Apple announced the iPhone X on September 12, 2017, as part of the tenth generation of its iPhone line. This is the standard version and the least expensive device of the iPhone X series.

Announced alongside the iPhone X were the higher-end iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. To compare, the price of the iPhone X ranges from Rs 79,990 to Rs 99,990 depending on variants, while the iPhone XS is priced at (Rs 99,900) and the iPhone XS Max costs up to Rs 1,31,900.

Display

The iPhone X features a Super Retina OLED capacitive touchscreen with a screen size of 5.8 inches, a screen-to-body ratio of 82.9%, and a resolution of 1125x2436 pixels.

About the Super Retina display technology, this is an Apple-owned technology used for the iPhone X. While the OLED technology offers the most accurate colors in the industry, the Super Retina tech results in incredible contrast, along with high brightness and a wide color gamut that meets the cinema standard.

The phone sports a long notch on the top of the display that houses the front-facing camera and speakers for calls. This design is the same for all the X-series devices as well as the iPhone 11 series. Apple was the first to apply this design, quickly followed by other phone makers.

Besides, the screen has a pixel density of 458 ppi and up to 625 nits of brightness. That means the iPhone X offers a top-quality viewing experience. Its medium-sized screen combined with a high pixel density and resolution allows for very sharp images. Furthermore, it features up to 120Hz frequency of touch-sensing, so swiping, navigating on the screen is really smooth, which gives you the real premium feel on the hand.

However, there have been user reports on screen issues on this phone. Specifically, the screen may not respond or respond intermittently to touch and others say the screen reacts even when it’s not touched. According to Apple, these problems could be attributed to a component that might fail on the module of the display. The good news is, if your device has this fault and it’s eligible, you can have the screen replaced for free.

Apart from that problem, there aren’t any troubles using the screen, especially in gaming. With an average refresh rate of 60 Hz, it handles gaming graphics very well with barely any lag.

Overall, the iPhone X assures an amazing viewing experience for both videos and games. It offers great sharpness, contrast, high brightness, smooth graphics, and fast touch sensing for navigation no matter if you’re using an app or playing a mobile title.

Chip

This smartphone is powered by the A11 Bionic chip, designed and manufactured by Apple itself. This chip was also used on the iPhone 8 series. It’s a 10nm 6-core processor, including dual Monsoon cores for performance and four Mistral cores for high efficiency, all of which features 2.39GHz clock speed, along with Apple GPU for graphics performance.

The A11 Bionic uses heterogeneous computing that allows the device to run on chips with cores of different specifications, unlike PC processors whose cores are exactly the same.

Compared with the A10 Fusion processor, this chip offers a 25% increase in performance from the dual performance cores. Besides, its high-efficiency cores offer 70% faster background tasks. The most exciting thing about this chip is the controller that determines which task is processed by which core. The controller now lets all the cores handle the same task at a time, which increases 70% in speed of multi-threaded workloads.

Regarding graphics, its GPU is 30 percent faster than the A10 Fusion but consumes just 50 percent the power when processing at the same rate as its successor. This, in turn, will help prolong the battery life for gaming.

On Antutu, this chip scores 213600 points in total, including 67783 points for GPU performance, which is equal to the Snapdragon 730.

All in all, this chip can surely handle games well in both processing and graphics as you may expect from a high-end device. When testing with Call of Duty, you can set the settings to the highest level and the phone shows smooth images while the act seems very good too.

One problem in gaming with this chip is that it tends to heat up pretty fast and quite hot, up to 49 degrees C though the gameplay remains smooth all the time and there are no frame drops when you play.

Storage

The iPhone X comes with 3GB RAM and two ROM variants, including 64GB and 256GB. While 3GB RAM would be too low on a mid-range phone, this phone handles intensive titles like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty surprisingly well.

Except for the heating issue as we mentioned above, there weren’t any other problems with playing games on this phone. And even when the temperature of the device increases to 47-49 degrees Celsius in a 25-degree room, the frame rate remains stable, smooth and the gaming experience is still very well. This is one of the best (and mysterious) things about gaming on an iPhone, but a good mystery.

Battery

This phone packs a 2,716mAh non-removable Li-Ion battery with support for Qi wireless charging and 15W fast charging that promise 50% capacity within 30 minutes. Testing shows that the iPhone X can last 21 hours on 3G connectivity and up to 60 hours of talk time. It can get you through 74 hours on moderate use.

As we said in the previous section, the phone does heat up when you play games. However, it’s likely because of the intensive graphics of the game along with the overloaded processor when handling the game rather than the battery itself.

In testing with Call of Duty, 8-10 minutes of gameplay in the multiplayer mode drains 8-10% of battery capacity while 25-30 minutes of gameplay in the battle royal mode drains 14-17% of battery capacity.

So, all in all, it’s safe to say that the battery of this phone does its job well.

Camera

In terms of camera, there is a dual-lens array on the back, including a 12MP camera for wide-angle shots and a 12MP telephoto lens. The camera module is supported by a Quad-LED dual-tone flash and allows for HDR, panorama modes. You can record videos at 4K and 24/30/60 fps or 1080p and 30/60/120/240 fps.

On the front, there is a 7MP standard camera with an f/2.2 aperture along with an SL 3D sensor for biometrics and depth sensing. The front-facing camera supports HDR mode and lets you record videos at 1080p/30fps.