Apple has officially revealed its latest device, the iPhone X. According to the firm, the device is the future of the smartphone, and comes in an all-glass design with a 5.8-inch Super Retina display, A11 Bionic chip, wireless charging and an improved rear camera with dual optical image stabilisation.
As revealed by the company, the iPhone X delivers a secure new way for customers to unlock, authenticate and pay using Face ID, enabled by the new TrueDepth camera. iPhone X will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, October 27, 2017, in more than 55 countries and territories, and in stores beginning Friday, November 3 2017.
“For more than a decade, our intention has been to create an iPhone that is all display. The iPhone X is the realisation of that vision,” said Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer. “With the introduction of iPhone ten years ago, we revolutionised the mobile phone with Multi-Touch. iPhone X marks a new era for iPhone — one in which the device disappears into the experience.”
“iPhone X is the future of the smartphone. It is packed with incredible new technologies, like the TrueDepth camera system, beautiful Super Retina display and super fast A11 Bionic chip with neural engine,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone X enables fluid new user experiences — from unlocking your iPhone with Face ID, to playing immersive AR games, to sharing Animoji in Messages — it is the beginning of the next ten years for iPhone.”
As revealed by the firm, the iPhone X introduces a revolutionary design with a stunning all-screen display that precisely follows the curve of the device, clear to the elegantly rounded corners. The all-glass front and back of the device features the most durable glass ever in a smartphone in silver or space gray, while a highly polished, surgical-grade stainless steel band seamlessly wraps around and reinforces the iPhone X. A seven-layer colour process allows for precise colour hues and opacity on the glass finish, and a reflective optical layer enhances the rich colours, making the design as elegant as it is durable, while maintaining water and dust resistance.
The 5.8-inch Super Retina display is the first OLED panel, as stated by the firm, that rises to the standards of iPhone, with stunning colors, true blacks, a million-to-one contrast ratio and wide colour support. The HDR display supports Dolby Vision and HDR10, which together make photo and video content look even more amazing. The addition of True Tone dynamically adjusts the white balance of the display to match the surrounding light for a more natural, paper-like viewing experience.
iOS 11 is redesigned to take full advantage of the Super Retina display and replaces the Home button with fast and fluid gestures, allowing customers, as revealed by Apple, to naturally and intuitively navigate iPhone X. Simply swipe up from the bottom to go home from anywhere.
Face ID projects more than 30,000 invisible IR dots. The IR image and dot pattern are pushed through neural networks to create a mathematical model of your face and send the data to the secure enclave to confirm a match, while adapting to physical changes in appearance over time. All saved facial information is protected by the secure enclave to keep data extremely secure, while all of the processing is done on-device and not in the cloud to protect user privacy. Face ID only unlocks iPhone X when customers look at it and is designed to prevent spoofing by photos or masks.
The new 7-megapixel TrueDepth camera enables Face ID features, wide colour capture, auto image stabilisation and precise exposure control, and brings Portrait mode to the front camera for stunning selfies with a depth-of-field effect.
As revealed by Apple, the cameras on the iPhone X are custom tuned for the ultimate AR experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. With ARKit, iOS developers can take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras to create games and apps offering fantastically immersive and fluid experiences that go far beyond the screen.
Portrait mode with Portrait Lighting on both the front and rear cameras brings dramatic studio lighting effects to iPhone and allows customers to capture stunning portraits with a shallow depth-of-field effect in five different lighting styles.
With iOS 11, iPhone X supports HEIF and HEVC for up to two times compression and storage for twice the photos and videos.
The TrueDepth camera, as revealed by Apple, brings emoji to life in a fun new way with Animoji. Working with A11 Bionic, the TrueDepth camera captures and analyzes over 50 different facial muscle movements, then animates those expressions in a dozen different Animoji, including a panda, unicorn and robot. Available as an iMessage app pre-installed on iPhone X, customers can record and send Animoji messages with their voice that can smile, frown and more.
The A11 Bionic chipset features a six-core CPU design with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion, offering performance and energy efficiency. A new, second-generation performance controller can harness all six cores simultaneously, delivering up to 70 percent greater performance for multi-threaded workloads, giving customers more power while lasting two hours longer than iPhone 7. A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. All this power enables incredible new machine learning, AR apps and immersive 3D games.
The new A11 Bionic neural engine is a dual-core design and performs up to 600 billion operations per second for real-time processing. A11 Bionic neural engine is designed for specific machine learning algorithms and enables Face ID, Animoji and other features.
The glass back design, as revealed by Apple, enables a world-class wireless charging solution. Wireless charging works with the established Qi ecosystem, including two new wireless charging mats from Belkin and mophie, available from apple.com and Apple Stores.
Apple also gave a sneak peek of AirPower, an Apple-designed wireless charging accessory coming in 2018, which offers a generous active charging area that will allow iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X customers to simultaneously charge up to three devices, including Apple Watch Series 3 and a new optional wireless charging case for AirPods.
iPhone X will be available in silver and space gray in 64GB and 256GB models starting at $999 USD.
Edited By: Darryl Linington
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