iPhone X debut draws massive crowds

Customers spill into the street near the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue.

The iPhone X is a hit.

Apple’s hotly anticipated new $1,000 gadget had fanatics young and old lining up on Friday — some waiting for more than a day — in hopes of getting their hands on Apple’s first smartphone with an edge-to-edge screen.

With a line outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship store snaking to Madison Avenue, a block away — and then back to Fifth and back again to Madison — it looked like most folks heeded Apple’s advice to “arrive early.” Even so, some left disappointed.

One Apple enthusiast who didn’t leave crestfallen was Chris Giles, who said he flew in from London on Thursday night, arriving at JFK around 9 p.m. After a quick nap, he was on line outside the Apple Store by 4 a.m.

“Fortunately, this is where jet lag helps me,” Giles said before the doors opened. “I was able to get up early and feel sprightly at 4 a.m. to join the queue to buy the iPhone X.”

Giles is in the city to cheer on his girlfriend, wheelchair basketball player Annika Zeyen, a paralympic gold medalist, who will be competing in Sunday’s marathon.

“I think we are both crazy in certain ways,” said Zeyen, who joined Giles later in the morning.

The first iPhone X reviews are in

Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the iPhone X during the launch event on Sept. 12 in Cupertino, California.

The iPhone X is a breakthrough device, but it’s going to take some getting used to.

That’s the initial verdict from tech reviewers who got time to fiddle with Apple’s new flagship smartphone this week ahead of its launch at Apple Stores slated for Friday.

The $999 phone has a gorgeous screen that’s nevertheless marred by a niggling notch at the top, reviewers say. Meanwhile, its Face ID feature has its quirks and the home button has been ditched in favor of screen gestures that can sometimes feel complicated.

–– A

On the positive side, reviewers praised the relatively compact size of the phone, which has a body only slightly bigger than the standard iPhone 8 but a screen larger than the iPhone 8 Plus’s.

Engadget’s Chris Velazco writes that the iPhone X’s display “is easily among the most impressive” he has ever seen in a phone. He praised the phone’s “subdued and natural” colors, compared to the more vivid display on Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8.

Reviewers, however, had an awkward time with popular apps — including Instagram, YouTube and Netflix — that aren’t yet optimized for the iPhone X’s uniquely shaped screen.

Namely, the iPhone X’s screen has a notch at its top center that houses the ear speaker and Face ID camera and sensors. The workaround for now, it seems, is for most apps to simply revert to a similar-shape screen that you get with a regular iPhone.

“Jumping into a non-optimized, letterboxed app was more jarring than I expected,” Velazco writes. “When you fire up, say, Gmail, it’s bounded on the top and bottom by empty expanses that frankly make the X look a little silly.”

The Verge’s Nilay Patel likewise noted that Instagram Stories have gray borders on the top and bottom, and don’t fill the whole screen.

YouTube, meanwhile, makes its users choose between videos either taking up the whole display but having a chunk cut out by the notch, or having thick borders around the top, bottom and sides of the video.

Elsewhere, Patel said he struggled to get Face ID to work properly until Apple clarified that it works best when the phone is 10 to 20 inches from the user’s face.

This, he said, meant he had to actively think about the way he held his phone any time he wanted to use it, and had to bring it closer to his face than he ever has any other phone.

“‘You’re holding it wrong’ is a joke until it isn’t, and you can definitely hold the iPhone X wrong,” he wrote.

Although Face ID was normally extremely reliable once he got used to holding his phone closer to his face, Patel said it became inconsistent when he used it in bright sunlight or under fluorescent lights, which interfere with Face ID’s infrared face mapping.

CNET’s Scott Stein, meanwhile, found himself longing for the home button that Apple unceremoniously scrapped in favor of its edge-to-edge screen, saying he felt like he’d “lost a thumb.”

All the new gestures that Apple has mapped to the iPhone X’s screen took some getting used to, according to Stein.

“At the end of the first day, I admit: sometimes I missed the simple home button,” he wrote.