I PHONE X

iPhone X Price and release date

Released on November 3
The most expensive flagship phone on the market
Comes in 64GB and 256GB options
It’s almost pointless to discuss the price of the iPhone X – it’s the most expensive flagship phone on the market, but iPhone users are more willing than most to look past cost.

But, while the focus here is going to be on the technology, we still need to at least mention the price and release date.

The iPhone X costs $999 / £999 / AU$1,579 for the basic, 64GB model. If you want the larger 256GB model it’s going to cost you $1,149 / £1,149 / AU$1,829 for the privilege.

If you want to buy the iPhone X you can already pre-order it – the window for doing so opened on October 27. We mention that because while the iPhone X release date was November 3, you probably won’t be able to get one for weeks or months now… that ship has sailed.

Screen

By far the best screen on an iPhone
Clear, vibrant colors
Notch at top slightly irks, but doesn’t get in the way
The first thing you’ll notice about the new iPhone is hard to miss: the new screen blazes into your eyes the second you pick up the handset.

The 5.8-inch OLED display is, quite simply, by far the best thing Apple has ever crammed into an iPhone. It’s leaps ahead of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus for so many reasons: the sharpness, the quality, the fact that it fills the whole front of the phone, and the color reproduction.

It’s also using a new, longer, screen, but while it looks larger than the iPhone 8 Plus’ 5.5-inch display on paper, it’s only marginally bigger in terms of actual screen real estate – it’s just stretched upwards.

The stretched screen is a completely different experience on the iPhone X
OLED technology means you’re getting deeper blacks and more blinding whites, so everything from websites to the photos you take will look a little better.

Some will point to the fact that Samsung has been using OLED screens on its phones since the first Galaxy, but Apple counters that by saying it’s only now that the technology is good enough for its phones.

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On the face of it that sounds defensive, but when you use the iPhone X you can see it’s a screen that’s incredibly, well, Apple. It’s not the sharpest or most colorful screen on a smartphone, but it’s clean, crisp and doesn’t suffer from terrible color shifts when you move it around. It’s a great screen to look at, and that’s what you want on a phone.

The term ‘bezel-less’ has been bandied about for the iPhone X, but that doesn’t really tell the right story. Yes, there are slight bands around the edges of the screen, but they don’t mar the experience – they give the fingers something to land on, preventing accidental touches of the screen.

Apple could reduce these further in the future and offer a more visually-appealing iPhone, but on the X the experience is still striking.

Talking of visual appeal, the notch at the top of the iPhone X is something that’s going to divide opinion, and that’s fair. Apple has taken this little chunk out of the top of the screen to house the new TrueDepth camera, and it encroaches on the display.

In portrait mode it’s hard to notice it’s there, and the way the notifications bar spills around it is nice. However, place the phone in landscape mode and it’s far more noticeable; it’s an irritant when you’re watching movies, as if we wanted to expand them to fill the screen (one of the real beauties of having a longer display) elements of the action were cut out by the notch.