Battery life, memory and connectivity :
There’s a 2,716mAh battery in the iPhone
X, which makes it marginally larger than the battery in the iPhone 8
Plus. That phone can generally see you through a day but not much more.
In other words it offers standard, middle of the road battery life by
smartphone standards. Not bad but not great either.
There’s little to suggest the iPhone X
will last any longer, in fact worryingly it will probably last less
time, since it has a bigger, sharper screen to power and according to
Apple for certain use cases it will last an hour less than the iPhone 8
Plus, with quotes of up to 12 hours for internet use and 13 hours for
video playback.
You should at least be able to charge it
quickly and easily though, as the iPhone X supports both wireless
charging and fast charging, the latter of which can juice it up from
zero to 50% in just 30 minutes.
Memory comes in at 64GB or 256GB, and it’s
this decision that will affect how much you pay. A 64GB version costs
£999, while a 256GB one will set you back £1149. And of course, being an
Apple handset there’s no microSD card slot, so choose wisely.
Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, 3G,
4G, Bluetooth 5.0 and NFC (though only for Apple Pay). Of those
Bluetooth 5.0 is worth a slightly closer look, as this is the latest
standard, offering four times the range, twice the speed and eight times
the capacity of the previous version.
That means you can be further away from
the device you’re connected to without it cutting out, and even that you
can connect to more than one Bluetooth device at once, though for most
of the benefits the devices you’re connecting to will need to have
Bluetooth 5.0 as well.
Camera :
The iPhone X has not one but two 12MP
rear-facing cameras. There’s a main wide-angle lens with an aperture of
f/1.8, and a secondary telephoto lens with an aperture of f/2.4.
The former doesn’t have quite as large a
lens opening as, say the f/1.7 Samsung Galaxy Note 8, but it’s close and
based on the iPhone 8 Plus (which has the same camera) it’s very fast
to focus and capable of taking great shots without a lot of effort – you
just point and shoot.
Some cameras require you to mess around
adjusting settings for optimal results, but the iPhone X does all this
automatically in the background with its image signal processor, so you
don’t have to. That processor also allows the camera to capture more
detail, for better photos than you’ll get from previous iPhones.
The main exception to this is when the
lighting is bad. Here the results are adequate, but not best in class,
despite the presence of both optical image stabilisation and a quad-LED
flash. They’re still the best you’ll find on an iPhone though.
Of course, we haven’t even touched on the
skills that second lens brings to the table. This enables a Portrait
mode, which can artfully blur the background of shots while keeping the
foreground in focus. You’ll have seen lots of images taken like this
because it’s a generally good look.
That second lens also allows for 2x
optical zoom without any loss of quality, so you can get in closer
without, well, getting in closer.
There are also a number of simple yet
powerful editing tools, most notably Portrait Lighting, which adds a
range of impressive lighting effects to images, leading to potentially
professional looking shots.
You also get Live Photos of course,
letting you add a brief clip to each photo you take, and there are new
effects you can add to these as well. It’s a powerful set of tools, and
while it’s not all-encompassing there are apps available to fill in any
gaps.
On the video front, the iPhone X can shoot
in up to 4K quality at up to 60fps, for seriously smooth,
high-resolution footage (albeit footage that will take up a lot of space
on your phone). It can also shoot time lapse footage and in 1080p slow
motion at up to 240fps.
The front-facing camera is less
interesting, but still reasonable. There’s a 7MP f/2.2 lens, capable of
recording video in 1080p at up to 30fps. That’s pretty standard, though
the results for both stills and video are solid (again, based on the
similarly spec’d iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus).
However, the iPhone X is also capable of
Portrait mode and Portrait Lighting using its front-facing camera, so
you can seriously power up your selfies.
