Last night, Apple finally announced its highly coveted iPhone lineup for 2017. Apart from the incremental iPhone 8 & iPhone 8 Plus, the company grabbed attention for the "innovative" iPhone X -- Apple's 10th anniversary iPhone.
It looks gorgeous, doesn't it?
Here's all you need to know about the iPhone X, the jewel in Apple's crown.
iPhone X is the 1st iPhone to sport an edge-to-edge display -- its front is all display, very minimal bezel. The 5.8-inch Super Retina display has Super AMOLED panel with HDR support, Dolby Vision and HDR10 baked in, which should make photo and video really come alive. It has?1125 x 2436 pixel resolution.
Apple claims the iPhone X's all-glass front and back features the most durable glass ever in a smartphone in silver or space grey, while a highly polished, surgical-grade stainless steel band seamlessly wraps around and reinforces the phone. The design is elegant as it is durable, while maintaining water and dust resistance.
You can now unlock the iPhone X using just your face. Face ID authentication on iPhone X, uses a TrueDepth camera system made up of a dot projector, infrared camera and flood illuminator, and is powered by A11 Bionic to accurately map and recognise a face. Face ID projects more than 30,000 invisible IR dots. 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 that 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. iPhone X also features a redesigned dual 12-megapixel rear camera system with dual optical image stabilisation. The ?/1.8 aperture on the wide-angle camera joins an improved ?/2.4 aperture on the telephoto camera for better photos and videos.?
The TrueDepth camera brings emoji to life in a fun new way with Animoji. Working with A11 Bionic, the TrueDepth camera captures and analyses 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 iPhone X runs on A11 Bionic, the most powerful and smartest chip ever in a smartphone, 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 industry-leading performance and energy efficiency, according to Apple. 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.
As expected, the iPhone X is the first step of Apple building an AR ecosystem. The flagship phone is built for software and hardware powered AR solutions, some of which were demoed on stage by Phil Schiller last night, allowing users of the iPhone X to manipulate their world through an interesting, augmented reality layer. The A11 Bionic chip and the iPhone X's depth-sensing camera are given a lot of credit for Apple to implement the AR system into the device. So yeah, Google has Tango, but Apple now has possibly a slightly better integration and implementation of AR that we've ever seen.
The glass back design on the iPhone X enables it for a wireless charging solution. Wireless charging works with the established Qi ecosystem, including two new wireless charging mats from Belkin and mophie, available from Apple Authorised Resellers.
At the keynote last night, 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.
The iPhone X will be available in silver and space grey in 64GB (Rs 89,000) and 256GB (Rs 1,02,000) models starting from November 3 onwards at Apple Authorised Resellers.
In one word, yes. It's the most exciting iPhone launch of the past five years -- ever since the iPhone 5 / 5s, to be honest -- in terms of looks, performance, and features. It's also packing in some interesting forward looking technologies like Face ID and AR, the latter will take off now Apple has thrown its weight behind it. But yes, the iPhone X -- given what little we've seen of it so far -- has justified all the hype so far. It's a fitting 10th anniversary device into the iPhone legacy. Should definitely have one.
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