This is the iPhone X, the iPhone that had many firsts! The first iPhone to have an OLED screen, wireless charging, a notch, and the very first to have Face ID as well.

So, let’s examine how this seven-year-old flagship holds up today since you’ve requested it on our YouTube community page.

 

Build Quality

So, after spending years handling more recent and boxier models, this phone’s slim form factor is still a refreshing reminder that it was a groundbreaking design years ago. 

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It is fascinating how its curved edges are still preferred by many today, including several women I’ve spoken to, who prefer the older iPhone 11 design, which felt more comfortable compared to the “sharper”, more modern aesthetics of the iPhone 12 onwards.

As I’ve mentioned before in my revisited video of the POCO F3 and the Samsung Galaxy S10+, I still do like this thin form factor design and the fact that the phone doesn’t wobble very much when you’re typing the phone on the surface is also a huge plus for me

But, while the design was groundbreaking 7 years ago, I prefer the latest iPhone’s overall design, especially for the camera bump area, even though it does sacrifice the comfort of having a thinner phone.

The glass back was also brought in here from the iPhone 8—yeap, no iPhone 9, in case you were wondering. 

But the new feature is of course the fact that not only does it have a glass back, but also has wireless charging. And it was the first iPhone to have that and more on the battery performance on the phone later on.

 

Display

Moving over to the phone screen, the iPhone X’s infamous notch was a trendsetter, although it does make the phone seem a bit more outdated now.

Funnily enough, many, including me, thought that a large notch means a very huge drawback. And of course, many brands, especially Huawei, who always tend to copy the iPhone, and then now with the Mac, followed this whole “bathtub” notch in their phones. 

It was the first iPhone to introduce Face ID as well, that is included in the notch, but yes, I do feel it very distracting when I was watching videos on full screen.

However, despite this, the phone supports Dolby Vision and Spatial Audio, making the viewing experience very immersive, but within a smaller size area when watching Netflix due to the notch. 

And while this OLED screen was great at the time of its release, the coating of the screen did not really age well as it did smudge the screen very easily, which I find myself always wiping the screen as much as I can. 

Even when viewing photos on the phone that I’ve taken, the screen smudges make the phone look less good, and speaking of taking photos, let’s dive into the camera’s performance next. 

 

Cameras

The iPhone X was the pioneer at its time, and this was due to its first Neural Engine in the A11 Bionic chipset. It was the KING of portrait photos for people at that time too. 

But before going into the picture samples, let me bring you back to remind you what were the specs on the iPhone X’s camera because remember the days when there were no ultra-wide cameras on the phone? Well, the iPhone X had no ultra-wide camera, just a main camera and a telephoto lens with 12 megapixels each. 

However, these lenses still perform well as the image processing of the A11 Bionic chipset was at the time that computational photography was at the beginning stage.

 

Main & Zoom

So, taking a look at the main lenses, yes, after 7 years it still looks good, from the dynamic range of the skies to the darker shadows, to the telephoto lens images also look great. 

And the phone can also increase the zoom level digitally up to 5x zoom as well, which did retain the image decently when it comes to the image quality. But if you go towards the maximum 10x zoom, here’s where the quality will drop. 

But overall, the image quality on the main lens during the day was very comparable with other smartphones currently available out right now.

 

Portrait Mode

Similar to when it was released, the portrait mode does not do a very good job of edge detection for pets, as the A11 Bionic chipset’s Neural Engine was more towards portrait mode for certain objects and of course for people, where it does an excellent job over there. 

 

Night

Since there’s no night mode on the iPhone during this time, you can expect a huge degrade of brightness. But to be fair, there was no noise in the darker areas of the image, and it did hold the highlights decently well even for its telephoto lenses.

 

Selfie

Selfie photos during the day turned out great, even with a lower value of 7 megapixels. However, the images only look great if you are aware of where exactly the light is coming from. If it’s backlit, you’ll get a brighter image in the background than you as a subject.

Then for nighttime selfies, once again, make sure to look for as much light as you can in the surrounding area, otherwise, you’ll get a very low-quality selfie. But of course, even with so much light, the quality was not as good as the daytime selfie.

 

Video

[Sample video footage available in my YouTube video]

Then as for video, the rear cameras during the day was as good as the images, so was the 2x telephoto lenses as well. 

Image stabilization though, was not the best compared to today’s standards for both lenses. 

The front video cameras during the day had mixed results for the dynamic range, sometimes it was good to light the background, sometimes it was not as good to light me as a subject, but the image stabilization was once again not the best. 

And nighttime videos were also similar to the pictures where you’ll need to get some amount of light at least, or a good amount of light, and the image stabilization at night also wasn’t good at all. 

Now, one major thing to note is that like the phone screen, the camera lenses also always need a wipe before use, especially when taking photos at night due to the aging of the lens coating.

So maybe a brand-new iPhone wouldn’t have such an issue, but good luck finding one brand new as it was the same of this particular lens coating, when it comes to how it ages, not very well on the Samsung Galaxy S10+ too. 

 

Software

You know how iPhone software updates tend to extend its support to previous generations for quite a while? Well, as of today, the iPhone X hasn’t received the latest iOS 17, stopping at iOS 16. So yeah, it’s the last stop for the iPhone X in terms of the software updates. 

The transition from iOS 15.6 to 16.7.7 did cause the phone to warm up significantly, a reminder of the phone’s age and the limitation of older hardware trying to keep up with newer software.

But other than all the software updates, the apps work very well from social media apps to apps like HomeKit without any glitches or issues. And this clearly shows how optimized iOS has always been. 

FaceTime also works and performs well to the point that the video and the audio quality were not very noticeable to the person that I was having a video call with. 

Then typing on the iPhone X remains a pleasure thanks to its responsive keyboard and of course the slim form factor. 

 

Gaming

So before going into the gaming test, besides the 10nm A11 Bionic chipset, the phone also has 3GB of RAM with 256GB of storage.

While 3GB of RAM for a phone was really small at that time, after prolonged use of using an iPhone, we tend to get used to the better performance compared to a spec-to-spec on an Android smartphone. 

First, I wanted to try a game that was less intensive which was Asphalt 9 and the game did perform great. But a few minutes in and the phone had already started becoming warm towards the top area of the camera bump, but it didn’t affect the gameplay at all. But I couldn’t get used to the overall notch when I was gaming on this.

Then I also tried the impossible to load Genshin Impact on this iPhone X, and even during downloading the resources on Genshin Impact made the phone very hot to the touch. 

And then when I was in the game after about 1 minute of gameplay, it started to lag, and again, it starts to become very hot towards the top part of the phone, and the battery drain was also massive too. 

The only positive that I see or I feel is that when I was gaming because it has a nice form factor, but other than that, I wouldn’t recommend this for any heavy intensive games.

 

Battery

Unfortunately, the phone’s battery did not do very well too. It gives an average close to 3 hours of screen-on time, a significant drop, most probably because of the phone’s age despite me doing a total battery change on this phone 2 years ago. 

Speaking of which, the battery health is at 92%, so here’s where size matters for long-term situations like this as the phone had only 2716 mAh of battery. 

Then the phone’s Lightning port, again this could be due to the age of the phone, did not function very well, so it was always wireless charging all the way.

 

Conclusion

So in conclusion, after 7 years, the iPhone X demonstrates why it was the flagship that pushed the boundaries. While it no longer supports the latest iOS updates and shows signs of aging, it was a testament to Apple’s design and innovation at that time. 

So the keyword here is “THAT” time, because if you’re using the phone now, probably brand new, it would be able to handle the current software. But if you’re getting this phone secondhand, I would NOT recommend for you to get it, as the current lineup, even the baseline iPhone 15, is a much better choice than this.