While I personally find the iPhone X notch almost unnoticeable much of the time, and cute when it’s visible, others have been more critical. There have been complaints that it’s asymmetrical and un-Apple-like in its design, and even that it ‘ruins’ the display.

But Apple VP Greg Joswiak has defended it as one of the company’s most impressive technical achievements …

Quoted in Tom’s Guide, Joswiak said that the focus should be on everything it achieves.

With all of those components, this is one of the most densely packed technology areas I think we’ve ever done. It’s one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology we’ve ever done in such an incredibly small space.

Apple did, he said, take its usual approach to new technology – not trying to be first to market, but aiming to offer the best possible implementation. And while he may not have called out Samsung by name, it was obvious who he had in mind with one comment.

It doesn’t matter if you’re first to a general idea, it’s about being first to making it fantastic, and that’s what we try to do. Whether it’s the chip team working with our hardware team or our software team with our human interface team — it is one team here. No one else can match that […] We had a line of sight on how to do real facial recognition, in a way never done before. It would be really hard to do, but we just didn’t want to do it the way others had, which could literally be spoofed with a picture.

Tom’s Guide picked the iPhone X as the overall winner in its 2017 Innovation Awards.

The iPhone X isn’t the first phone to integrate technologies like OLED or facial recognition — it simply executes those features better than the competition. At the same time, the processor inside the iPhone X is miles ahead of anything from the Android camp. There are three advancements — the Super Retina Display, Face ID and the A11 Bionic chip — that combine to make Apple’s flagship the most innovative product of the year.

Face ID did hit one glitch, with the release of iOS 11.2, some owners reporting a message that the iPhone X was unable to activate the feature. Fortunately, a simple reboot fixed it.

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