The much-anticipated and heavily rumored special edition iPhone has now been revealed. Apple calls it the iPhone X, pronounced as "iPhone 10."
This new 10th-anniversary flagship iPhone has a lot of firsts: It's the first iPhone to have a bezel-less OLED display, to get rid of the Home button and Touch ID, to sport a new facial recognition technology called Face ID, and much more.
It's also, alongside the new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus models, the first iPhone to support wireless charging.
Now that it's official, it's clear the rumors were true after all, from the design to the new features to the little software touches. Almost every leak came true: the notch, wireless charging, the astronomical price tag, the lack of a home button, Face ID, and much more. But throughout the keynote presentation, Apple didn't mention anything about the leaks, unlike when Steve Jobs made a joke about the huge iPhone 4 leak back in 2010.
iPhone X: The New Design
The iPhone X sports front and back glass panels, and it has "surgical-grade" stainless steel around the frame. It's water and dust resistant, too. The front is almost entirely made of screen, save for the wide notch at the top where the myriad of sensors are hidden. By the looks of it, the phone isn't entirely bezel-less, since the borders still look slightly pronounced.
The 5.8-inch screen is the highest-resolution Retina display that has ever been featured on an iPhone, coming in at 458 ppi with a resolution of 2,436 x 1,125. As with the other new iPhone models, it also has True Tone display.
iPhone X: The New Features
Apple has made some startling omission of once iconic features, but has replaced them with purportedly better alternatives.
• No Home Button: For one, the Home button, which has long been a staple of every iPhone, has been removed. Apple replaced it with a virtual horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen that responds to different gestures. Pull the bar up to go back to the home screen. Pull it up but hold a little to launch multitasking. Because of this, accessing the Control Center has been changed. Users now have to pull down from the right side of the notch to access it, while pulling down from the left accesses the Notification Center.
• Face ID: Because there's no Home button, Touch ID has been replaced with Face ID. It utilizes a bunch of sensors on the front notch to map and recognize a user's face. Face ID serves mainly two purposes: unlocking the phone and making Apple Pay payments. Apple says the chance of someone being able to trick Face ID is one in a million, so it's purportedly far more secure than Touch ID.
• Apple A11 Bionic Chip: A new chip called Apple A11 Bionic powers all new iPhone models. It has two high-performance cores, four high-efficiency cores, and the first GPU to be designed by Apple.
• Wireless Charging: All new iPhone models support wireless charging. Apple even unveiled a new charging pad that can juice up multiple Apple devices simultaneously.
• Cameras: The iPhone X has dual 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras, both of which are staggeringly equipped with optical image stabilization. Apple says both sensors are faster and larger than previous generations. There's also a quad-LED True Tone flash that gives scene illumination that's twice as uniform as last time. The iPhone X can record 4K video at 60 fps, which is quite impressive. Selfie lovers get a 7-megapixel front shooter.
• Animoji: What's perhaps the most adorable part of the presentation was the unveiling of new Animojis, even though they've surfaced before in the leaks running up to the event. They're basically animated emojis. Not just that — they're emojis which users can animate with the help of 3D facial recognition. This is Pixar-level stuff, and it looks quite wacky and adorable.
• Other Things: The iPhone X supports LTE Advanced and Bluetooth 5.0 standard, similar to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and OnePlus 5.
iPhone X: Pricing And Availability
The iPhone X costs $999 for the 64 GB model and $1,149 for the 256 GB model. Preorders will open on Oct. 27. The phone ships on Nov. 3.
