 Hey, it's the iPhone the verge. It's like Monday morning, 10 a.m. Just walked out of a meeting with Apple and I've got it. It's the iPhone 10. Now this is going to be a weird one. It's not how it usually is. I've only got 24 hours to review this phone. That's all they're giving us. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to publish a first video today as quickly as we can of all the features, look at stuff, take our impressions. Then I want your questions. Put them in the comments below. We'll publish a much longer video answering all those questions in a couple of days. All right, well, roadblock number one. I need to put my SIM in here and I don't know about you, but I am not in possession of a paperclip currently, nor would I want to do that operation in the back of a moving car. But the screen looks nice. So we're here in the studio. I'm going to give you some quick impressions of the big stuff, the screen, the cameras and face ID. The screen, there's notch. No getting around it. It's right there at the top of the screen. I will say that even just using it after a few hours, I've stopped thinking about the notch or caring about the notch. You will notice it in two places right away. The first is an apps to play video. So we run the Star Wars trailer on YouTube. YouTube is optimized for the phone. It looks weird because you can either go full screen and the notch sits over the left side of the video or you can shrink it down so it doesn't. But then the video is pillar boxed and letter boxed, and that means it's really small, which is just not great. So you've got two not great options. The other thing is apps that aren't optimized for this display are kind of broken. So like dark sky has a weird black bar at the top. Google Docs, which isn't optimized yet, has huge borders at the top and bottom. They're basically fake bezels. Other apps that use auto layout, like my news reader app, Newsify, it's just broken. There's lines cutting across the status bar. Usually Apple developers are really great about fixing their apps or new versions of iOS, but the last time Apple made a change this big was the iPhone 6 and it took some developers years to make their apps work on iPhone 6 side screens. So we'll see how it goes. The screen is a 5.8 inch OLED display and I would say the experience of using it so far is actually somewhere in between the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus. It doesn't act like a plus size display. It doesn't have tabs in Safari and landscape. The keyboard is about the same size as the iPhone 8. The reason is it's got the notch at the top and this control area at the bottom where the home button used to be. So the vertical real estate of the screen is actually a little bit smaller than you think. So you get a bigger screen than an iPhone 8 and it will look bigger, but in terms of usable area, it's not as big as the 8 Plus. It's right in the middle. So I know there's been a lot of controversy about the Pixel 2 XL display and that's led to a lot of controversy about OLED screens in general and I'm just going to tell you, looking at it for a few hours, this display is great. It's made by Samsung, but Apple is really insistent that they actually designed and engineered it themselves. So Samsung's just manufacturing it and it's a pen tile arrangement. If you're that kind of nerd, I know I am, but Apple's doing a lot of custom work to eliminate some of the problems pen tile displays have had in the past. The colors are vibrant. They're not muted like the Pixel 2. They are not super exaggerated like the S8. It basically looks like a much brighter version of the iPhone LCD. I know I said in the iPhone 8 review that I think the iPhone LCD is the best screen ever made and people got really mad at me, but this looks like an even better version of that and I think that is really great. As for cameras, it's basically the same setup as the iPhone 8 Plus. The big difference is that both the wide and the telephoto lens have optical image stabilization here. On the 8 Plus, only the wide has optical image stabilization. This will probably make a way bigger difference in videos when you're shooting with a telelens, but we've got to do a lot more testing to find out. Right now, in just some quick tests, pictures basically look like the 8 Plus and if you watched our 8 Plus review, you know they're pretty competitive with the Pixel and the S8 and the Note 8. I think the Pixel looks a little bit better and now that the Pixel 2 is out, we've got to do a deep head-to-head and we're going to be doing that test coming up soon. The front camera, because it has the TrueDepth system, can now take portrait mode selfies, which is fun, and you get to use Animoji, which are super silly and I think are probably the best feature of the phone. So face ID, that's the big one. Apple got rid of the home button, they got rid of the fingerprint sensor, they got rid of touch ID, they changed all the gestures on the phone of how you use it, because now you unlock the phone just by looking at it. And I've got to be honest with you, it's been a little bit inconsistent for me. So inside, it basically works all the time. Sitting at my desk, walking around in dark places, mostly when I'm walking around, it works fine. The problem has been when I go outside into bright sunlight, particularly when I'm walking around in bright sunlight, or when I go into places with weird fluorescent lighting, like hilariously the deli across the street. I think the reason for this is that when you're in the dark, it's shining the IR light on your face and the camera can just see it, it's like a flashlight in the dark. When you're outside, there's tons of IR interference from the sun or from those crappy fluorescent lights and the camera's a harder time seeing the IR beam illuminate your face. This is just my theory right now, but it's kind of what's been happening. So we got to do a lot more testing, I'm going to ask Apple what's going on, we're going to figure it all out, we're going to have all that information in the full review, but right now I'm just going to tell you, it hasn't worked great all the time. So that is what I know after these first few hours of playing with the iPhone X. I think it's a really good iPhone. I think there's some big questions to be answered around face ID consistency, particularly outside. I think there is some deep camera testing I want to do, especially against the Pixel 2. I can't really tell you about battery life yet, because I just haven't had it long enough, but I think if you've pre-ordered this phone, you're going to be pretty happy. You're going to be on the face ID journey of discovery with the rest of us as we figure out where and when it does and doesn't work. If you haven't pre-ordered and you have questions, ask us, because I want to hear from you. So leave questions in the comments on this YouTube video, hit me up on Twitter, hit us up on the website. We're going to take all those questions, we're going to go back to Apple, we're going to ask them some additional really hard questions, and we're going to answer them all in our full review coming in just a couple days. Hey Joanna, how's it going? I'm good, I just got my iPhone X. Do you have one yet? No. I'm special. Alright, that's enough. Get back here, Stern! Get back here, Stern!