This is iphone 10 and it's my favorite iphone ever by far and there's no doubt that in the history of iphones this thing is iconic, it's more modern, it finally feels like a new iphone that's a big part of why I like it so much, but that's also the source for a few sore spots, there's a learning curve to this phone unlike any other iPhone.
Every other iPhone ever has just been home button, rectangle screen, rounded corners, pretty much the same thing, you know what you're getting yourself into, you know exactly how to use it and if there's going to be one big new feature every year it takes you two seconds to learn it and you're good, iPhone 10 is different with this phone there's maybe three or four big fundamental changes to the way you use the phone.
It's very clearly still an iPhone you still mostly know how to use it, but there's a couple things that are different that you'll have to get used to, so on the outside is the shape we're used to the rectangle with rounded corners, but this is the first time the display itself actually has curved corners and it's pushed right up to the edges of the phone and it pushes everything to the corners and keeps all the front-facing sensors in the notch, the forsaken notch at the top it's actually not that big of a deal.
Just holding the iPhone 10 though it feels great, I think it's an awesome size, but if there were a bigger iPhone 10 plus I would totally get that, right now despite the larger display the 10 is definitely closer to feeling like an iPhone 8 than 8 plus, it still feels like a smaller phone compared to the others I've used and also thanks to the stainless steel sides it's definitely slippery and it's definitely going to slide out of your pocket at least once it happens to the best of them and it's crazy the silver it's so shiny and honestly we all know your phone is never going to look as good as it does fresh out the box unlike the more matte finish of the previous iPhone, I'm not convinced this super shiny finish on the iPhone rails is going to last like this we've seen this before in other products it definitely gets chipped and scratched, but D-brands got something new for the 10 “The Grip” so like the name implies this thing is supposed to be the best way to grip your phone.
Overall the iPhone 10 is a pretty complete hardware package as you'd expect from a thousand-dollar smartphone, the speaker's even though they aren't front-facing are still pretty good,
The one part of the hardware of this phone I actually really don't like is the camera bump, but not just for the usual reason like rocking on a table I've just kind of accepted that at this point but because of the new orientation a couple times I've noticed it's easy to accidentally get your finger in the photo or video you're taking just because it's all up in the corner it might take a couple days to get used to that and stop getting your finger and the corner of your shots.
What's really become the signature feature of the iPhone 10 is on the front and it is the notch up at the top of the display.
Apple have come up with the opposite solution which is “embrace the notch” so in all their software and all the software they'll promote is apps that wrap right around that notch and fill up the whole display, that's what an optimized iPhone 10 app looks like and since this is a taller aspect ratio apps will have to get updated to do this, developers will have to get on their horse and actually put in the work and update their apps to get them to fill up the display.
The only time I really think about the notch is when I'm watching videos, yes it gets kind of awkward here because when you're watching videos fullscreen the notch will cut off some of the display some of what you're trying to watch, so if you want to avoid that you can actually double tap and it'll bring in the video you're watching on this OLED display now you have some more bezels, but at this point now the video you're watching is so small you might as well not be watching it on a bigger screen it feels like the same size as the iPhone 8, so this whole thing is the main reason why I would actually want a plus size iPhone 10, as for the rest of the display it's great, Apple calls it a super Retina display, I just call it their first OLED in a smart phone ever finally and it's it's pretty awesome it's a 5.8 inch panel, high pixel density, it supports the p3 color gamut, HDR, it has true tone, it doesn't get as bright and saturated as Samsung's like note 8 and s8 displays, but it is still bright enough not too cartoonish with the colors, has a small blue shift when you tilt it off axis but so do many other OLEDs to varying degrees and it still has 3d touch although I pretty much stopped using that completely except for lock screen controls that I wish I could change, so the screen is awesome and it's a big part of why this phone looks so good from so many angles.
Of course, when you go to a full screen display like this you lose the home button, so that's why iPhone 10 replaces that home button with whole bunch of gestures this is the biggest learning curve of any iPhone ever, but it's still not that bad.
You swipe up from that bar at the bottom of the screen at any time to go home now anytime you see that bar it represents the home and whatever app you're in will close itself just like any other iPhone hitting a home button.
Swipe down from the top for notifications, but now swipe from the right corner for your control center and for multitasking again you have no home button so you swipe halfway up and then over to get through your recent apps, that'll get you to that same card style carousel as before, but overall once you get hang of this system once you get used to all this swiping which took me a couple days it felt pretty natural. I actually started trying to swipe up on other phones which shows you how weird how much I got used to that the one that took me the longest was multitasking because I started off thinking you had to swipe up then wait and then the cards show up, but that always felt so slow but what you really have to do to get this to work is you swipe up and over and I gets you to the cards way faster so that's a pro tip for anyone who is still swiping up halfway and waiting for the cards to show up like I was, you're welcome.
For those with small hands or who just really liked reach ability on the bigger iPhone you technically still have it, here it's buried in the accessibility settings but you can do the little swipe down on the bottom of the screen to bring the top corners within reach and that makes getting a top gesture is easier with one hand, I leave that on it's pretty useful sometimes.
Now of course, the other big change that comes with ditching the home button on iPhone 10 is he also just ditched that fingerprint reader which means as you may have heard they needed to replace that with face ID (facial recognition).
Face ID on the iPhone works really well most of the time, it's not perfect and I think touch ID was closer to perfect as far as fail rate goes but it's still impressively good and I still believe that touch ID is definitely still faster, but face ID can get better with software updates and with time as millions of people begin to use it I think that'll happen and it still also has some physical limitations that you can become aware of and avoid just like touch ID had some physical limitations that you could become aware of like when your fingers wet or it doesn't quite work because of stuff on your hands or if you have a glove on stuff like that you just know touch IDs not going to work so you put in the passcode.
Face ID has some physical limitations too, it works by bouncing thousands of little infrared dots off your face and back into the sensor and creating a map of your eyes nose and mouth it doesn't actually use the front-facing camera and it can learn a changing face over time it still recognizes you when you get a haircut or shave a beard or put makeup on, none of this stuff has a huge effect on the dot map that made of your face it also won't be tricked by a picture of you because that doesn't have the depth of your face and I can also work through some pairs of sunglasses again the ones where the infrared light can get through, but face ID has been known to fail when you're backlit or when there's like a ton of extra infrared light coming in basically from the Sun it's like how a dim flashlight doesn't work when it's really bright out same thing face ID is going to get blinded by all that extra infrared light just got to type in your passcode, but those times for me were few and far between, if touch IDs success rate was 99% to me it felt like face IDs success rate was like 95%.
I can add up when you unlock your phone hundreds of times a day, but again this can get better as it gets used more there's even some settings as well where you can turn attention on so it won't unlock if you're just holding the phone up to your face not only that but you have to be looking at your phone then it'll unlock and show all your notification data works pretty well for me just please don't do this while driving and even if face ID is this workaround to not getting the fingerprint reader underneath the glass in time for this phone, I still think that at its best facial recognition on a phone is closer to secure seamless authentication than a separate fingerprint reader ever would be because with this you just pick up the phone and it works you use it you login you pay for stuff you download apps etc, but if someone else picks up your phone it won't work it's that simple.
Then there is an emoji possibly maybe the most fun feature of iPhone 10, but you know it's hilarious these moving facial tracking and emoji are iPhone 10 exclusive, you can't get this on any other iPhone, so if you get one of these then you know the person that sent it has an iPhone 10 and weirdly enough if you send this to someone with an Android phone they just get a video message of this an emoji, but here's the thing an emoji is just using the front-facing camera, an emoji is working and continues to work even when you cover the depth sensors and the extra front-facing sensors all that stuff, it'll work when you cover everything except for it the front-facing camera which means they totally could have made these available for any other iPhone, but they didn't.
iPhone 10 also has some slightly new cameras same exact sensors for both cameras as the iPhone 8 plus but slightly better glass and now both are optically stabilized so this is going to get you some meaningfully better performance with the 2x telephoto lens and zoomed in photos and zoomed in videos things like that which is good to see because I avoided using it with previous iPhones and as you'd expect photos from the iPhone 10 look awesome, I'm especially happy with how much dynamic range we're getting HDR on previous iPhone cameras used to be a lot less aggressive and I kept asking over and over for a little more a little more and now photos really pop the sky is like always so blue, details is there, color accuracy is tight, it's not as good as the pixel 2 camera just going to say that right up front, but this is a top 5 smartphone camera and no doubt and despite his tendency to overexpose I think it might be the best front-facing camera for video for any smartphone, they've also added portrait mode to the front-facing camera for portrait selfies on the 10, but it doesn't work nearly as well edges get blurred super hard almost to a comical amount when compare it to something like the pixel 2 or even the back facing camera, but the thing is pixel 2 does all this so much better because of machine learning and software, so in theory iPhone 10 can keep learning and get this good too, plus it already has better color accuracy so I'll be on the lookout for that software update.
Now you may have noticed we've made it all this way into an iPhone review without talking about any of the specs shows how important that is, but iPhone 10 is rocking the a11 Bionic chip and three gigs of ram and it's awesome in fact it's really good, I would say this is the most powerful mobile chipset in any smartphone right now the benchmarks are insane, but this isn't for iOS this is for all the things that run on top of iOS, the augmented reality apps, the image processing, the super slow-motion video all of that stuff, it obviously feels more modern because of all the swiping and the gestures now, but as far as functionality, it has all the same stuff and features you're used to, has all the same quirks you are used to, like iOS this notification system is still a mess since they don't group apps together this is still easily fixable but there's plenty of other things I wish would be different about iOS too, but it's Apple they're stubborn you'll get used to it.
Battery life on the iPhone 10 has turned out to be pretty great close to the iPhone 8 plus I would say again iPhone is a champ of standby time and it always has been so no problems there and it handles the biggest iPhone display ever pretty well thanks to it being an OLED, I haven't had any problems getting to the end of a single day with full use if you want to use that screen on time metric it's usually around 6 hours.
So the bottom line and the question that I get the most often about this phone is so what do you think? This is my favorite iPhone ever by far I really like it.
Is it worth $1000? Honestly I don't think people spending the money on this phone will be disappointed.
That's not to say this thing is perfect it clearly still also has its downsides,
But those are all things that I think people who are buying this phone are already used to or were expecting and for that reason it's not a deal-breaker in 2017 so I'm happy to be carrying this phone, so if you were thinking about going out and getting this phone go ahead I think you'll like it too.
Every other iPhone ever has just been home button, rectangle screen, rounded corners, pretty much the same thing, you know what you're getting yourself into, you know exactly how to use it and if there's going to be one big new feature every year it takes you two seconds to learn it and you're good, iPhone 10 is different with this phone there's maybe three or four big fundamental changes to the way you use the phone.
It's very clearly still an iPhone you still mostly know how to use it, but there's a couple things that are different that you'll have to get used to, so on the outside is the shape we're used to the rectangle with rounded corners, but this is the first time the display itself actually has curved corners and it's pushed right up to the edges of the phone and it pushes everything to the corners and keeps all the front-facing sensors in the notch, the forsaken notch at the top it's actually not that big of a deal.
Just holding the iPhone 10 though it feels great, I think it's an awesome size, but if there were a bigger iPhone 10 plus I would totally get that, right now despite the larger display the 10 is definitely closer to feeling like an iPhone 8 than 8 plus, it still feels like a smaller phone compared to the others I've used and also thanks to the stainless steel sides it's definitely slippery and it's definitely going to slide out of your pocket at least once it happens to the best of them and it's crazy the silver it's so shiny and honestly we all know your phone is never going to look as good as it does fresh out the box unlike the more matte finish of the previous iPhone, I'm not convinced this super shiny finish on the iPhone rails is going to last like this we've seen this before in other products it definitely gets chipped and scratched, but D-brands got something new for the 10 “The Grip” so like the name implies this thing is supposed to be the best way to grip your phone.
Overall the iPhone 10 is a pretty complete hardware package as you'd expect from a thousand-dollar smartphone, the speaker's even though they aren't front-facing are still pretty good,
- It’s water-resistant which gives you some nice peace of mind
- It has wireless charging,
- It has no headphone jack
It is now officially the most breakable iPhone ever thanks to having glass on the back.
The one part of the hardware of this phone I actually really don't like is the camera bump, but not just for the usual reason like rocking on a table I've just kind of accepted that at this point but because of the new orientation a couple times I've noticed it's easy to accidentally get your finger in the photo or video you're taking just because it's all up in the corner it might take a couple days to get used to that and stop getting your finger and the corner of your shots.
What's really become the signature feature of the iPhone 10 is on the front and it is the notch up at the top of the display.
Apple have come up with the opposite solution which is “embrace the notch” so in all their software and all the software they'll promote is apps that wrap right around that notch and fill up the whole display, that's what an optimized iPhone 10 app looks like and since this is a taller aspect ratio apps will have to get updated to do this, developers will have to get on their horse and actually put in the work and update their apps to get them to fill up the display.
The only time I really think about the notch is when I'm watching videos, yes it gets kind of awkward here because when you're watching videos fullscreen the notch will cut off some of the display some of what you're trying to watch, so if you want to avoid that you can actually double tap and it'll bring in the video you're watching on this OLED display now you have some more bezels, but at this point now the video you're watching is so small you might as well not be watching it on a bigger screen it feels like the same size as the iPhone 8, so this whole thing is the main reason why I would actually want a plus size iPhone 10, as for the rest of the display it's great, Apple calls it a super Retina display, I just call it their first OLED in a smart phone ever finally and it's it's pretty awesome it's a 5.8 inch panel, high pixel density, it supports the p3 color gamut, HDR, it has true tone, it doesn't get as bright and saturated as Samsung's like note 8 and s8 displays, but it is still bright enough not too cartoonish with the colors, has a small blue shift when you tilt it off axis but so do many other OLEDs to varying degrees and it still has 3d touch although I pretty much stopped using that completely except for lock screen controls that I wish I could change, so the screen is awesome and it's a big part of why this phone looks so good from so many angles.
Of course, when you go to a full screen display like this you lose the home button, so that's why iPhone 10 replaces that home button with whole bunch of gestures this is the biggest learning curve of any iPhone ever, but it's still not that bad.
You swipe up from that bar at the bottom of the screen at any time to go home now anytime you see that bar it represents the home and whatever app you're in will close itself just like any other iPhone hitting a home button.
Swipe down from the top for notifications, but now swipe from the right corner for your control center and for multitasking again you have no home button so you swipe halfway up and then over to get through your recent apps, that'll get you to that same card style carousel as before, but overall once you get hang of this system once you get used to all this swiping which took me a couple days it felt pretty natural. I actually started trying to swipe up on other phones which shows you how weird how much I got used to that the one that took me the longest was multitasking because I started off thinking you had to swipe up then wait and then the cards show up, but that always felt so slow but what you really have to do to get this to work is you swipe up and over and I gets you to the cards way faster so that's a pro tip for anyone who is still swiping up halfway and waiting for the cards to show up like I was, you're welcome.
For those with small hands or who just really liked reach ability on the bigger iPhone you technically still have it, here it's buried in the accessibility settings but you can do the little swipe down on the bottom of the screen to bring the top corners within reach and that makes getting a top gesture is easier with one hand, I leave that on it's pretty useful sometimes.
Now of course, the other big change that comes with ditching the home button on iPhone 10 is he also just ditched that fingerprint reader which means as you may have heard they needed to replace that with face ID (facial recognition).
Face ID on the iPhone works really well most of the time, it's not perfect and I think touch ID was closer to perfect as far as fail rate goes but it's still impressively good and I still believe that touch ID is definitely still faster, but face ID can get better with software updates and with time as millions of people begin to use it I think that'll happen and it still also has some physical limitations that you can become aware of and avoid just like touch ID had some physical limitations that you could become aware of like when your fingers wet or it doesn't quite work because of stuff on your hands or if you have a glove on stuff like that you just know touch IDs not going to work so you put in the passcode.
Face ID has some physical limitations too, it works by bouncing thousands of little infrared dots off your face and back into the sensor and creating a map of your eyes nose and mouth it doesn't actually use the front-facing camera and it can learn a changing face over time it still recognizes you when you get a haircut or shave a beard or put makeup on, none of this stuff has a huge effect on the dot map that made of your face it also won't be tricked by a picture of you because that doesn't have the depth of your face and I can also work through some pairs of sunglasses again the ones where the infrared light can get through, but face ID has been known to fail when you're backlit or when there's like a ton of extra infrared light coming in basically from the Sun it's like how a dim flashlight doesn't work when it's really bright out same thing face ID is going to get blinded by all that extra infrared light just got to type in your passcode, but those times for me were few and far between, if touch IDs success rate was 99% to me it felt like face IDs success rate was like 95%.
I can add up when you unlock your phone hundreds of times a day, but again this can get better as it gets used more there's even some settings as well where you can turn attention on so it won't unlock if you're just holding the phone up to your face not only that but you have to be looking at your phone then it'll unlock and show all your notification data works pretty well for me just please don't do this while driving and even if face ID is this workaround to not getting the fingerprint reader underneath the glass in time for this phone, I still think that at its best facial recognition on a phone is closer to secure seamless authentication than a separate fingerprint reader ever would be because with this you just pick up the phone and it works you use it you login you pay for stuff you download apps etc, but if someone else picks up your phone it won't work it's that simple.
Then there is an emoji possibly maybe the most fun feature of iPhone 10, but you know it's hilarious these moving facial tracking and emoji are iPhone 10 exclusive, you can't get this on any other iPhone, so if you get one of these then you know the person that sent it has an iPhone 10 and weirdly enough if you send this to someone with an Android phone they just get a video message of this an emoji, but here's the thing an emoji is just using the front-facing camera, an emoji is working and continues to work even when you cover the depth sensors and the extra front-facing sensors all that stuff, it'll work when you cover everything except for it the front-facing camera which means they totally could have made these available for any other iPhone, but they didn't.
iPhone 10 also has some slightly new cameras same exact sensors for both cameras as the iPhone 8 plus but slightly better glass and now both are optically stabilized so this is going to get you some meaningfully better performance with the 2x telephoto lens and zoomed in photos and zoomed in videos things like that which is good to see because I avoided using it with previous iPhones and as you'd expect photos from the iPhone 10 look awesome, I'm especially happy with how much dynamic range we're getting HDR on previous iPhone cameras used to be a lot less aggressive and I kept asking over and over for a little more a little more and now photos really pop the sky is like always so blue, details is there, color accuracy is tight, it's not as good as the pixel 2 camera just going to say that right up front, but this is a top 5 smartphone camera and no doubt and despite his tendency to overexpose I think it might be the best front-facing camera for video for any smartphone, they've also added portrait mode to the front-facing camera for portrait selfies on the 10, but it doesn't work nearly as well edges get blurred super hard almost to a comical amount when compare it to something like the pixel 2 or even the back facing camera, but the thing is pixel 2 does all this so much better because of machine learning and software, so in theory iPhone 10 can keep learning and get this good too, plus it already has better color accuracy so I'll be on the lookout for that software update.
Now you may have noticed we've made it all this way into an iPhone review without talking about any of the specs shows how important that is, but iPhone 10 is rocking the a11 Bionic chip and three gigs of ram and it's awesome in fact it's really good, I would say this is the most powerful mobile chipset in any smartphone right now the benchmarks are insane, but this isn't for iOS this is for all the things that run on top of iOS, the augmented reality apps, the image processing, the super slow-motion video all of that stuff, it obviously feels more modern because of all the swiping and the gestures now, but as far as functionality, it has all the same stuff and features you're used to, has all the same quirks you are used to, like iOS this notification system is still a mess since they don't group apps together this is still easily fixable but there's plenty of other things I wish would be different about iOS too, but it's Apple they're stubborn you'll get used to it.
Battery life on the iPhone 10 has turned out to be pretty great close to the iPhone 8 plus I would say again iPhone is a champ of standby time and it always has been so no problems there and it handles the biggest iPhone display ever pretty well thanks to it being an OLED, I haven't had any problems getting to the end of a single day with full use if you want to use that screen on time metric it's usually around 6 hours.
So the bottom line and the question that I get the most often about this phone is so what do you think? This is my favorite iPhone ever by far I really like it.
Is it worth $1000? Honestly I don't think people spending the money on this phone will be disappointed.
That's not to say this thing is perfect it clearly still also has its downsides,
- The fact that it's all glass on the back more breakable that's a downside
- The notch on the front for a lot of people that's a downside
- No headphone jack still a downside
But those are all things that I think people who are buying this phone are already used to or were expecting and for that reason it's not a deal-breaker in 2017 so I'm happy to be carrying this phone, so if you were thinking about going out and getting this phone go ahead I think you'll like it too.
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