iPhone X: Five things that drive me absolutely nuts – CNET

For well over two months, my days have ended and begun with the iPhone X. Compared to older iPhones, the X feels impressively fast, slim and, with 5.8 inches of screen space, satisfyingly spacious. But as I’ve grown to appreciate some of its finer points, I’ve also discovered the traits that make me roll my eyes, gnash my teeth and occasionally erupt with a well-chosen expletive.

The funny thing is that almost all of these ire-inducing “quirks” stem from Apple’s redesign of the iPhone X, which removed the home button and installed a bunch of swipes and taps to cover all navigation bases.

On one hand, Face ID and gestures prove that iPhone users can live without a home button. On the other, learning the ropes takes time, and the swipey stand-ins don’t always make a lot of sense. Some iPhone X gestures feel half-baked.

So here we go, my five personal worst iPhone X navigation offenders. Stay tuned for a future piece on some of the things I truly do love about the iPhone X.

Face ID never works when I most need it

Face ID, Apple’s replacement for the secure fingerprint reader, uses the iPhone X’s front-facing camera to approve mobile purchases and unlock the phone.

It works by making a 3D map of your eyes, nose and mouth — except when it doesn’t. Face ID recognizes me often, but fails enough times to make me notice. For example, I have about a 50-50 success rate while wearing my polarized sunglasses.

When it doesn’t work is when I want it to most: as soon as I wake up in the morning. Part of the problem is biological. I’m near-sighted, which means that when I first reach for the phone while my glasses and contacts are resting in their cases, I wind up holding the phone closer to my face than the 25 to 50 centimeters that Apple recommends. 

And then there’s the fact that in my groggy morning state, I’m lying on my side with either one eye closed, or my face buried in my pillow.

There’s no way Face ID is boring its way through that, and it’s not Apple’s fault.

What is Apple’s fault is that the iPhone X doesn’t have a satisfying backup plan to my morning squinty-eye. With Face ID, you don’t get an immediate second chance to biometrically unlock the phone, not the way you do when the fingerprint scanner on a home button fails; you just tap it again. 

No such luck here. You can wait some long seconds only to have to try again, or lock and unlock the phone to kickstart a new Face ID scan.

More often than not, I wind up typing in my 6-digit password, which is faster than waiting for Face ID to maybe or maybe not unlock. This gets annoying when you do it multiple times a day, every day. I’d love a biometric backup, or a faster do-over time if Face ID misses the scan the first time around.

Bleh battery life

If you’re switching from an older iPhone with battery life that can barely hobble through a single day (especially if Apple did this), the iPhone X is a fantastic upgrade. At least at first.

After two months, I noticed a steep battery decline. Of course your charge will take a hit every time you stream music or video, or use navigation. That’s life with a phone. But even on days when I didn’t engage these things, I found myself topping up the power reserves before going out for the night, unconvinced my phone would make it through the evening activities.

When you live on your phone — texting, looking up stuff online, reading e-books — that uncertainty makes the difference between a device you can trust and one you have to constantly manage.

This isn’t just anecdotal, either. In CNET’s looping-video tests, the iPhone X lasted just shy of 11.5 hours average after 9 tests. That’s two hours less than the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus results with the same test, and six hours less than the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (17.5 hours).

Anecdotally, it lasts longer than the iPhone 8 in real-life use, but peters out before the 8 Plus loses steam.

These time windows don’t seem so short in a vacuum, but when you compare the results across the board, the iPhone X — the most expensive mainstream phone you can buy — drains as quickly as some midrange phones that cost less than half the price, if not faster.

To make matters more frustrating, Apple hides the iPhone X battery percentage meter; it isn’t visible at a glance. Instead, you have to swipe down from the top of the phone on the right side of the notch to call up the Control Center. Only then can you keep a detailed tab on how much juice you have left.

Maps navigation shortcut only goes one way

I use maps navigation quite a lot. When you pop out of either Google Maps or Apple Maps to do something else, the iPhone X helpfully puts a tiny blue Tic Tac around the clock, turning it into a nifty little button you can tap to pop back into the map again.

This is great, but Apple stops short. See, you can toggle from any app back into the map, but you can’t toggle from the map back to what you were doing before. So if you’re reading an article, you can pop into the map to check on the directions (using the shortcut) but won’t be able to return to the story (no shortcut).

When you get used to pressing that shortcut button a couple dozen times during a long trip, you’ll be cursing Apple that it only goes one way. Hopefully a future version of the software will make toggling a two-way street.

By the way, the shortcut also works with the phone app (the button turns green), voice memos (red) and some third-party apps.

Is the alarm on or what?

I’m an inveterate nervous-alarm-setter, even on weekends. I just can’t relax unless I know I won’t oversleep (yes, I have problems).

That doesn’t stop me from waking up bleary-eyed in the middle of the night second-guessing if I set the alarm for the right time, or even set it at all. I would like to be able to glance at the iPhone X and immediately see the alarm clock icon reassure me, before drifting back to sleep.

This is how it was pre-iPhone X and still is on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Yet for some reason, Apple has decided to bury this information. You can still see it — and your remaining battery percentage — but you have to pull down the Control Center first.

I don’t want to mess with my phone at 4am. I don’t want to swipe a screen or use more brain cells than I have to. In short, I don’t want to do anything that could wake me up and make falling back asleep harder than it needs to be.

But the biggest problem is…

The first iPhone was so beloved because — in a world of hard-to-use phones that acted like mini computers with file systems, keyboards and styluses — it was simple. Anyone could pick it up and figure it out.

10 years on, you can’t use the iPhone X without a tutorial, which Apple does provide. Things that should be easy are complex. For example, don’t you swipe the camera icon to open it from the lock screen? No, you hard-press and then release it. Why not simply add the option for both?

Apple’s also changed the buttons you press to take a screenshot and power down the phone. If you mess this up, you might find yourself accidentally calling 911. 

You have to know which side of the Notch to swipe for the quick-controls in Control Center (the right side) and which to swipe for your notifications (the left). And now, you double-press the lock button to finish installing an app and hold it down to fire up Siri.

While these changes are absolutely learnable, and even become second-nature over time, the iPhone X’s navigability is a far cry from the logical layout that made the iPhone stand out from every other phone of its day.

It’s not that I wish the iPhone X reverted to the stripped-down style of the original iPhone. It’s that Apple, in paving the way with some new technologies, had the opportunity to rethink how we use a phone, and wound up making it more complicated to use — not less.

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