My first week with the iPhone X

So, I knew going in that switching to an iPhone X was going to require a few adjustments, thanks to the now missing home button. Swipe up to go home. Yeah, I got that. You want to talk to Siri? We're not really on speaking terms. But seriously, now you press and hold the power button. OK, so if you press and hold the power button to talk to Siri, how do you shut your phone down? We'll get to that later.

So now I want to see what apps are running and maybe switch to another one. There are 2 ways to do this. I can swipe from one bottom corner to the other to cycle through my running apps like a Rolodex (showing my age now), or I could swipe up and hold to see the open apps like a poker hand. OK fine, but how do you close an app? Well, you have to press and hold any one of the displayed apps in the switcher view until little minus signs in circles appear. Then you use those buttons to close the appropriate app.

Alright, but how do I get to the control centre or the notifications? The home button is gone and swiping up takes me home. Well, for control centre, you swipe down from the top right corner, and for notifications, you swipe down from the top left corner.

Speaking of which, how do you turn the phone completely off? 2 ways. Press the power and any volume button at the same time. Or you can go to settings, general, and scroll all the way down to shut down.

I used to use the triple click of the home button to access the magnifier feature, so that my not-so-great eyes could read menus and vitamin labels. Now, the magnifier is accessible through 3 clicks of the power button.

It seems like there are a lot of changes to how you do things, but like any other regularly performed task, the process burns into your memory after a few exposures. What's going to suck is when people live in households where they're helping out others with older phones.

So, aside from the task change adjustments resulting from the absence of a home button, I like this phone. The screen looks superb. I love that I get similar screen real estate as my original iPhone 6 Plus in a much smaller phone. The setup process was like something out of a dream, thanks to having the aforementioned, already functional iPhone on hand. As soon as I got to the beginning of the setup process, my original phone asked me if I wanted to give all my wifi and Apple ID data over to the new phone. Which of course, I said yes. Then the new phone displays what can only be described as an artificial intelligence blue and white swirly pattern, which I'm supposed to capture in my original phone's camera frame. Then, like magic, the old phone shares everything about Apple ID and wifi settings with the new phone. Then the new phone starts restoring from the iCloud and then it finishes by installing all the apps that were on the original phone. The entire process took less than an hour from start to finish.

Disclaimer: To make the final iCloud backup much smaller, I deleted all on-board music from my iOS Spotify account so it would remove several GB to the backup space. I downloaded all my Spotify music after the new phone was done being set up. I also made sure all my photos and videos were backed up (to Google Drive of all places) and weeded out pics I didn't really need to keep on my phone (because they're in the cloud).

Because I decided to use Face ID (which works great so far), whenever I turn my phone on, I got into a habit of waiting to see that Face ID recognized me (you watch for a locked icon to change to an unlocked icon) before swiping up to get to my home screen. It turns out that there's no need to wait. You just swipe up while you're looking. By the time Face ID has done its thing, you'll be at the screen, ready to use your phone.

I assumed that migrating from the old iPhone to the new one would have brought all of my settings along. It did not. I was reminded by some online articles to look into the automatic updates setting 'use cellular data' and turn that off (I only want updates using wi-fi thank you). I also noticed that background app refresh had been turned off. I prefer it to be on. I like my apps getting updated as soon as they're available. Over wi-fi only please. There were other settings as well.

One setting I decided to leverage for the first time is a scheduled do not disturb. Between 10pm and 6am my phone is switched to do not disturb mode, which means no annoying notifications in the middle of the night when Gord updates Facebook or whatever.

I've had a chance to use the camera a bit and have noticed something unexpected. The iPhone's camera no longer saves pictures in JPG file format. It saves them as HEIC, which, I've heard, is a better picture and video compression scheme developed by the same folks who brought you MPEG.

The problem right now, is that we don't know of any picture viewer or editor programs for Windows that will recognize HEIC. Luckily, there are apps you can get, and I tried out an online converter web site, heictojpg.com. Hopefully image editors update themselves soon to take advantage of this new picture file format, as it does use a lot less space.

Incidentally, you can change the iPhone X back to storing jpg in the camera settings. It's called Camera capture and the default (HEIC) setting is High Efficiency. Most Compatible will save as JPG.