Apple[1] needed to wow skeptics with its 10th-anniversary smartphone, the iPhone X[2]. (That's pronounced "iPhone 10," for the curious.) As expected, Apple showed off a phone with an edge-to-edge screen[3], advanced facial recognition technology and no home button.
I got to try it out, spending some brief time with the phone at Apple's launch event Tuesday.
This is a sleek, beautiful phone. It had all of the more credible features we were promised by a steady drip of leaks. And it is certainly the most futuristic iPhone that Apple's ever produced.
But while the iPhone X looks like an evolution of the iPhone, it doesn't feel like an evolution - more broadly - of the smartphone.
While the edge-to-edge screen on the iPhone X is crisp and beautiful, it still looks ever-so-slightly boxed in by its thin bezel, as compared to the Samsung Galaxy S8[5] or Galaxy Note 8[6]. The iPhone X's design doesn't make an appreciable difference in screen size or even the number of pixels you see, but it does make those Samsung phones feel like an advancement over the standard smartphone as a general product category.
And it's not immediately clear to me that losing the home button for an all-screen front, on balance, is worth it. Apple's come up with a series of gestures to replace the home button functions. For example, getting to the home screen requires a swipe up the middle of the screen. Pause mid-swipe, and that gets you a view of all of your apps. The Control Center, which was formerly called up by swiping from the bottom, is now summoned by swiping down from...