All you need to know about A11 Bionic chip, Face ID, 5.8-inch bezel display, Qi wireless charging, TrueDepth camera and more on the iPhone X.

Debashis Sarkar

Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the tenth anniversary edition iPhone X as the most advance iPhone that Apple has ever made. While with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, Apple had played it very safe, the special edition iPhone X was quick to grab the centre stage with all the latest innovation.

The iPhone X is the first smartphone from Apple to feature a bezel-less design. It offers a 5.8-inch Super Retina display and is powered by a A11 Bionic chip. The iPhone X also comes with wireless charging and an improved rear camera with dual optical image stabilisation and of course facial recognition enabled by a TrueDepth camera.

India pricing and availability

The iPhone X will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, October 27 in more than 55 countries and territories, and in stores beginning Friday, November 3. Apple has confirmed that the device will be available in India starting November 3. There are two variants of the iPhone X with 64GB and 256GB storage. The iPhone X 64GB costs Rs 89,000 while the 256GB storage version costs Rs 1,02,000.

Design

The iPhone X offers an all-screen display that precisely follows the curve of the device. The all-glass (front and back) smartphone will be available in Silver and Space Grey colours. There is a surgical-grade stainless steel band that holds the glass body and reinforces the device. It is water and dust resistance.

Display

The iPhone X comes with a 5.8-inch Super Retina OLED display offering true blacks, a million-to-one contrast ratio and wide colour support. The HDR display supports Dolby Vision and HDR10, which together make photo and video content look good. The addition of True Tone dynamically adjusts the white balance of the display to match the surrounding light for a more natural, paper-like viewing experience.

iOS 11 is redesigned to take full advantage of the Super Retina display and replaces the Home button with fast and fluid gestures. This allows users to naturally and intuitively navigate on the iPhone X by simply swiping up from the bottom to go home from anywhere.

Face ID

On the security front, the iPhone X offers Face ID facial recognition to unlock the device. It is achieved by using a new TrueDepth camera system made up of a dot projector, infrared camera and flood illuminator, and is powered by A11 Bionic to accurately map and recognise a face. Face ID can be also enabled for Apple Pay and Apple claims that it works seamlessly in the dark as well.

How does it work?

Face ID projects more than 30,000 invisible IR dots. The IR image and dot pattern are pushed through neural networks to create a mathematical model of your face and send the data to the secure enclave to confirm a match, while adapting to physical changes in appearance over time.

All saved facial information is protected by the secure enclave to keep data extremely secure, while all of the processing is done on-device and not in the cloud to protect user privacy. Face ID only unlocks iPhone X when users look at it and is designed to prevent spoofing by photos or masks.

Reinvented Front & Back Cameras Featuring Portrait Lighting

Camera

The new 7-megapixel TrueDepth camera on the front that enables Face ID features wide colour capture, auto image stabilisation and precise exposure control, and brings Portrait mode to the front camera for selfies with a depth-of-field effect.

The iPhone X also features a redesigned dual 12-megapixel rear camera system with dual optical image stabilisation. The ƒ/1.8 aperture on the wide-angle camera along with an improved ƒ/2.4 aperture on the telephoto camera for better photos and videos.

A new colour filter, deeper pixels and an improved Apple-designed image signal processor delivers advanced pixel processing, wide colour capture, faster autofocus in low light and better HDR photos. A new quad LED True Tone Flash offers twice the uniformity of light and includes Slow Sync, resulting in more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds.

Augmented Reality

The cameras on iPhone X are custom tuned for the ultimate AR experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. With ARKit, iOS developers can take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras to create games and apps offering fantastically immersive and fluid experiences that go far beyond the screen.

Video recording

The new camera also delivers the highest quality video capture ever in a smartphone, with better video stabilisation, 4K video up to 60fps and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. The Apple-designed video encoder provides real-time image and motion analysis for optimal quality video.

Portrait mode with Portrait Lighting on both the front and rear cameras brings dramatic studio lighting effects to iPhone and allows users to capture portraits with a shallow depth-of-field effect in five different lighting styles.

With iOS 11, iPhone X supports HEIF and HEVC for up to two times compression and storage for twice the photos and videos.

Animoji

The TrueDepth camera brings emoji to life in a fun new way with Animoji. Working with A11 Bionic, the TrueDepth camera captures and analyses over 50 different facial muscle movements, then animates those expressions in a dozen different Animoji, including a panda, unicorn and robot. Available as an iMessage app pre-installed on iPhone X, users can record and send Animoji messages with their voice that can smile, frown and more.

A11 Bionic chipset

The A11 Bionic features a six-core CPU design with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion. A new, second-generation performance controller can harness all six cores simultaneously, delivering up to 70 percent greater performance for multi-threaded workloads, giving users more power while lasting two hours longer than iPhone 7.

The A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. All this power enables incredible new machine learning, AR apps and immersive 3D games.

The new A11 Bionic neural engine is a dual-core design and performs up to 600 billion operations per second for real-time processing. A11 Bionic neural engine is designed for specific machine learning algorithms and enables Face ID, Animoji and other features.

Qi wireless charging

The glass back design enables a wireless charging on the iPhone X. Wireless charging works with the established Qi ecosystem, including two new wireless charging mats from Belkin and mophie, available from Apple Authorised Resellers.

AirPower: A new way to charge Apple devices

Apple gave a sneak peek of AirPower, an Apple-designed wireless charging accessory coming in 2018, which offers a active charging area that will allow iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X users to simultaneously charge up to three devices, including Apple Watch Series 3 and a new optional wireless charging case for AirPods.