M.G. Siegler reviews Apple’s iPhone X: Certainly the best smartphone I have ever used, despite the weird and awkward notch
“The iPhone X is amazing. Easily the best iPhone Apple has ever made, and certainly the best smartphone I have ever used,” M.G. Siegler writes for 500ish Words. “But you could have said that about each and every new iPhone. Including the rather lackluster iPhone 8 — for about a month there, it was the best iPhone ever made. And then along came the X. But this is not just the best iPhone yet, it’s a new leap forward. Others have compared it to the jump we got with the iPhone 4 back in the day. And I think that’s both fair and apt. This feels like a new type of iPhone. One that is, forgive me, a notch above.”
“That’s not to say it’s perfect. It’s definitely not. I’ll get to some of that in a second,” Siegler writes. “The biggest leap forward is the obvious one: FaceID. To say “it just works” is a disservice to what it’s actually doing. It works like magic. It works in so many situations where you think there’s no way it will work. To the point where you think: is it really doing anything or is Apple just messing with me?”
“But, the notch,” Siegler writes. “Day-to-day, I honestly don’t think about the notch anymore in regular iPhone use. But if I stop to think about it, such as for this review, it does still bother me. It also bothers me if I’m doing anything in landscape mode. Look, I get it. It’s there to enable all the amazing stuff mentioned above. I still just sort of wish Apple had made the bottom bezel-less and left a small one across the entire top of the iPhone X. (Or actually, just insisted this area be used for the status indicators (cellular service, battery, etc) and nothing else. When app-makers do this, it’s nice because it preserves the rest of the screen for content.) I know they couldn’t have claimed ‘edge-to-edge’ this way with at least somewhat of a straight face. But the bat ears, rabbit ears, horns — whatever you want to call them — are weird and awkward. ”
Apple made the wrong choice with the notch. It’s bad design to ask the world’s developers to design around a flap occluding the display.
The good news is that Apple can fix this in the software (of course, the few developers who’ve already designed around Apple’s abomination will have further work to do). Apple should reserve the “bunny ears” portion of the screen to display cell and Wi-Fi signal strength, time, battery, and whatever else they want to use it for on a deep black background – with corner arcs that match the iPhone X’s other corners – into which the black bank of sensors comprising the notch will simply disappear.
Apple owns the notch’s bunny ears and the developers get all the rest.
Simplicity is the hallmark of great design, but Apple’s current notch design “solution” is anything but simple. It’s ugly, messy, and it mars an otherwise gorgeous device. — MacDailyNews, November 1, 2017
iPhone X notch un-botched by Forbes’ Gordon Kelly and Nodus
