Do You Really Need An iPhone X?

I’ll start this article by saying I’m a huge iPhone fan and have been for a number of years. I’m now on my 5th iPhone as my everyday phone and love it. When the new iPhone 8 and X were announced then I was pretty impressed with the X (less so with the 8 that’s just another evolution of the 7). Yes it’s an expensive phone at £1000 but it’s not just a phone. It’s a mobile computer doing everything and more than most laptops do. Looking at it like that is probably more appropriate than viewing it just as a really expensive phone.

I was ready to order one and had planned to on October 27th when pre-orders opened. Over the days leading up to it I began to think that maybe £1000 would be better spent elsewhere. Would the X give me £1000 more value over my current iPhone (a 6)? While some of the new features are nice, I came to the conclusion that my current iPhone actually does everything I need and want to do. It would be a good upgrade from anything older than an iPhone 6 imo but anything newer is difficult to justify. In the end I didn’t order one…

All this thought of phones, their cost, and what they’re capable of then got me thinking. If you were coming from an older phone (say 5+ years old) and wanted a new one, do you really need to spend £1000 (expense isn’t just an Apple thing btw, a Google Pixel 2 XL starts at £800) for something decent?

To test this theory I decided to do an experiment… On the day of release of the iPhone X (3rd November and just for dramatic effect!) I put my iPhone in a drawer where it will stay for the rest of the month. I’ve now using a Moto G4+ Android phone that retails at just £150. Will this do everything a much more expensive new large format (it’s screen is 5.5", the same as an iPhone 8+) smartphone will do?

I’ll be reporting my findings as the month progresses but my initial impressions are surprisingly good. I did think I’d really struggle with Android rather than iOS but Android 7 is just as slick as iOS11. Yes there are some differences, but they are just that, differences, not better, not worse, just different.

One of the things I thought may be a pain would be the initial setup and pulling all my contacts and calendar info across. I’ve used iCloud for many years and didn’t want to change that. In the end this was pretty simple using an App “Sync for iCloud” which as the name suggests, doesn’t just import info, but syncs it so I can continue to use iCloud elsewhere (iPad and laptop). The rest of the setup was simple as it was basically just installing all the Apps I use (and remembering the passwords to login!).

The only real issue I’ve come across so far was when I connected the phone to my car. The setup all went well but when listening to podcasts the audio was sometimes choppy, like the old days of CD’s skipping. A quick Google suggested this was to do with battery optimisation settings for the Bluetooth services. This turned out to be correct so was solved very quickly.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out…

Thanks

Richard