After months of rumors and hopes of a great, new design, the iPhone X has finally been released on November 3rd.  The iPhone X features Face ID, a design change, a new display, a better camera, the Animoji, and much more.

In this new model, the home button and Touch ID features have vanished, and again, to my personal disappointment, the headphone jack is nowhere to be found. Touch ID has now been replaced with a system that can unlock one’s  phone by facial recognition. Although there are many people who think facial recognition is a convenient tool, in my opinion, the facial recognition is a little creepy; I’d rather my phone not be able to recognize me. On the other hand, Face ID is pretty simple to set up, and it’s recognition theoretically gets better with each use. While minor facial changes will still be recognized, dramatic changes as well as changes in lighting may sometimes require a person to put in their password. However, to unlock this phone, a person will have to pick up their phone and hold it in front of their face in order for it to recognize them. Now, they have to have to pick up their phone and hold it about 10 to 20 inches away from their face just to check a notification; that’s not too subtle.

Because the home button is now gone, a person must learn a lot of new gestures in order to navigate their phone. Now, to go home, they have to swipe up from the bottom, to open the Control Center, the have to swipe down from the right, and to open the notifications, they have to  panel swipe down from the left of the screen. Also, if a person wants to switch apps, they can swipe along the bottom of the screen or swipe up and hold for the app switcher will show up.

Another major design change is the addition of the notch at the top of the screen. Because of this notch, many apps won’t fill the whole screen. Apps that normally use the entire screen aren’t as user friendly anymore because some of the menu options are hidden by the notch or placed in more difficult to reach positions. It will take some time until the apps are updated in order to fill the screen of the iPhone X. Also, because of the notch, there isn’t as much room at the top of the phone. Now, in order to see the battery percentage, one has to swipe down to the control center.

The iPhone X is the first iPhone using OLED display; the OLED screen has been used on Samsung phones for some time. On the plus side, the OLED display allows the phone to be thinner, but on the other hand, the OLED screen can sometimes add some colorshifting off the side of the phone.

One of the best parts of the new iPhone is the double camera, which was also featured on the 2016 iPhone 7, but this year, on the iPhone X, it also features “portrait mode” and “portrait lighting” where the photographer can focus more on one object and blur the background like in professional pictures. Some aspiring photographers are now ditching their bulky professional cameras for their smaller iPhone.

Apple says that the iPhone X should get two more hours of battery life than the iPhone 7.

Currently one of the most popular features of the iPhone X is in the Animoji, Apple’s animated emoji characters. It works almost perfectly 100% of the time while tracking the user eyes and facial expressions and capturing their voice in exact sync with the animation of the original emoji. This feature has also received the least amount of complaints.

All in all, the screen is amazing, Face ID is simple to set up and mostly effective, the camera is simply spectacular, and the Animoji are very popular, but the iPhone X still has no headphone jack, early buyers will have deal with unoptimized apps for sometime, and the design will take some getting use to. Sold at about $1000, the iPhone X is very expensive, but for a lot of people, it’ll be worth it. And for others, it’ll seem ridiculous, but it’s the new, most popular iPhone, so I’ll leave the readers with this; is it worth it?