The iPhone X revealed with lots of features, little innovation

Apple’s latest smart phone is a slightly uglier upgrade of all the other iPhones

By Greg Waldock, Staff Writer

The new iPhone X is out! Apple has officially entered the “randomly ignore numbers” game by skipping from the iPhone 8 straight to the Roman numeral for 10, putting them in fierce competition with Microsoft and their X-Box One. The new iPhone has few surprises—save one, the immediately noticeable black bar at the top of the screen holding the speaker and front-facing camera. Not at the top of the phone, by the way. It is actually at the direct top of the screen itself, cutting a notch out of it. It looks horribly obtrusive, and I feel bad for any app developer that needs to build around it. Everything from web browsing to video-watching just got a lot more awkward and terrible.

But aside from that fairly major problem, it looks on the outside almost like any iPhone. Rounded edges, sleek black finish, and the tragic lack of a headphone jack. It does finally have a wall-to-wall screen with no buttons on the front, and a new sharper screen to display said lack of buttons. The insides are nothing shocking: iOS 11 as an operating system, some neat facial recognition software, a very decent camera on both sides. It does support wireless charging, which is always cool, and has either 64 or 256gb of storage with a rumoured extended battery life. By and large, this is an all-around improvement… almost.

The first major problem is the price, starting at a full thousand dollars in the US. This is simply not an affordable phone. Given how recent the iPhone 8 release was, this price is a touch surprising, though iPhones have never been geared towards the cheaper side. The second major problem is the black bar at the top. As I mentioned it’s enormously distracting, weird, and uniquely ugly. I can’t name a single smart phone that has ever covered a chunk of their screen like that, at least not successfully. It’s a bizarre choice that’s sure to turn people off.

Aside from those major issues, this is an iPhone. If you want an iPhone better in specs than your current one, you’ll probably pick this up eventually, unless that black bar is a deal-breaker for you. If you currently have an Android phone, this won’t tempt you to the dark side. It’s a very functional entry to the historic iPhone brand.