charging a lot more for the privilege – seems risky. The price band could also be seen that way – the iPhone X costs £999 for the basic 64GB model, and £1,149 for the 256GB version.

The 5.8-inch OLED display is leaps ahead of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus for many reasons: the sharpness, the quality, the fact that it fills the whole front of the phone, and the colour reproduction. The screen is also taller, but while it looks larger than the iPhone 8 Plus’s 5.5-inch display on paper, it’s only marginally bigger in terms of screen real estate – it’s just stretched upwards. The term ‘bezel-less’ doesn’t really tell the right story. There are slight bands around the edges of the screen, but they don’t mar the experience – they give your fingers something to land on.

The notch at the top is something that’s going to divide opinion. Apple has taken a chunk out of the top of the screen to house the new TrueDepth camera, and it encroaches on the display. In portrait mode it’s hard to notice, and the way the status bar spills around it is nice. But in landscape orientation it irritates if you expand a movie to fill the screen rather than be pillar boxed.

Unfortunately, many app developers are not ready for the taller format, with almost all apps we used packing black bars above and below the display, and those that take advantage of the aspect ratio displaying some glitches. Developers are likely to quickly fix their code, but right now it’s disappointing.