The fact is, Apple needed to remove Touch ID for Face ID to work with the general public. Humans are stupid. The vast majority of us, myself included, would have simply dismissed Face ID as a gimmick like the Note 8's had it not been for the fact that it is the only option. If Touch ID were still here, I would have set my fingerprint (or 3) as always and gone about my business as if no amazing, new technological brilliance and innovation had been miraculously crammed into a tiny notch at the top of the screen. Face ID feels more than complete; it feels like the feature we wanted 10 years ago, only able to come to life in it's full form now. The beautiful butterfly to a capricious caterpillar. The fearsome Drogon to a diminutive dragon egg.

Speaking of the notch: All I can say - like many others who have used it for more than a few days - is that it's freaking awesome. It adds instant identity to the phone which otherwise resembles so many other 2017 bezeless brethren, albeit with more polish, and practicality is not lacking with lots of useful information crammed into those 'horns' that are so often abhorred by the general press and android fans. More than that, it means I can tell which way of the phone is up while I'm using it without having to flip the damn thing to see the camera position and determine upright vs upside down. I don't notice the notch, I certainly don't hate it and I never really found it to be an imposition. It's grown on me.

And finally, the screen. That screen. No, THAT screen. My goodness it's gorgeous. There's a good reason this Samsung-made OLED screen scored higher than every Samsung phone in existance on the industry-standard displaymate.com, and it's all in the Apple-esqueness of it all. Superior tweaking and fine tuning has given the X a truly eye-popping aura of almost 3D-like, HDR, high resolution goodness. True-to-form wanky Apple name aside (super-retina, really?), the way it's designed is so close to the surface that it genuinely feels like the picture is actually protruding off the plane of the phone, and yet it's all in the genius of how the OLED is utilized by Apple to create that effect. Most reviewers put the screen as the biggest 'feature' of the iPhone X, and they're not wrong.

But the iPhone X isn't perfect.

There's a few software issues that need to be fixed before a truly seamless experience can be had on the iPhone X, some of which ironically DID feel rushed. Even Jony Ive, Apple's famous chief engineer has admitted that with respect to the iPhone X this year, the hardware has been the primary focus. The software we can expect to follow to make the most of this beautiful design over the coming year.

One example of this (and my biggest peeve with the iPhone X) is the way in which the default Photo's app handles scaling of video's, even captured by the very phone they are displayed on. Watch a recording in landscape without adjusting anything and you'll have giant bezels on either side of the video due to the strange aspect ratio. Double tap on the screen to zoom in and rather than 'zooming to fill', the image (or video) will zoom right in and you'll lose most of the picture and have to try and fumble about manually to fit the image as best you can to fill the beautiful display without losing any more of the image than necessary. The whole experience in this regard is distinctly anti-Apple. Another example is the lack of landscape mode on the home screen. It all feels so easily fixable, yet is frustratingly slow in fruition.

In short, the Apple iPhone X is definitely a Portrait-mode phone. Which is a huge shame, given the amazing colour and sheer beauty of the screen so quickly lends itself to consuming content by the bucketload, which is always better in landscape. And that's made even more frustrating due to the iPhone X camera being a damn good unit for taking video and photos.

Performance wise the iOS range is without a close equivalent at this time. The closest phone so far, in synthetic bench-marking, is the OnePlus 5T; the new flagship which we don't even get on Australian shores (and we really should). Even then we're talking scores of between 50% to 75% of the A11 bionic chip housed in the iPhone 8 and iPhone X series. Put simply, at the moment, Qualcomm, Exynos and MediaTek all need buckle up, grab a beer and do a tonne of hard-yards, long hours and homework in order to level the playing field with processor hardware. Because right now, it's no competition, and that will have more of a factor as process-heavy applications are adopted in mainstream use such as AR, VR and multi-player gaming.