Upgrade - 165: The iPhone X Review

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

This week is all about the iPhone X, which Jason reviewed and now has in his hands to answer Myke's—and your—questions.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 165 the iphone 10 review today's show is brought to you by blue apron bomb fell and encapsular my name is mike hurley i am joined by mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mikeley. How are you? I'm very well, but literally nobody cares about that today because we have a huge show. But I'm going to start with an iPhone 10 related hashtag Snell talk question, which was sent in a long time ago, but I've waited for today. This comes from Frank. Frank wants to know which Animoji, Jason, is your favorite? I got to go with the monkey.

I think you've got to.'ve got it the monkey is my favorite i mean because first off monkeys in general are kind of my favorite and the monkey emoji is one that i really like and uh i i enjoy that monkey i there are a lot of good emojis i i will say this i think some of the animoji are more expressive than others. Like, I really like the robot, but it's a robot. What can they do with it? Whereas, like, the fox is super expressive. The fox is so cute. Right?

And I mentioned this in the review, but one of the things that I think the most impressive thing about Animoji is not the face tracking. I think it is the character animations that happen. Like, there is a lot of personality that was put into those animations. They do some amazing things interpreting certain facial features as other features mapped to like, like the big ears on the top of the Fox and they do things when you like change your forehead and it's, it's crazy. So, um, so yeah, I, I say I like the monkey because it's a monkey but uh the i think over time we may come to appreciate certain animoji as having a kind of amazing uh animation in them that makes gives them even more personality but yeah it's totally the monkey what which which

monkey did i use in my video or which animoji do I use in my video the monkey Of course goes without saying really I have yet to see Anybody well this is mostly Use you need to rectify this at some point to Send me the unicorn because I think the unicorn Is going to be what I end up going with But I haven't seen A unicorn yet nobody sent me a unicorn

So we are of course thank you Frank by the way for sending in that hashtag Talk question if you want to open the show of a question to Jason, just send a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk in and it will open a future episode of the show. Of course, we are talking completely about the iPhone X today because Jason has a review that he has published and we're going to be going through and kind of filling in some of the gaps and getting some more color, maybe a seventh color, to round out everything about the iPhone X.

But I guess we should start... It's all infrared. It's all infrared. The color is infrared. It's a hidden way of saying it. Yes. But we should start at the beginning and we should start at the point

when you picked up your iPhone. So I assume you went back to the spaceship. I did not. I went to Infinite Loop. I just went to the briefing center in infinite loop i i think they're prepping the visitor center to open so so maybe they can't just camp out in the visitor center again and and my impression is that there are not a lot of people in at the spaceship yet i will say though um people a lot of people there's a conspiracy

theory that the reason we didn't record the show on monday was because of this and it's not true i went to a wedding in rhode island on sunday Sunday. Our friend and colleague Serenity Caldwell got married. Congratulations, Serenity. Yeah, absolutely. And so I came back very early Monday morning. That was always the plan. I made my reservations a whole long time ago, and I was going to be in the air when we did this. And I just said, let's just do it Tuesday. And you're like, all right, let's do it Tuesday. Not a problem. And then I got a call from Apple saying, would you like to come down Monday afternoon? So I literally just got to the airport and drove south instead of north and went to Apple. But as we're coming in to San Francisco

airport, I opened the shade on the window and between the fog and the clouds and stuff, I was looking to try to see where we were in the Bay Area, like playing that game of like, can you spot where you are? And it was, you know, a lot of buildings and some freeways. I'm like, what am I looking at? Is this the East Bay? We usually come down over the East Bay and then across the Bay and then land in San Francisco. And I was like, I'm not quite sure where this is. And then you know what I saw, Mike? I saw a giant ring building. And I thought, oh, I know where where we are and you were instantly reminded that you had to get to work yeah so i flew above the spaceship but then i drove to infinite loop and uh and got a briefing and then i came home and uh then i put together a review and went to

bed at 3 a.m because that was when the embargo was so you have had your iphone for 24 hours at this point right oh it's less than that. I got it at like 1.30 or 2 in the afternoon. And as we record this, it's not yet 10 in the morning. So yeah, it's more like 18 to 20 hours ago. I took the iPhone X into my heart and also put it in my pocket. Yes, this is a new direction from Apple, it seems this time that i think they're focusing on getting these smaller reviews out first and then maybe pushing out for content later we'll see if this is something that sticks but they definitely made

a change this time it's unusual the the part about this that's they always choose interesting outlets from time to time that that just happens that they choose they try to push it outside the usual they've done that for a while now i'd say what the big difference was this time is i can't remember the last time they had a universal embargo with different um hardware procurement times i mean that's that's the thing is i can't remember the last time there was an embargo that everybody followed but some people had it for a day some people had had it for a week. That's a little unusual. Usually the people get it well in advance, their embargo drops, and then everybody else just sort of gets

handed a unit and says, write about it whenever. And they didn't do that this time, which is a little bit different, but they're trying different stuff. So I was very happy to have the opportunity to be under embargo. It's been a while since I did an embargoed iPhone review. I think it's been since three years ago when the 6 came out, I had an embargoed review, which was right on the cusp of me leaving Macworld and doing 6 Colors. So I actually wrote on 6 Colors. That was the impetus for launching 6 Colors when I did, instead of giving myself a few weeks off from being an internet personality,

was that I had that review and we talked about it on Upgrade Episode 1. Episode 1 was an embargoed iPhone review. I totally forgot about that. But I also wrote about it for Macworld because it was originally supposed to be for Macworld. So we kind of made a deal where I wrote some stuff for them and some stuff for Six Colors

and we talked about it in Upgrade. So it's been three years since I had one of these. So I wanted to make the most of it, even though I had a limited amount of time. For what you're able to say, was there anything interesting that came out of the briefing? Was there any kind of mention of the pre-order demand? Was there anything specific that Apple wanted to go over with you,

or was it pretty standard fare? It's a product briefing, so they're basically focusing on the product. It's a lot of stuff. You know, I was actually there with somebody from broadcast journalism, and it's always a reminder that one of the reasons they go over all the features that they mentioned at the keynote is because people who don't do this as their primary job, but it's just one of many, many things they cover, they need the refresher. Um, so there's

a lot of coverage of things that we already know. Um, and then one of the nice things about the product briefings is that they have details and they know that we want little tidbits. So I got some tidbits about like details about how, about the inference sensor and how the camera differs from the eight and how, uh, what was it? Some of the gestures, like I didn't know that, that, uh, reachability still exists, but it does. And I actually turned that on for my iPhone 10. And that was something that the person in the briefing room told me. So, um, so yeah, that's, that's the nice thing about the

briefing. Apple, Apple's one of these companies. It's not like our friend, uh, Anze Tomic talks about how, um, in, in Slovenia, he'll review phones and he literally like, it's good. It gets a paper sack full of phones. They said, go review these. And, uh, with Apple, it's very much like Apple doesn't want to just give you the product. They don't want to just FedEx it to your house. They want you to come to them and sit in a room and have them tell their story to you. And, you know, you can then do whatever you want, but they want the opportunity to set the story. They always want to do that.

That was, I remember I, at one point at Macworld, we had like a handshake agreement with Apple that was basically like, we're going to give them the opportunity to give us a product briefing because there were a couple of products where they didn't brief us and, or they wanted to brief us late. And, you know, we just ran out and bought the product and wrote a review really fast. And that really frustrated them. And we're like, guys, we got to review the product. And so we sort of made a deal where we were going to give them the opportunity to give us a briefing and sort of in exchange, they were going to get us the products sooner. And that was the thing we did, but they have, that's a cultural thing with Apple PR to this day, which is they

want to give you that. They want to set the stage. They want to make sure you hear their side of it before you go off and do their review. And so that's a big part of the product briefing process. We should probably just start talking about the phone, right? I think so. I think we've done our pre-phone theatrics are now done. So I have a bunch of different sections that I want to talk to you about. And I guess the first one is kind of the physical size of the phone, because this is a new physical size as it sits kind of in scale between the 8 8 and the 8 plus so i kind of first off wanted to know how it feels in the hand what is the width like what is the height like how does it feel to to hold and use this phone as compared to the the 8 and the 8 plus which you just reviewed Um, it's, it is a slightly wider iPhone eight.

Basically it is, if you were to hold it just like a blind test, if you just sat in a chair with your eyes closed and somebody put a phone in your hand, you would say this, and you didn't know the existence of the iPhone 10, you would say it's an iPhone seven or eight, right? You would say, or six it is. Cause it's only, what is it like a couple of millimeters? I had somebody say, hey, thanks for the metric. But it's like, fractions of inches are so ridiculous that I find millimeters actually, even as an awful American, I prefer the millimeters to say it's

three and a half millimeters wider, which is nothing, right? It's 0.14 inch, which is totally meaningless to me, which is why I say it in millimeters. So it's basically as wide as the iPhone, you know, small size iPhone. It's taller, but it's not wider. So, and for me, my challenge with the iPhone plus models was always like, it was, I would have to expand my hand so much to get around the phone. I never felt like I had a really great grip on it. And then at that point, my thumb, because my arm, my hand was, you know, trying desperately to hold onto it. My thumb had very little movement. So at one handed use of the phone was really limited, which was always my frustration. That's not an issue. The, the width is not an issue with the,

with the 10 it's it's, you know, you will you will if you pay attention you'll notice it's a little bit wider but it's it's very little bit it's it just put in perspective the the uh plus is more than seven millimeters wider than the 10 so it's a lot like it's so it's three and a half wider than the the eight but the but seven narrower than the eight plus. So it's definitely on the side of the smaller phone. Yeah, definitely. It's definitely edging towards that. But so what about the height though? Like how easy is it for you to go up and activate notification center? Is this something that you are finding difficult? Is it more or less difficult than the plus models? How is that feeling for you in a usability standpoint? Well, it's less difficult than the Plus models? How is that feeling for you in a usability standpoint?

Well, it's less difficult than the Plus models, but it is more difficult. And this is one of the things that I struggled with yesterday is I realized that I do a lot of my iPhone stuff with one hand where I am sort of flicking around on the screen with my thumb. And that's one of the reasons why I like the smaller phone, because I can reach most places. I can barely reach the top of the phone, uh, with my thumb on the, uh, on the seven and the eight, um, on the 10, I can't like, it's, it's like a whole, whole, whole row of the home screen that I cannot reach. In fact, to the point where I've already decided I'm probably going to need to re relay out my home screen to push,

to put, first off, to fill the empty row at the bottom and put the most important apps toward the bottom. Because if I want quick access to the phone app, which is in the top row, forget it. I will need to either readjust my grip or i will need to uh call you know send for the other hand to stop whatever it's doing and uh you know get in a car and drive over to where the other hand is and tap something on the phone which again it's not a problem welcome to my three years ago jason yeah right this is this is what everybody did when they got plus models right you rearrange your home screen a little bit to fit that bit better.

Because it's not just that the X is taller. The X is a little bit taller, but the X screen, if you imagine, the X is a little bit taller than the 8, but the screen goes all the way to the top. So all that area that you've got the bezel in the 8 or the 7 or the 6, that's screen 2, so it's that much more tall. And so reaching all the way up there is an issue, which is why I mentioned reachability earlier. You can turn on an accessibility reachability, which now that there's no home button, it is one of a litany of things that they've had to remap to a new gesture.

In this case, they've got this sort of gestural area down at the bottom of the screen where there's this white bar at the very bottom that is your indicator to flip up to go to the home screen or to unlock the phone if it's locked. You can also, one of the gestures there, if you turn it on, is you kind of like flip down in that area and reachability triggers. And it's like you're saying, come on down, come on down, rest of the screen, I need you. But it's also entirely possible that with a little bit of retraining of muscle memory, I will start doing more of a, you know, hand shimmy kind of thing, or I'll hold it a little bit higher and stop using my pinky as like the maintainer of the kickstand that maintains its place in my hand. I may change my method of holding the phone

in order to optimize for this size. I don't know. But that was the first thing that leapt out at me is one-handing an iPhone at the top of the interface is not happening, at least not yet. So reachability, using the second hand, moving things down on the screen all of that stuff is in play i will say i expect that you you will end up finding a way to do it one-handed

because i remember going through all this stuff and i can activate all this stuff one-handed you just kind of adjust and contort your grip into different ways right which end up being oh you hold your phone slightly differently because you want to reach more of the screen. And that's always the challenge when you've got a product, not even just for a day, but even if you've got a product for a week, is that's not living with it. Living with it, over time, you will adapt. Your muscle memory will adapt to the new thing.

And a new thing is always going to be frustrating at first. I got a new, this is a very brief tangent. I got a new mechanical keyboard to try the other week. Cause I like mechanical keyboards and this one's got, you know, my, my other keyboard is like missing lots of keys, which I've mapped around, but it is a little bit weird. So I got one that's got more keys in it and I used it for like two or three days. And I, I wanted to throw it across the room because like it wasn't in the wrong place and I wasn't sitting in the right place and it made my hands uncomfortable and it made moving the trackpad uncomfortable, all of these things. And I was like, you know what? It's changed. You got to deal with it. And I like, I stuck with it and now it's fine. Like I got

through that process and I probably, it didn't change, right? It's still a hunk of plastic. I changed where I positioned my hands and where I positioned my chair. And I adapted until I found even unconsciously, right? Found a place that was comfortable. And with a phone, I mean, what is more, where do ergonomics matter more than something like holding a phone, like your finger placement and the angle of your wrist wrist like all of that is something that you may not think about it but you have a preferred style of doing it and then you get a new phone that kind of changes it and you got to adapt what are your thoughts on the colors

so i'm a as you know i am a big proponent of the darth vader phone like i loved the original um black iphone 5 because it was just like super black. And then they made it lighter space gray later, but the first one was like super black. I like that. I had the Jet Black 7, loved it. So my order that I placed, which since I was on the East Coast, I got to experience the 3 a.m. Apple product order. That was fun. Also 3 a.m. is for you at the moment. Oh, yeah. I've gotten up at 3 a.m. Yeah, I've been awake at 3 a.m. too many times lately. I got

the black one. I got the space gray one, which is pretty much black. And that one, so the stainless steel ring around the iPhone X, which Apple will tell you is a special atomic process to make the space gray match the glass back. But it looks great. which Apple will tell you is a special atomic process to make the space gray,

uh, match the glass back. Um, but it looks great. Like, like with the jet black, it basically makes the whole thing like just a black phone. Um,

unless the screen is on, it's just like all black phone with a little Apple logo. Um, and they'll also tell you that the stainless steel is a surgical grade in case you need to perform surgery with the ring around your iphone you could do that and that it's a proprietary apple um apple metal like they they're the particular mix to make this particular stainless steel is something that apple has formulated themselves okay Okay. Fair enough. What I didn't expect is that I really like the silver one. So the black one is how much blacker could it be? None more black.

It's a black phone. It's great. Darth Vader phone. I'm all for it. The silver phone though, way, I like way more than I like the silver phones lately. And there's two reasons. One is the bezel is black. They've made no attempt to have like some white showing in the front, which they've done with, you know, all the silver phones lately have been white phones with silver. And I don't like white phones.

I don't like it. Sorry, Casey Liss. I don't like white phones. I don't like how the fact that most of the time the screen is dark and then there's a white ring around it. It like highlights where your screen space is. I really don't like it. I prefer the illusion that when of the time the screen is dark and then there's a white ring around it it like highlights where your screen space is i really don't like it i prefer the illusion that when the phone is off it's just a perfectly featureless or almost featureless slab right so that's what

they've done with this one um the back is is is white and it's pretty there's um even though it's glass like the iphone 8 there's an extra layer and they have like eight different layers of coating on this thing, including like the oleophobic coating and it's the reinforced glass. And it's got a lot of things that are like the eight. There is one apparently like layer that's different that makes it a little more kind of like shimmery, shimmery looking. And it's nice looking. And so you've got the Apple logo is in silver, the word iPhone is in silver. It's nice looking. And so you've got the Apple logo is in silver.

The word iPhone is in silver. And then the rest of it, you know, the camera area, camera oval is black. And then the whole rest of it is white. It's kind of a nice reflective silvery white. That's nice. And so if you want that white phone back, you can get it. But to me, the star of this is the stainless steel on the silver phone. Because it's not like a silver phone. It's a stainless steel phone.

It's a shiny stainless steel ring. So if you think about the stainless steel Apple Watch, it's that kind of thing. It's a really noticeably bright, shiny, pretty stainless steel around the ring. Surgical, of course, stainless steel. I don't know how I missed this. I thought that both phones had the stainless steel, stainless steel. I somehow missed. I think it's because the photos show it always looks reflective.

I didn't know that the Space Gray phone had a kind of gray black treating treatment to to the steel so i mean i placed my order for the silver one because i think it's the one that i would like the most and i'm really excited about that because whilst i don't like the stainless steel apple watch look for me all of the pictures that i've seen of the iphone with the shiny stainless steel bat around it i really love it mostly because it makes me think of like the the older iphones that i love so much so i'm really pleased that it's more shiny back of the original ipod too is something that struck me about it right it's this it's this super shiny polished silvery stainless steel um it looks great and i'm saying that as somebody who

never chooses the silver phone always chooses the space gray phone. The silver one looks great. I think the black one looks great too, but I really like this look as the other look. silver and then my uh one that i bought that's coming friday because um that did work lucky you 3am i did get one that is supposed to be delivered on friday well lucky there's a whole other show that's like the upgrade that never happened basically that is talking about iphone orders where we missed it upgrade 164 and a half um but the short version of the story is that um as some people have noted, they're not selling this as a SIM free, like unlocked phone right now, as they often do with, uh, with new Apple iPhones. They want you to tie it to the, to the carrier, which frustrates me because if I pay full

price, I just don't want to even bother with the carrier. So I get at 3am, they're like, put in your phone number and the last four digits of the social security number associated with your AT&T account. I'm like, oh my God. So I look that up, paste it in. I'm trying to do this all quickly. And to Apple's credit, somebody at Apple said, you know, I don't want our customers to get screwed by the things we can't control, like the carrier systems dying. So let's build in a contingency where if we can't contact the

carrier, we're just going to hold that person's place in the reservation line. We're going to give them a phone as if they've already reserved it. And then we're going to send them an email saying, and post on the web form when you try to buy the phone, we can't talk to your carrier right now. We will contact you. Your place has been saved. That's what happened to me is they're like, look, essentially, look, contact you, your place has been saved. That's what happened to me is they're like, look, essentially, look, AT&T has gone away. We don't know when they're coming back. Your order is secure. Go to bed. We'll email you tomorrow. And the next afternoon, I got an email from Apple saying, great, you have 24 hours to click through and complete your order because we have now

reestablished diplomatic relations with AT&T. And it worked. And then when that was all done, it said, great, you'll get it Friday. So that was actually pretty great on Apple's part that they identified the weak link in the chain, which is the carriers, and worked around them. So in the end, I'll get the black phone on Friday. And that's the real phone that I will keep in my pocket. And this will go back to Apple. Lucky you. Yeah, that's the real phone that I will keep in my pocket and this will go back to Apple. Lucky you.

Yeah, that's great. I do not have a phone for delivery on Friday. I'm sorry. We'll see. Come on over. I have options. None of them are from Apple right now. I have some options. I'm investigating some areas into how I'm going to procure a phone on Friday. Stop and buy. I'll just pop over. I'll just pop over to the house.

Alright, there's so much more. So much more to cover, but let's take our first break. Big show. And thank Encapsular for supporting this week's show. Encapsular will help you delight visitors to your site whilst frustrating attackers, all because of their bulletproof security options and fast content delivery network.

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about income and traffic and lets you update security policies without disrupting anything. As a listener of this show, you can get one whole month of service for free. Just go to encapsular.com upgrade. That's I-N-C-A-P-S-U-L-A.com upgrade. Go check it out now and find out more what Encapsular can do for you and to claim your free month as well. Give Encapsular a try. You're not going to regret it. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. So let's talk about the screen. Now, the iPhone X has an OLED screen.

It's the first one we've ever had on an iPhone. How does this compare to the LCD screen? Well, I spent some time with Wonder Woman. She's great. She says hi, by the way. That sounds like a great afternoon. No wonder you're so busy. Unfortunately, I had to leave because I had a review to write.

I played Wonder Woman on my iPhone 8 and on the X. And just sort of in parallel and was watching them and comparing them and doing direct comparison. And yeah, I mean, it's what everybody says. It's what john syracuse always talks about when he talks about led screens right like the black levels are amazing um and i i don't want to get too video nerdy about it but like i think anybody would notice the difference because on a backlit lcd screen um everything is lit and so black if you've ever had something that was really dark or even like totally black on your tv and your hd tv and yet it's still glowed and you had that moment of like how is it that this is supposed to be black and

yet my whole living room is lit it's because even when the screen is black, the backlight is back there. And so you end up with this kind of like bright, let's call it space gray. Why not? Let's call it that. Anything can be space gray. Any, literally anything except space, Mike, because space is black, not gray. But anyway, the OLED screens don't do that. The OLED screen, that's not how it works the uh it puts out light when there's light to be put out and otherwise it doesn't

and so looking at wonder woman i mean not only is it a high resolution screen this is the highest resolution uh screen i think that apple has ever made in any product um and it's it's uh 458 pixels per inch and that's you know theoretically that's beyond the level at which your eyes can actually detect the details of the pixels. But what it does mean, it's a full, you know, 1080 HD image with the black levels. It supports HDR video. So the dynamic range that's capable on the display is pretty impressive. So, you know, it can display bright content with detail and dark content with detail. And it looks really good.

I mean, that's the bottom line is even if you weren't measuring the black levels, it looks really good. Now, one of the challenges with OLED is color shifting. I'm not great with color. I'm not great with color. It does shift a little bit if you look at it from angles, but it is super subtle and not annoying in the way that even earlier, earlier LCD screens were, and especially not some of the other smartphone screens that have had some serious color shifting problems when you watch it off angle.

It's a good display. And it also doesn't seem to be aggressively, you know, like, like the, when you watch it off angle. It's a good display. And it also doesn't seem to be aggressively, you know, like what I said in the review is like one of those TVs that's set up at the store to pop all the colors so that your head explodes with the colors on the screen. A lot of panels will get cranked up like that to impress you with the color.

And that's not, Apple wants to be accurate with the color and they did a pretty good job so it looks great it is as advertised a really nice looking um display really nice and remind me does this phone have true tone in it yeah oh yeah it's got the it's just like the aid it's got the uh it's got the uh the the sensor and it's doing the uh on the fly true tone adjustment i cannot wait to see how my home screen looks like that you know that was the big thing for me with the with the ipads when they went to true tone is so everything just looked so much more rich you know like there's like a vividness to it which i really enjoyed so i'm very much looking forward to having that on my iphone as well now obviously the screen goes all the way to the edges, and by going all of the way to the edges, we get the notch.

This is the thing. This is the thing that everybody was up in arms about. How is the notch going to be? What's the notch going to be like? So, Jason, how is the notch? Well, I mean, we'll see how it progresses over time. Different apps handle it in different ways. it in different ways. Generally, the way that seems to be good to handle it is that you kind of flow the background of your content into those areas underneath the status information.

And, you know, you don't have any actual usable, like interface that's tappable up there, you have it be just sort of like part of the experience. But the experience of using it is definitely like, The experience of using it is definitely like, I don't look at the notch and think there is a thing chewing into my screen. I actually think about it more like I look at the edges around the notch and think the screen is so big that it is, you know, it's going to flow all the way until it hits something that can stop it. And so it goes around the camera notch area. And otherwise it's like going completely to the edge up there. That's sort of how, if that makes any sense, like that's how it feels to me is that this is not, Hey, we tried to do an all screen phone and stopped. It's more like, um, every place we could possibly put screen. We did. I think that's the message I get from this phone is that Apple saying, you know, we couldn't put it everywhere, but we, we didn't stop it lower down

just because of the need for a camera housing. We, we're going to flow it all the way to the top. And, and it has that effect of sort of like extending the experience, extending your field of view, even, you know, even up where it should probably stop because there's a camera up there it just keeps on going with the apps that you've been using how is the optimization uh it's all over the place right now i've got some betas um some apps have been updated um i have apps let's see there's there's a bunch of categories they're the apps that have not been updated okay where they're basically letterboxed top and bottom so it probably looks like a regular iphone right like it's just the exact same screen size yeah pretty much i mean it yeah it just all of a sudden the um the phone's not as tall you've got you've got kind of black areas top and bottom

so that happens with ones that have not been updated just out of interest because it's oled does that look good like does it look like there isn't a screen there like does it look like it's just plastic do you know what i mean like does it look like or close to like the bezel because like when i'm on my apple watch right when i look at my apple watch and that's an OLED screen, where it's not on, it just looks like there's nothing. The reason it doesn't is because you have the status bar at the top, and you have the bright white line that is your flip up here to go home, that's always there. That's a shame. Those remain. So those are still there as cues. And then the iPhone app screen floats in the middle. So that's what it's doing.

It's trying to keep those things consistent because the status bar stays at the top and the little line for the multitasking and home, essentially, area stays there. Does that have an official name? If it does, I don't know what it is. The what do you call it bar? The whatchamacallit that's what we'll just refer to yeah exactly that's that's what it is the whatever um then so the other things i've seen is there are apps that uh have been uh carefully considered and they um they do the right thing like i was looking at a fantastic cow and it's got the red calendar bar at the top of the screen. And on the iPhone 10,

the red color just keeps extending all the way up to the top through the status bar. And it looks good. It likes it. It's really a consistent look. And then there's some apps and I'm not going to name any names, but there are some apps where they still have work to do where like the color extends all the way to the top but then they're like navigational elements at the bottom of the screen are all the way at the

bottom which means that they're like going off the edges of the the curved edges and they're been and they're beneath the multitasking area which means that you can't actually tap on them, which is bad because you can't. And those will be fixed, right? But that's an example where like, there's a lot of work. And I'll reference, Mark Arment's talked about it on ATP

and he's talked about it under the radar. But this is an update that requires active work by developers. Developers can't just phone it in with the iPhone 10. Ha, phone. They need to put in some work. This is not one of those things where it's like, oh yeah, you know, you recompile it, you change a couple of things, and then it all works. Like, no, you need to think about, like, what are you going to do at the top of the screen? What are you going to do at the bottom? And that's still going on. So even Apple's apps, I mean, they all support it. But even there, there are those moments where I think, like, they've got, you know, sometimes

they do it better than other times, and they're still figuring it out themselves. Have you seen any apps that do more than just put color? Like, are there any apps that are using this for information or anything like that? Or does it really just seem like it's just the color that's on the top of the status bar is just stretched all the way to the top that's basically it right now i mean i i imagine that that might change i'm not quite sure what they have i mean the status bar is the status bar right unless they hide the status bar and put something up there which uh some some may but instead it's sort of like just giving you this the sense that the the status bar is part of the app interface

and extends to the top of the screen and then just getting out of the way of the bottom. I think there may be some opportunities down at the bottom of the screen, especially on the sides. One of the things that Apple did with a keyboard is they actually, the keyboard sits up a little bit. There's like

a gray area underneath the keyboard. The keyboard isn't down at the bottom of the screen like it is on all other iPhones. And if you think about it, you can figure out why, which is all other iPhones have a gap. The keyboard never sits at the bottom of the phone. It sits with a gap between it and the bottom of the phone, right? And if a gap between it and the bottom of the phone right and if you tried to hold a phone with two hands and do thumb typing you realize very quickly like thumb typing where you have to tap all the way at the bottom of the phone is kind of awkward i would drop my phone a hundred percent yeah you either drop your phone or you're or you're like bend your thumbs way too far back like i'm holding it right now as if I was typing on the bottom and it's just not secure enough.

Right. So what they did is they put this kind of buffer area and then a keyboard. And that's a bummer in the sense that the app space above is less than it would be. Like you're giving up some space in the app interface when you slide up the keyboard. space in the app interface when you slide up the keyboard but what they did do which i think is kind of clever is they put the the emoji slash international keyboard button and the microphone you know voice dictation button they put those down on the left and right corners of the display to the left and right of the multitasking area and that means that the like bottom row of the software keyboard has a is a little more spacious there's a little more room because there's two keys that are that are out of there yeah and i thought that was a clever use of that space um and i it made me wonder if other apps might once they're up and running on iphone

10 might start to experiment with like could we do things with these new spaces but i think you know phase one is is literally make it not be in a letterbox make sure that their interface elements don't collide with the edges of the screen or slide under the home area all of those things because that's like step one what i would like to see um with that area is you know like on the ipad you have the persistent buttons on the keyboard like the copy and paste buttons i would like to see something like that there because because from the images that I've seen, it just looks like you've kind of got the dictation on one side, the smiley face on the other, and then just a grey area. You know, it would be nice to maybe see some stuff go in there.

Yeah, the problem is that the grey area is also colliding with multitasking and swipe up, so you've got to be careful there. But i do wonder about that i i actually i think it's ergonomics i actually was wondering why they didn't put the um the autocorrect stuff uh below but i think the rationale there is that you want to see it above because you're looking at your content and so you want the content and the autocorrect to stay together because you'd be covering the autocorrect options with your hands most likely right like you wouldn't see exactly it would be obscured from view.

Right. So that's, you know, there's a lot of these things that obviously Apple has had more than a month and a half to think about. And app developers have only had a month and a half at most to think about. So I expect more to be done here. And then always, yeah, everybody's going to look at how the Apple apps implemented all of this stuff and say, all right, why did they they do that because there are lessons to be learned there but um you know when an app fully when i launch an app that's already been because you don't really know

right like you just i just restored my phone from my backup and it downloaded apps from the app store i don't know which ones have been updated and which ones haven't there are a couple things that i've got in beta on test flight but mostly it's just things in the app store and then every now and then i open one and i'm like oh this one this one's on this one's on the iphone 10 like like i said with fantastical it's like oh look at that isn't that nice look at you yeah and then and then others like slack i open i'm like black bars and and actually it's a weird i wonder if they've changed something with that you know swipe from the left uh gesture where you swipe from the screen edge to go back um i wonder if something's changed there because what i've actually found is in an app like slack that really relies on that swipe from the left left gesture i have to be way more careful about

how i do it or it doesn't trigger so i think that there may be some i think maybe the edge gestures have all been tweaked a little bit in the ip iPhone 10 and that maybe some apps are going to have to react to that too. But I don't know any technical reasons why. All I know is that literally I used to just do a very sloppy swipe from the left edge of the phone to the right to open the channel view in Slack. And now I kind of need to plant my finger, plant my thumb on the screen and swipe to the right to get it to work reliably. Okay. So there's some tweaking, right? There's some tweaking that they need to do for that. Yeah. I mean, in other words, if you're somebody who is really excited about some of these features on the iPhone 10 and the big screen and expects all of your favorite apps to support it right away, you may be disappointed because it is not trivial to do this and they've had and they had very little time keep in mind these are also developers who worked all

summer to support ios 11 stuff they finally hit the finish line and the day they're about to hit the finish line a new phone with totally new screen size that's very different from what's come before is announced so you know they at that point they're like kind of exhausted and now they've got a whole new version of their app that they basically need to do in order to address it so it may take a little bit of time this has happened before right when we got the six and the success the 12.9 inch iPad pro like this is a thing that's happened when we've got the five like as every time screens get bigger there has to be some kind of considerations and these considerations are different because

the screen is bigger, but it also has a cut taken out on the top and bottom. But, you know, it's just stuff to consider, right? And developers will find their ways around it. There will be, I'm sure, many new design conventions that come out of this

over the next couple of months. You know, like someone has a really smart idea and then it starts to pollinate across the ecosystem, like Porta Refresh or something like that, you know, or hamburger buttons. I'm sure there'll be some stuff like that that starts to pollinate across the ecosystem, like pull to refresh or something like that, or hamburger buttons. I'm sure there'll be some stuff like that that starts to pop out as people work through this stuff and work out some things over the next weeks and months and stuff like that. The new home button, which we'll refer to as the home indicator, because that seems to be how it's being referred to in the HIG. Thanks to the chairman for digging that up all righty um so the home indicator how easy is it to use this

i mean this is something that you're struggling to get used to you're you're swiping up now um rather than pressing a button how has this been uh i love it it takes some getting used to but it doesn't take a lot of getting used to. It happens pretty fast because, and everybody's different and everybody's, how they hold their phone is different, right? So everybody's going to have an experience. For me, this is a way less complicated gesture than the old one, because keeping in mind, the old one was put thumb flat on touch ID sensor,

have it register, press the button. And now all I have to do, and it's basically the same place. And in fact, when I forget that I'm using an iPhone 10 and I put my thumb down there and I realize there's no button, all I do is flip up like from the place I expected the home button to be and it unlocks the phone. So it's like literally for me, the same place. It's just instead of holding my thumb flat and then pressing, I'm able to just do a swipe. So it's a less complicated gesture that is pretty much the same in terms of muscle memory, but easier. So I like it. It takes a little getting used to, but I really like it. I think

it's totally natural. I think there are gestures that have been redefined that are going to take more getting used to and are less discoverable and maybe a little finicky but the actual like swipe or you know swipe up to unlock or go home i think it is super you know easy and natural what about the the multitasking view that one takes a little more getting used to because you've got to swipe and hold and remember to keep holding until the other kind of cards come out, which is both a little less discoverable and also more easily accidentally triggered.

But it's, you know, once you learn that it's there, it's pretty easy to bring it up consistently. It's just that one requires a little more thought at first to get your head around. And there's also this one where you kind of swipe the bar and go backwards and forwards, right? Like, this seems to be a thing.

Yeah, this is the reason why, I think, iOS 11 accidentally question mark um did away with the 3d touch from left to right to do multitask to go back to the previous app remember that remember that uh that thing that used to be a feature and then in ios 11 it sort of got turned off and they said no no it'll come back in the future update now is it because 11.1 came out today, actually while we were recording, bringing with it Emoji and the reinstallation of this feature. Yeah, so this is why that went away, right? It seems, because this is that feature, essentially. So they rebuilt it for the iPhone X and then, I guess, forgot or couldn't get back to getting it work for the other devices again.

Because it's the same premise, which is if you put your finger or thumb down there in that multitasking area and you do a straight on swipe left or right, it moves you in that stack. So, you know, from left to right, it will take you back to the previous app. And then left to right again, we'll take you back another one. And then if you go right to left, it will take you back to the one that's to the right in that kind of, when you don't do any other multitasking stuff, it tries for a little while to keep them in the right sequence so if you've got like calendar email and and safari and you go left to right from calendar to email and left to right from email to safari if you don't i i don't know whether it's time or uh more multitasking or whatever but for a while at least if you're like oh no actually i want to go back to email then you go right to left and it will i like you back to email a lot i really like it it's basically

the four finger swipe to switch apps from the ipad the ipad has that it keeps it keeps you in place for a look for a period of time you go left right left right you're not going like left left left left right it's kind of keeping some persistence as to where you've come from and where you're going rather than just immediately moving the old apps to the left right it would be super confusing if you went oh to my to my left is this is app b and then you're like now i want to go back to app a i will go to the right and it was like oh no i don't know what you're talking about this is the end because it's like no i just came from there a is at the left again now right like they all just jump over one so yeah i'm really super confusing that's that's excellent you could also

never get to a third app using that right it would always be those two and you'd be like i'm trapped i can't get out right so instead they maintain some amount of of like that geography temporarily that geography persists and that you know it's a i think it's a way more discoverable and natural gesture than the 3d touch you know push hard and then swipe with your finger and then you go to the previous app now it's just swipe in that area left to right and it you know basically as you're swiping your finger or thumb the interface is sliding underneath you and bringing that other app in cover sheet has seen some changes right there's a flashlight and camera button now on the notification lock screen thing

yeah i think this is a reaction to the fact that control center has been exiled to the top right okay um and it actually makes me a little bit sad because i i know they want to limit uh what what junk is on that lock screen because they want you to see your notifications but i found myself thinking could we not have like optionally a few more control center items on the screen yeah i would prefer home to the flashlight for example right right i mean i i use the flashlight all the time and i know how to swipe right to get to the camera, so I really don't need a camera button there, right? Does swiping right still go to the camera? Yeah.

Even though there's this persistent button? That's interesting. Yeah, if you just swipe right on the main interface, not down in the application thing, but the main interface and the lock screen, it does exactly what it used to do, which is, and left takes you to the widgets. and left takes you to the widgets. But if you 3D touch on the flashlight, the flashlight comes on, which their thought there is if you really need to take a picture or flash the flashlight, you want quick access to that.

So they put those on the screen with quick access. So talking about control center, one thing that I'm a little bit disappointed about is the fact that it's been moved to a not so convenient place when I really wish they would have found a way to integrate it into the multitasking view like it is on the iPad. You know, so you're still swiping up and it's there. You know, like how on the iPad, the kind of the multitasking and the Control Center is all in the same place. But with the iPhone 10, if if i'm right you pull down from one of the uh the ears

of the phone uh little batman ears and you pull down from the right one if if that's correct and then left the middle is still to bring down your notifications but the right notifications brings down control center yep that's that's it and it makes me a little bit sad because as i pointed out the top of the screen is very far away and i got used to flipping up control center right yeah and now you can't now now for me control center is not a casual flip up with my thumb now it is a bring over the other hand take the index finger and uh and bring it down so it's i know why they did it i mean they had to do it because that go to the home screen gesture is the most important gesture and that is the most natural place to put it but it still makes me sad because i like control center and i

use it all the time and it is kind of in you know exiled into siberia at this point it's way up in the top right it is far away because i hold my iphone one-handed in my left hand. And, um, and so the up top right is just forget it. Like I'm never going to casually reach the control center. Now it's never going to happen. And there's no way to flip those around. No, no, that's too core,

too core a feature to, I mean, I, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to make going back to the home screen exiled either. Right. I meant like the left and right, you know,

like, can you, can you put control center like the left and right you know like can you can you put control center on the left and well yeah i wondered if is there another gesture that you could do to bring up control center um i'd actually rather have a control center button on the lock screen quite honestly like instead of flashlight i'd rather 3d touch to bring up control center but that's not in the cards either it seems can you combine it with the reachability so if you activate reachability can you then just swipe down from what would be the previous area because this is something you used to be able to do um and i think has actually come back with 11.1

i was coming from 11.2 that if you use reachability you can just swipe down on the blank area to bring the notification screen down can you do the same for control center like if you use reachability and swipe from the right hand side does it bring control center down from like halfway on the screen rather than the top yes it does so that's that's one that's how i expect i will be using it so it's two gestures rather than one but i bet i will get used to that pretty quickly like swipe swipe right like i feel like i will that that will get embedded for me over time as uh what i end up doing so reachability if i'm if i'm following correctly from your review, you have to enable it as an accessibility setting, which is fine.

Yes. And then you swipe down on the home indicator, right? Is that how that works? Yeah, basically. So it's a little bit more fine a gesture than a lot of these where you can just sort of start on the left or the right or the bottom and then flip up. This one, you have to land your finger or thumb in that space down there by the home indicator uh high enough up that you can give

then a little pull down um so it's you basically land at the near the bottom of the screen and then pull down and then reachability triggers which is logical in the sense that you are literally kind of pulling the interface downward. But it just requires a little more finesse with, and precision with where you land your finger because you don't want to be too high up or you're just going to scroll through the app. Yeah. Right. You've got to be down there in that area,

which is why that area needs to stay clear because there are like these system wide gestures that are going on down in that area. clear because there are like these system-wide gestures that are going on down in that area so uh vidit in the chat room just shared a mock-up that he put together that that a while ago which i actually really like of um where maybe control center could go in the multitasking view and i i hope that that's something that maybe could get added in the future like a way to try and combine those two uh to make it a little bit more useful. I would really like that. Because, you know, Apple do it on the iPad

and this is the same gesture, right? The swipe up. I think that's kind of where it came from. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the reasons that you've gotten used to it and I'll get used to it quickly is I'm very used to now

never using the home button on my iPad. I just do the swipe up gesture to get to everything. So I expect that will embed with me quite quickly too for that reason. Doesn't solve it on the lock screen though, which is the other part of this. But like I said,

you could potentially just put a control center button on the lock screen so that I could 3D touch that and then the lock screen becomes the control center. I'm going to assume that iOS 12 brings something because every single version of iOS changes control center in'm going to assume that ios 12 brings something because every single version of ios changes control center in some new way so yeah we can have we can cross our fingers i love the new control center and i use it all the time i use it to adjust screen brightness i use it for home kit volume i mean i use it all the time i use it like you know for music controls and also

to connect my airpods because it's a quick way to do that if you click that little little chevron-y thing in the corner. I hope that they find some way to make that either A, more useful, or B, that after some use, I get used to the new way of activating it. The last thing I want to talk about in regards to iOS

is changes, because that's what this segment is, by the way. This is the changes to iOS. Is the many buttons and the way that they're all changing uh so kind of how do you take a screenshot and how do you turn off the iphone uh oh boy um so taking a screenshot you use the side button and the volume up button yep but this is this the story is okay every single gesture that's on the home button has to move how do we move them all so that's how you

do the screenshot to do siri you hold down the side button like you used to hold down the home button to do apple pay you double tap the side button and the i want to say the volume up button and you hold them down i think it's what it is for a while and you'll get that you know the prompt to turn it off that's to turn it off right that's the turn off yeah and then the reboot and this is amazing this is the forced restart you're talking about now yeah that it's like remember where you where it used to be home and the side button or the it used to be the top button but you know the sleep wake button and you hold them both down and it's like die and then it changed to on the seven with like seven because there's no physical it's a software home button basically and it's like volume down and...

So on the 8, it is volume up, volume down, and then hold the side button. So wait. In that order. It's like control, alt, delete. You press up, down. It's like a cheat code. It's like a cheat code. That's incredible.

For rebooting your iPhone. It's the Konami code for iPhone. I love that. That's hilarious. I mean, okay. Like, I see why they're doing it it's and also i reckon most people very rarely need that what they most of the time need is just the way to bring up the turn off right like i feel like in most situations that will probably solve what

people are looking for um but yeah it's funny that i mean i would have thought that just holding all three buttons would work fine right like that isn't that that feels to me like more like a bailout situation i think yeah but i think they don't want to make it easy right because because you don't normally want to force reboot an iphone so they want to make it uh for people in the know or who are looking up an emergency thing online yeah but not like everywhere all right so that's that part there more, there are more button uses, but I'm going to talk about, but we're going to start talking about face ID. And I think the button comes into play a little bit more there as well. But first let's talk about a new sponsor for the show. And that is Bombfell. This episode is brought to you by Bombfell, the online personal

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We thank Bomfell for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay, so Face ID. Maybe the main event, you know? And I know that the screen is a big thing, but I think Face ID, this is the thing that, what is this going to be like? What fundamental change is this going to be to the iPhone? Because the screen is the screen.

We know Apple can make a good screen, right? No matter what it is they've done, they're so good at this now, the screen's going to be great. And you can decide whether you like or don't like the notch, but that's your own personal taste. But Face ID, facial recognition, it's never really been done very well before, especially on phones.

So I want to go through all of this with you, Jason. How was the setup process? Shockingly easy. Easier than Touch ID, I would would argue i hate the touch id setup i hate it right i hate it okay so touch id where it's like hey we scanned your finger now change your grip and keep repeatedly touching your finger awkwardly on the thing until we tell you not to as we show you an animation that may or may not be tied to what's actually happening and then i have to go into settings and add every single other one of my

fingers right like you do this like five times or something well good news there's you only have one face and it'll only accept one face this is frustrating for me but it's not the end of the world like you know i would like like me and adina we share uh fingerprints on our devices and you know she's just gonna she knows my code she's gonna have to use the code right yeah that's that that is i i wish it would support more faces and maybe it will in the future maybe there's some hardware constraints there but um but it will only do it but yeah training is easy like shockingly easy so uh when you set it up it'll train you but you can also at any time um just go into the settings into the face id settings of the settings app and say enable face id and what happens and there's a video in my review on six colors i did a minute and a half video of like lovely top features of it it's hosted by a monkey and emoji with my voice by the way i

just want to say about this as a quick aside i have no idea how you did this i have no idea how you wrote the review and made a video you are superhuman jason snell um don't tell anybody or they'll come and take me to area 51 so um now you've got to be the alien emoji now so so my entire enrollment uh in face id is in that video and that's like that's i i think i i think i shortened the pause between the two scans by a half a second or something to get it to match my voiceover but basically it's all there and all you do is you say train okay so train face id and it shows you a uh selfie uh the selfie camera camera with kind of like a target box and you're supposed to put your face in there.

And then when it does that, then suddenly you get like a circle and it's very much sort of like guiding you to like look at the thing and see your face in the circle. And once that happens, then you get this, it's like a little,

like a clock almost around your face. And it says, and like sound effect begins to play of like, it's seriously like, like it's scanning you, but it's just a sound effect. It's just silly. And they did it to make you feel like your face is being scanned

because it is, but it's being done silently. So they make a sound effect. And the text basically says, move your head around sort of in a circle until the circle fills in. And so basically at that point, there's this like clock ring around you. And as you, you basically want to kind of like lift your head up and kind of pivot your neck and just sort of like let your phone see different angles of your face. And as you do that, it's giving you

the feedback as the little circle moves around. So essentially you do one little neck stretch from, from, from nine o'clock to midnight, down to six o'clock and back to nine o'clock, like just around the dial. And it goes great. Do that one more time. And you do it one more time and it says done. That's it. Takes no time. It's completely painless. I do have a trivia tidbit, and this came out of my briefing, which is Face ID is entirely based on infrared. The only time that the selfie camera gets used is in the setup process to give you feedback where you see yourself as you would see you in visible light. That's the only time that camera is used the rgb camera

in terms of the actual training and actual sensing and actual detecting all of that is infrared they've got the thought right it's not the camera they're just showing you it's working that's right that's for humans that's so that's to make you feel good yeah about what you're about what you're doing it's not needed it's like in the same way that you don't see a picture of your thumb when you're using Touch ID. It's not required. Yeah. So they show that to you and they play the weird sound effect of scanning and they put this little computer scanning effect over your face to make you feel like, yes, now it's tracking my face and it knows me. But that's all for show.

In the background, it's got an infrared blaster, basically, that's bathing your face in the background it's got an infrared uh blaster basically that's bathing your face in infrared which you can't see and it's got the dot projector which is putting those dots on your face that's apple whimsy what that is right there that really is great yeah well also i mean it's whimsy well it's apple whimsy in the sense that it's whimsy with a user purpose which is to make you, it's delighting you in the fact that your face is being scanned, but it's also giving you feedback that yes, this is a futuristic device

that is scanning your face with its magical process. That's so great. I love that. To make you feel like it's actually happening right down to the fact that it's got these sound effects going on in the background.

But it's super fast. I mean, you really, you do a couple of neck stretches and you're're done how fast is it to unlock jason let's be real okay um let's be real face id makes unlocking your phone irrelevant it's it's a i saw i think it was was it ben baharan somebody said or no horace did you said it's not a feature from a user perspective it's basically not a feature once you get used to it which takes no time um i like i'm already doing it so it took me hours once you are used to the fact that when you pick up your phone and flip up from the bottom it just opens you you

stop thinking about face id it just it disappears and it's fast enough that most of the time when i flip up it's already unlocked and and the way apple has done it if you flip up and it's not unlocked it completes the unlocking procedure and then proceeds with the um flip up and it's not unlocked, it completes the unlocking procedure and then proceeds with the flip up gesture. So you don't have to wait to see that the lock is now unlocked and then flip. There's no like pause for unlock,

now I'll go. You just pick up your phone and flip and it all happens. And I have not had a failure. The only failures I've had are when I have been showing it to somebody. And so there's multiple faces or it's pointed out. I'm holding it kind of in an unusual way. But in terms of just literally just picking it up and flipping, that works every time.

And yes, occasionally there is a delay where I flip and I see the words face ID for a moment and then they go away. But it is momentary. It is a fraction of a second. So I'm very impressed. Like, again, your face may vary. In fact, it probably will. Otherwise, you could unlock my phone.

But it just worked. I mean, I hate to say it just works, right? We all joke about, oh, it just works. It just works right we all joke about oh it just works it just works like for me it has just worked and it shows you why we talked about this on the show before the goal here is not what if we made face scanning if you're apple right the goal is what if we made it so that when you use your phone it knows it's you and it just unlocks it and you don't have to change anything about your behavior and that's the goal and i think they met it like i don't it's just not an issue and on top of that on apps that do biometric authentication you can you see where it's like

you know it brings up a little face id thing and then it opens but like i don't have to like oh yeah right i need to enable touch ID and move my thumb down and have it read my thumbprint. And now I can use the thing. Instead, it goes like, boop, face ID unlocked. And that's it for apps too. It's pretty great. Pretty great.

Have you tried like angles? Like, do you have to have the phone right in front of your face? What is that like? I mean, it just seems to work unless you get it kind of like at an unreasonable angle. Like if it's laying down on a table I kind of have to lean over like hello

and then it unlocks right so you can't so if you want to unlock it like when it's in your pocket or when it's laying on the table you know six inches away from you into the table yeah it's not going to unlock because it can't see you

but you know the use case that's by going to unlock because it can't see you but you know the use case that's by far the most common is you pick up your phone and and with the raise to wake you literally like lift up your phone and your thumb is moving to the bottom of the screen and you flip it open and your phone's open and you just don't even think about it and that happens for me that happened very quickly like this morning in the car my wife is driving we're coming back from the doctor and i was like oh yeah i want to see what's going on and i took the phone out and i went flip and was looking and then i thought oh yeah i just unlocked that phone without even thinking about it i didn't think about where my where my face was

was i looking i was just behaving like a person using their phone and it all just happened and you can do like i mean you know this is my my hope is that like you know you just take your phone out your pocket you just swipe up and look at it like it's just a motion like you know that's why pop is done before it's in front of your face kind of thing yeah and that works right like if if you pick it up and you're swiping and it's not open yet, by the time you get it up to your face, then it Face ID unlocks and it opens and it holds that gesture. It knows you're trying to open the phone

and it holds that gesture and it puts up a translucent sheet that says Face ID and then the little thing spins for a fraction of a second and it unlocks. So even though there's two steps, you can do them out of sequence and it's fine. And because of the Face ID stuff, it's also hiding notifications now right yeah by default that was already a setting that you could do but now it's by default so like i got a slack message from steven hackett while we

were doing this and it just shows up if i you know tapped awake it just shows up as a slack message and it says slack message from steven hackett but doesn't show me the message and then i picked up the phone to look at it and it face it face id unlocked still at the lock screen and um revealed the uh the content of the message on unlock which is pretty cool um the other place that i've noticed face detection outside of animoji um is in the screen lock setting like um 30 seconds of inactivity to do screen locking um it uses attention detection on that so if you're sitting on your phone and after 30 seconds it's going to dim because you're not actually looking you know you're not actually interacting with it if you're still looking at it it won't dim the phone because it knows you're looking at the phone yeah why would you turn off the screen when you're looking at content on an

unlocked iphone and so it won't it just won't do that which is something you can do when you're literally the phone is aware of whether it's being watched. And how do purchases from the app store work? Because, you know, you usually you'd press buy and then scan your thumbprint. Like, how is it doing that? Because I'm always looking at it. So how is it authorizing the purchase? It basically is the same workflow as on the previous ones where, you know, you've got that Apple Apple pay like thing.

as on the previous ones where you know you've got that apple apple pay like thing that's not actually apple pay because apple the app store doesn't take apple pay because reasons anyway uh so you uh you basically double tap the side which is the apple pay gesture and then it does a face id scan so that's that's how you confirm because you you don't want to just say oh i see your face i'll just charge your account yeah because yeah that doesn't work that's not that's how you confirm because you don't want to just say, oh, I see your face. I'll just charge your account. Yeah, because, yeah, that doesn't work. That's not how it works. That's not good. So it has you do the little double tap Apple Pay gesture, even though it's not Apple Pay. And then it checks that it's you and it's a done deal.

So we spoke about Animoji a little bit at the top and kind of peppered through. And, you know, you say, right, you say, like, this seems like a really impressive feature technologically and from an animation perspective is this something you think that you'll use like can you see yourself using animoji well uh yeah i think it's more likely gonna be stickers than anything else with funny expressions yeah because you can you can what you can make a face and then turn it into a sticker right because i'm not sure i just want to send people movies of like me talking with an animal face right i like i'm not sure i want to do that but i like the idea of making a sort of like making my own expression that the the face is a mask that i wear and then

i make an expression it doesn't necessarily even need to match the existing emoji expressions. And then I can send that off. I think that's probably more likely going to be the case than that I'm going to be sending those Animoji messages. I'm not convinced in the long term if this isn't more like other iMessage apps and stickers and things where it's a fun thing for people to do and it'll be novel. And then some people will keep using it and everybody else will stop using it but it's very cool technology um i you know i didn't lead with it in my review because while it is adorable and i think the animations are really great and i think everybody's going to be sending in emoji messages for the first few weeks that they have an iphone 10 in the long run i don't know i mean i i was actually thinking i would rather um

uh what about things like an emoji picker where you pick where you say i want the smiley face and you know the the the circular circle yellow face and then you give a uh facial expression and it picks the emoji that's closest to that and just sends that like an actual emoji i think someone could build that i think probably so someone will build that i hope that they do because that sounds like a fun demo right like even if you don't use it like that sounds like a fun little keyboard to have i think that's something somebody could build and i can't i also like uh you know will there be more animoji characters down the road maybe so because obviously that's it's hard to do it because you got to do a lot of character animation, but that would be fun too.

So, you know, maybe I also, you know, they've only got it down as this sort of like 10 seconds with sound kind of thing. And I wonder if there's some variation that can be done in terms of like, could you turn that into like a, an animation that has no sound that you can just do a really quick,

like three second animation and send that instead. Cause I feel like that would be less intrusive than, you can just do a really quick like three second animation and send that instead because i feel like that would be um less intrusive than uh a video with with audio to send like an animation so the stickers then are just static they're not moving stickers yeah i think they're just static i think you you um you basically pose and then drag it out or tap to send it as a sticker. Because I mean, you can have moving stickers. So I hope that they find a way to make that happen for an emoji. That'd be nice.

Almost like live animoji kind of thing where you do a little thing and then it turns it into an animated sticker. Yeah, I don't think that is something that exists right now. So I have a couple of little things left to round this out. First off, the camera. Is this what you'd expect? What is different with this camera to the iPhone 8 camera? The big things

are its optical image stabilization on both which the Plus does not have. So this is both back lenses, right? Both of the back lenses. So it's got OIS on the telephoto as well as on the wide angle

which the eight plus does not okay and then um what else the uh it's got a wider aperture the telephoto does on the 10 than the eight um otherwise it's pretty much the same there are a lot of things that are shared right the glass back although it's not exactly the same it's pretty close the uh the selfie camera itself is the same the rear facing wide angle is basically the same the telephoto is a little bit better um so it's you know the the chip is the same like this is not using a faster a11 bionic right it is the same chip it uses the machine learning part of it more because of the face id stuff but it's the same chip the same speed i ran uh geekbench on both the 8 and the 10 and they're the same okay so it has a lot of things in common of course nobody's upgrading from the 8 well there is somebody

out there who's upgrading from the 8 to the 10. They bought an 8 and then three weeks later they're going to get a 10. Okay, fair. But 99% of people will be upgrading from the previous model. That's true, although that's the review unit on my real one. But it is most of what is in the 8 plus some things that are unique to the 10. So it shares a lot of the advances that the 8 had. The wireless charging, the inductive charging is another example of that. The processor is the same.

The camera, the zoom camera, the telephoto camera is subtly better, but not dramatically, just subtly better, lets in a little more light. Has the OIS, which actually means that in low light settings, where sometimes on the plus models, when you're zooming in, in a low light setting, they will actually, even though you're zoomed in, the software will actually, it'll keep that zoom, but it'll actually flip over to the other camera. I don't know if you knew this but this is something that happens sometimes is you're zoomed in with a with a uh what you think is an optical zoom but it's kind of dark yeah and it'll be like i'm going to use the digital a digital zoom instead

on the other camera because it's got image stabilization and so it's going to be a better image even though it's a digital zoom because of the image stabilization on this camera, they both have image stabilization. So that'll be, you'll get better kind of low light stuff going on. So it's not doing the swapping. I think, I think, I mean, it may, but it has less reason to. The biggest thing here is if you're somebody like me who has never bought a Plus phone because they're too big for them, this is the first small-sized-ish iPhone to have the two cameras set up. So I'm going to have the two cameras set up in my pocket every day for the first time, which is very exciting. Yeah, it's a great life. I'll tell you that.

Last thing. Now, I'm only asking this because people want me to ask it and i'm sure you don't have a good enough answer for it yet but i'm gonna ask it anyway that's a great reason that's a great reason people want to know is a great reason to ask a question battery life well mike i'm happy to report that i've had the phone for less than 24 hours and i haven't run out of battery because i've kept it charged i have nothing to report i i wanted to ask it because people will wonder why we didn't but i know you haven't had enough time and also the first set up of a phone kills the battery like it's it's not a good test exactly we'll report back on that next week it's doing spotlight

indexing and it's downloading apps and the whole the whole thing it got it was definitely when it was doing the restore it was it was chewing through battery life so that's going to be a long-term thing to watch uh given that apple is confident enough to quote two extra hours of battery life and matthew panzerino who had the phone for a while he had it for a week i took a tech crunch panzer says that it lasted longer for sure great um. And I read, I think the BuzzFeed review, Nicole said that it was interesting the way she phrased it, which is like, you can't get through two days with it, but you can get through more than one day was her takeaway,

which is awesome if that's the case. It sounds like there's more, that there's more, you know, this is not a two-day phone battery, but we may be getting to the point where with the 10, it really truly is an all-day battery. All right. So, I mean, this is kind of it for the review. Is there anything you wanted to add?

I don't know. I mean, you read my review while I was sleeping. Sure did. More app updates will help. You know, that's some of what's going on here. And we're going to know more about that over the next few days, right? Some of those apps are going to start to come out over the next few days. Obviously, we'll have more to say next week because, one, you'll have had a week with it.

And two, hopefully I have one as well and we'll have had a long weekend with it. So there will be more about this next week. Now, of course, we did have our listeners send us in Ask Upgrade questions. Now, of course, we did have our listeners send us in Ask Upgrade questions, and I have a selection of iPhone X Ask Upgrade questions, which we're going to do just after our final break, where we thank Blue Apron for sponsoring this week's show. They are the number one recipe delivery service with the freshest ingredients. You can get $30 off your first delivery and free shipping

by going to blueapron.com slash upgrade. Blue Apron's mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone while supporting a more sustainable food system. They set the highest standards for ingredients and build a community of home chefs at the same time. Because for less than $10 a meal, Blue Apron will deliver to you seasonal recipes with fresh, high-quality ingredients to help you make delicious home-cooked meals in 40 minutes or less.

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Ask Upgrade. Infrared dots. Yeah, that's what it is now. Lee wants to know, Jason, have you had any accidental touches with the palm of your hand as you hold the device? Because, you know, maybe your hand is like stretching over to the screen more than it would normally.

Have you noticed anything like this? Okay, great. I mean, I assume that there's good edge detection and stuff like that in there. I hope so, yeah. They've learned how to do this with the iPad over time. That's true. James wants to know,

do screenshots of the iPhone X black out the notch and the rounded corners, or are they just rectangle squares with everything there? They are complete rectangles, which means the notch is not there, nor are the rounded corners. Because if I didn't mention it earlier, the other thing about this

is that there are lots of rounded edges to this phone. It is not perfectly square. The screen ends in of rounded edges to this phone. It is not perfectly square. The screen ends in these rounded edges that match the rounded edges of the device. But when you take a screenshot, it's a rectangle, which is why, like, if you look at my video, what I ended up doing was taking a photo of the iPhone, emptying out, basically erasing the screen portion

and making that transparent so that I could put my screen recordings behind it and have it look like it looks on the phone because the raw screen recording or screenshot will be rectangular and you'll miss the notch and you'll miss the curves in the corners. Kyle wants to know how does the steel feel in the hand compared to the aluminium how do those two materials kind of stack up when you're holding them well the the the aluminum is um is like the i don't know it's it's less shiny right it's this it's less shiny and less tacky because it's um because it's that it's that aluminum feel that apple does so well the stainless steel doesn't feel like that it's it's like going from a an aluminum apple watch to a stainless steel apple watch basically it is um it is much

smoother and it's a little more grippy because it's so smooth that your fingers just kind of like stick on it a little bit more the stainless steel is more grippy you're saying yes you're right whereas the aluminum's got that kind of soft feel because it's been blasted by whatever they blasted with little beads or whatever to give it that feel so it's it's a different um it's it's a shiny instead of matte basically i think i would say in in terms of the feel it looks great how grippy is the glass back versus the jet black aluminium asks me here i'd say that they're comparable okay um i think i think this is and the eight right i mean i think i think they're all pretty pretty comparable um the aluminum frames may be a little less grippy because they're

um because they are that blasted aluminum and so they're a little bit less um less uh tacky that whereas this thing is uh the the stainless you know is more like the grippiness of the glass so that it's more it's got more in common with that so that's yeah that's my take on it paul has asked is there a setting to allow the iphone to unlock and go straight to the home screen rather than having to swipe up on the lock screen so i asked about this and i think the answer is no although i was kind of hoping that there was a um that there was a uh an accessibility accessibility feature but I don't think there is. And the reason Apple doesn't want to do that

is that Apple wants you to be able to look at your notifications and use that interface because that's a useful interface too. Like app picking isn't the only thing you do when you pick up your phone. Sometimes you look at what your notifications are and they built that notification interface

to be pretty robust. So, and it's got widgets and all that stuff. And those widgets now, when you look at them are unlocked, right? They, if you tap them, they will just like notifications too. They'll just take you where you need to go because you're looking at the phone,

Face ID has already unlocked the phone. So you look at a notification and tap it and you don't get one of those oh yeah you need to put your fingerprint on the glass before we continue instead it just opens and moves along its way so i haven't seen a place where you can get it to uh just jump to the home screen i'm a little surprised by that but there it is andrew wants to know in your experience does face id work well outside and in bright rooms nilai patel at the verge had issues with this himself uh i have used it more inside and in dark rooms than outside in bright rooms i need to spend more time i gotta go walk the dog so i will try i will try it and report back and we'll we will see yeah i would imagine

that if you're backlit brightly by the sun or something like that, it might have a challenge even with the infrared of, uh, having you be kind of swamped. Um, but I haven't experienced a touch or a face ID failure yet, but I have not, I've been doing a lot of stuff here at my desk and not out in the world, which I will be doing hopefully soon mr espresso asks which screen is better for just reading text in something like instapaper or ibooks is the oled of the 10 or the lcd of the 8 plus what's more comfortable mr espresso is this federico no actually this is the best i could get from their twitter account i like contrast and the nice thing

about the oled is that the blacks are really black and the whites are really white. So you should be able to get a very contrasty thing. It's also much higher resolution, which means the text should be clearer. It is OLED and LCD, and those are not exactly the same. But my guess is they're both fine. They're both great. I'm not sure one is going to be better than the other.

The OLED might be better better but it might not matter I've read things on both of them they both seem great and finally Matt asked I have a 5S so any upgrade is going to be a big for me what feature should push me towards the 10 instead of the 8 plus um

8 plus okay uh that makes a difference because I was going to say dual camera, but that's not it. So what features should push you toward the 10? Uh, the screen being bigger, you know, big high resolution screen, you know, the, the plus has a nice big screen too, but this is a nicer screen and a face ID, you know, sort of like going, you know, not having to worry about it at all and just it unlocks when it sees you. But, you know, as we wrap this episode up, it's worth saying this is a $9.99 US dollar phone. This is a, this is a pricey phone. My review is that, you know, tomorrow's iPhone today, this is what they're doing. We theorized about it when the rumors about this phone were out there earlier this year.

And this is the case. You're buying the cutting-edge, first-generation of a whole new way of thinking about the iPhone, and you're going to pay a premium for it. And if things like Face ID and having the smaller device but still has the dual cameras and the OLED display, which is very, very nice. If those are like, well, those are nice, but is it worth another $150? If you start to have those questions,

or I guess it's the A+, right? So it's not quite, there's still a gap there, right? Is it 150? I don't know what it is. But if you, everybody's gonna have to decide for themselves this is not the iphone 10 is not a phone every person who has an iphone should by default buy right i mean like you need to look at what it offers versus what the eight and eight plus offer and make a decision about whether it's worth the extra money and i will also say as i

said when i reviewed the iphone 8 which also, we didn't even talk about that. I wrote a review of the iPhone 8 last week after all this time, because I spent time with it and I was thinking about it. And the short version of that review is for a lot of people, like the 8 is going to be a great update from the 6 or the 6S. It's going to be a great update and it's going to be really familiar. It's going to be the same shape. It's going to be the same iPhone.

My wife has the 8 now and it's like, it's really familiar. It's going to be the same shape. It's going to be the same iPhone. My wife has the, has the eight now. And it's like, it's really great. It's fast. It's, it's the size and shape and behavior that she expects from an iPhone. The iPhone 10 is not that right. It's not quite the right size. It's not the right behavior. It's got a lot of new stuff in it. And so it's not for everyone. For our audience, it's probably for a lot more than you'd expect. And then you got to look at the price cause it's expensive. And those features may not be worth it. And over time, those features will probably come down to the rest of the product line,

but that's the future today. It's the high end cutting edge iPhone. And, uh, and so you, you're gonna have to decide yourself whether you want to be a part of that, or if you want to save some money and get something that's got a lot of the same features not all but a lot of them and is in a much more familiar package all right that's it for us upgrade today I wanted just

before we go to have a little bit of follow-up just one quick thing on iPhone 10 bumper cases so I mentioned that that's what I'm looking for. I want a bumper case for my iPhone 10. And three listeners sent in three different cases to me. So Rapscallion sent in a case by Incase called The Frame. Will sent in the RhinoShield Crash Guard. And Kai sent in the D-Brand Grip. These are all bumper-like cases that are coming for a couple of phones,

including the iPhone 10. The one that I coming for a couple of phones, including the iPhone X. The one that I want out of all of these is the in-case frame. So I'm keeping my eye out for when that's going to be available for me here in the UK. That's the case that I want, I think. It looks really nice. I know in-case do good stuff, and it's a bumper case, which is exactly what I want. So it'd be a shame to not see the stainless steel, but that's probably what I'm going to go with if I go for a case. I honestly hope that I won't want to have any case on it like i'm going to feel comfortable in holding it um i am going to buy apple care plus because the screen replacements are so expensive i was going to mention that the the replacements for the screen and the glass and

all of that on this are much more than on other iphones much more to the point where even even me even the guy who never buys AppleCare, I'm thinking I'll probably buy AppleCare for my 10 because it's like too much. It's $279 for the screen, $549 for the back out of warranty. I think this is because of the charging stuff. I think that's why it's so expensive. So yeah, Stephen Hackett did a good kind of,

he put some charts together on Fytofix. Scary. I'll put that in the show notes. So I'm going to get it. Yeah, he sold a lot of Apple Cares with that story. I bet he did. He should have got an affiliate for that. That's why I'm buying it, because of those charts.

All right, so thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. We hope that you've enjoyed it. We're going to be continuing our iPhone X coverage next week, as we will both have had time to spend with the devices. Hopefully, knock on wood, that I will get one. We'll see. We'll see.

Who knows? Nobody knows. And if you want to get involved with the show, there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can follow me and Jason on Twitter. Jason is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. You can send in questions for the show.

We take hashtag Snell Talk questions to open the show and hashtag Ask Upgrade questions to close the show. Ask Upgrade are serious questions. Snell Talk are a little bit more entertaining for us to get things started every single week, so we jump straight into the action. Jason writes over at sixcolors.com where you can go and read his review, which you should,

and I'm sure, Jason, you're going to have more coverage of the iPhone X over the next couple of days, I would expect. I guess. Your guess is as good as mine. It's unknown what you're going to say, right, because you've written the review. But I'm sure there'll be things that you will want to talk about. Maybe there's going to be some apps that come out. But you should go stay always stuck to Six Colors for the latest news because it's a great website that Jason puts together. I want to thank Blue Apron, Bombfell, and fell and encapsular for their support of this week's episode and most of all i want to thank you for listening if this is the first time you've listened

to upgrade please subscribe to the show um if you enjoy it this is we're as good as this every week if you think that and if you haven't enjoyed it then you're probably still not listening um but until next time mr j. Jason Snell, say goodbye. Bye, everybody.