iPhone X First Impressions

I had the opportunity to goto an Apple Reseller Store (Sadly no Apple Stores in India yet) this week and I played around with the new iPhone X. Here are a few things that I got answers answers for:

1. The Top of the Screen isn’t too far out of the reach: I’m not sure how Apple’s tweaked the grip on this phone, but the top of the screen isn’t as out of reach as some would think. I could grip the phone normally (just a little over the bottom edge of the phone) and easily pull down for Notification Center or type in URL on Safari. That being said, I wouldn’t mind if the interaction area stayed in the centre of the screen, which is much more comfortable to interact with.

2. It’s hard to ignore the blue shift: It’s uniform and it only appears at a certain angle. But its there, and hard to ignore. The blue shift isn’t a deal breaker but one doesn’t hope it to be there in an Apple device. It’s also very slight, in fact the person next to me couldn’t notice it at all. I’d like to know more about Apple’s push towards OLED in this iPhone. I really hope it’s for good reason.

3. Black backgrounds make the sensor area less striking but it’s kind of pointless anyway: Black backgrounds do a great job of hiding the sensor area. But to be honest, the sensor area doesn’t hurt the eye a lot. It’s what it is, It’s not very large or very tiny, It’s a 33pt black bar at the top. And because it’s much wider than its taller, it’s easier to ignore than the leap out at you. I feel going out of the way to hide it away would be pointless.

4. Gestures are intuitive: Gestures are easy design pitfalls, a lot of them are indescroverable and require on boarding an experience. But with iPhone X, Apple offers enough feedback to make them intuitive after first use.

As I held the device in hand, I could stop fiddling around with. The iPhone X is a remarkable device. It’s got so much that’s different about it, yet it maintains the simplicity of the original iPhone.

These are just first impressions though. I haven’t had the opportunity to use the device at length, or even use it’s most talked about feature. I only wanted to use the iPhone X today because I was concerned about some of the design decisions I made with my app LookUp (and I was pleasantly surprised with the decisions I took 🙂 ). Hopefully, I’ll use it for a longer period of time sometime later and have more to say about it.