The screen isn't just pretty, it's a little more than twice as tall as it is wide. And a surprising number of the apps I use regularly have adapted to fill that extra space just fine. Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Bear, Dark Sky, Yelp, WSJ... the list goes on. Apple says it generally takes a few hours of work to make an existing app fully iPhone X-compatible, and I sincerely hope that wasn't just some marketing fluff because jumping into a non-optimized, letterboxed app was more jarring than I expected. When you fire up, say, Gmail, it's bounded on the top and bottom by empty expanses that frankly make the X look a little silly. Not exactly the experience you'd expect out of a $1,000 iPhone, but I suspect the App Store will be full of updated software by the time the X is widely available.

So yeah, some app experiences are a little less than elegant right now. Thankfully, navigating through the iPhone X's interface is generally a breeze. Since there's no home button, cruising through iOS happens with a series of swiping gestures. Slide a finger across a bar at the bottom to switch between running apps, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and hold for a moment (you'll feel a haptic pulse) to display all of your currently running apps, or simply swipe up to go back to the home screen. Despite hitting the reset button on almost a decade of iPhone behavior, Apple has built a version of iOS that handily proves home buttons aren't necessary anymore.

That said, it's not perfect. Using the new app switcher seems just a hair slower than double-tapping the home button, and trying to close an app takes a little more effort than it should. Instead of swiping up on an app window to dismiss it, you have to press and hold the window, then tap a close button on the corner. The move was necessary since the swipe up does something else, but the process now takes an extra, mildly annoying step. The stock iOS keyboard also has a lot of empty space beneath it, and while Apple uses it for buttons that switch layouts and fire up voice dictation, it's pretty ugly.

In addition to all the stuff that's baked into iOS 11, the iPhone X packs two features that people haven't been able to stop talking about: Face ID and Animoji. In case you somehow haven't heard: The former replaces the standard iPhone fingerprint sensor with a clever infrared camera array that basically turns your face into your password. The latter uses the same camera system to map your face's movements to one of nine emojis so you can, y'know, make pandas say cuss words and send them to friends.