TECH

2017 / 09 / 14

Are you feeling X-cited about Apple’s latest, best iPhone?

ONCE again, the Church of Apple drew its devotees together this week to sing the praises of another new product launch.

But what, pray tell, did we learn from Tuesday’s largely iPhone-focused presentation?

Tech watchers, business leaders and the stock market had spent a busy Monday chattering about Apple’s expected revelations, with a number of leaks – proven to be correct – suggesting Apple’s latest iPhone iteration would make some large leaps forward.

The leaks and rumours were confirmed by the main man himself, Tim Cook, who took to the stage to run through the main features of Apple’s new ‘anniversary’ phone – the iPhone X – as well as run through the major boosts to some ‘lesser’ models, such as the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus, and other Apple products.

However, the X was by far the star of the show, boasting some interesting new features – and an eyewatering price – to note.

Perhaps the biggest change for most users was a further drift into purely tech-driven features, with the X ditching its physical Home button for a full-screen phone experience.

Forget fingerprint recognition – the X now scans your face, using infrared tech to create a 3D mask and verify that, yup, you’re you, rather than, say, an annoying kid brother trying to unlock your phone with a photo of your face.

It’s an interesting piece and use of tech, with Apple claiming that it’s about 20 times better and more secure than its fingerprint-scanning tech which it had introduced a few years back, but many users may miss the muscle-memory use of a home button.

Moving on, and there were the inevitable power, speed and processing jumps that each new iPhone iteration gets – and as the vast majority of people go as glassy-eyed as I do whenever someone starts talking about giga-anything chips, processing cores and RAM, let’s just say that the X has seen a decent boost to enable it to do even more impressive things, even faster.

One welcome new feature, although not a revolutionary one, is the X’s introduction of wireless charging, using a special plate – so goodbye, fiddly, fragile charging cables.

This isn’t particularly new tech, as a number of rivals have offered wireless charging for some years in higher-tier phones, but it’s a canny move towards the wire-free future that’s surely coming.

Apple’s new user modifiable emoji was a bit of an underwhelming feature to highlight, but anyone who can’t type anything without adding a This-is-what-I-kind-of-mean face at the end could get a kick out of them, although thankfully they’re locked into using Apple’s proprietary messaging system. ;-)

Apple’s already impressive iPhone cameras got another significant boost, both in terms of the power put into taking shots, and to subtly edit them afterwards.

At this stage, many phones (not just luxury iPhones) have started to encroach on the lower tiers of digital cameras’ abilities, and as other tech heads have noted, there’s an evolutionary clash beginning to take place between phones and cameras which one would hope camera manufacturers have already woken up to the dangers of. A complex story for another day...

The iPhone’s Achilles Heel (its pitiful battery life) saw a plaster slapped on, with claims of an extra two hours or so of extra life for the X, despite its power-hungry abilities.

Longsuffering iPhone users will welcome the boost, any boost, to the battery life, but I can’t help but think of how my cheap €150 Moto G phone, for all of its faults, generally lasts a day and a half on a single charge despite heavy use – something beyond this pricey new phone.

I said ‘pricey’ for a reason: the iPhone X has a $999/£999 price point – to start with – which will inevitably be even higher, here, let alone paying for higher-storage models.

For all of its bells and whistles features (which I’ve ignored running through in more detail, as by today, Thursday 14, readers will already have had a full day or two of iPhone X articles everywhere), that’s an eye-watering price for what’s ultimately still just a phone; fancy and powerful, but a phone nonetheless.

Apple purists will love it, but it’ll be interesting to see how the X fares over here in our cash-strapped economy once it starts shipping in early November ...