Apple's first smart speaker finally emerges, well after Amazon's Echo speakers and the Google Home family dominated the conversation.
For Apple's HomePod, it's better late than never.
The smart speaker became available for advance orders in the online Apple Store in the US, UK and Australia on Friday. While you can typically put in an order for new Apple products at 12:01 a.m. PT, the HomePod wasn't available until just before 5:45 a.m. PT.
A little patience was required for Apple's latest product. The consumer electronics giant unveiled the HomePod at its developer conference in June and said it was slated to ship in December, but it ended up delaying the release to early this year. The device will hit stores Feb. 9.
The HomePod is available for $349, £319 or AU$499 in white and space gray. Apple has positioned it as a speaker first, smart device second. You'll be able to ask Apple's Siri voice assistant to do things like play a song on Apple Music, send a message to a friend through WhatsApp or control your smart lights. Later this year, you'll be able to link two HomePods together for multiroom listening and stereo sound.
Unlike recent iPhone launches, the HomePod didn't immediately sell out Friday, and the Apple Store didn't have glitches that prevented people from placing their orders. As of 5:45 a.m. PT, both the white and space gray versions of the speaker were still available, and the shipment date lists Feb. 9. Apple's hottest iPhone models have tended to sell out within minutes.
Anticipation for Apple's HomePod is likely nowhere near as high as demand for a new iPhone. Despite efforts to get into new markets like wearables and the smart home, Apple still makes about two-thirds of its sales from its smartphones.
Working against Apple's smart speaker is the popularity of Amazon's Echo and the HomePod's higher price compared to rivals. The speaker also doesn't easily stream music from third-party services like Spotify, and the number of other tasks you can ask of Siri is limited. Siri itself has been deemed a subpar voice assistant by researchers. And even though Apple is pushing HomePod's audio capabilities, that may not win over as many people as it hopes.
"There is not a large market for high-quality audio," Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin said. "Most Echo owners are completely content with the sound quality and say it is 'good enough' for their needs."
Siri, can I buy a HomePod?
When Apple showed off the HomePod for the first time in June, it positioned its new device as a music experience rather than just a smart-home hub, ostensibly to "reinvent home music." It has better audio specs than other hub speakers and an A8 chip for processing (the same chip that's in the iPhone 7). It uses a wide-array mic that supposedly can hear you over the music, and naturally integrates with Apple Music. It can also control HomeKit devices.
In the race for in-ear AI, Apple has the clear advantage despite the fact that their intelligent assistant is one of the dumbest of the bunch.
Yesterday, reports emerged that Apple was working on a pair of follow-ups to its Airpods headphones that could bring them always-on Siri functionality as well as a splash-proof design. As we think about all the things that Apple could do right with its next set of wireless earbuds, it’s easy to reflect on all that Google did wrong with its Pixel Buds and how much of an opportunity they still have.
Google Assistant lends so much potential to a pair of smart wireless earbuds from Google. The fact is that Siri doesn’t hold a candle to Google Assistant in many ways, and while the functionality of voice control on the AirPods is largely focused on music and calls, the superior intelligence of Google Assistant should make them a much clearer companion for a set of earbuds.
Hardware is still very much a side project for Google, but as the company prioritizes home assistant hardware, it really doesn’t make sense that they’re not putting more resources into a pair of wireless headphones. The Pixel Buds need a more purposeful design that minimizes friction and delivers Assistant insights more effortlessly in a package that feels like more than just a follow-on.
The AirPods are an engineering marvel, and while some of the functionality of the Pixel Buds was interesting — mainly their ability to interface with the Pixel 2 for language translation — they fell flat on design. Google needs to rethink its wireless earbuds from the ground-up and focus more on creating something with the sleekness of the Pixel phones rather than the fabric-obsessed friendliness of their Home devices. Cutting the woven cord and moving to a truly wireless form factor is a necessary step, as is shrinking down the size of the Bud part of the product. It’s really not about the sound quality as much as it is about the connectivity and the lack of friction. While FastPair has been a great step in simplifying the bluetooth pairing, there are still some quirks that aren’t present with Apple’s W1 chip.
While Siri is always quick to refer you to search results when it doesn’t have an answer (a frequent occurrence), Assistant’s optimization for its display-free Home devices has led it to order functionality around the assumption that there’s not always a screen available to default to. Today, Google announced that it was bringing location-based notifications and voice-optimized routine functionality to its Home devices so it could complete regular custom tasks without you having to pepper it with commands, stuff like this would be ideal for earbuds that are always-listening, something that Google could do much more with than Apple.
Even as features take months to roll out, Google has still shown a degree of nimbleness on the voice assistant front that Apple can’t match in annual WWDC keynotes. While Amazon is just as quick with Alexa, Google Assistant’s deepening integration with Android establishes an arena where they should be the clear champion.
AirPods are clearly the best wireless earbud that an Apple user can own and even with the reduced functionality that still might be true of Android phones. People are building tools to bring iOS-only feature sets to Android and that fact alone should suggest Google take a more serious look at its own hardware and the opportunity that it’s losing out on.
Google is bringing gadget maker Nest back under its control as the search giant battles rivals Amazon and Apple in the rapidly expanding smart home market. A big part of the change: Making it easier to add Google's artificial intelligence technology and Assistant -- a digital helper that competes against Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri -- into new Nest products.
The world's largest search engine has staked its future on building Google smarts into devices beyond smartphones. On Wednesday, Google said Nest was part of its plans and would no longer operate as a separate division that lived in the outer orbit of parent company Alphabet's "Other Bets" group of projects.
Instead, Nest rejoins the Google mothership -- the part of Alphabet that houses search, YouTube, Android mobile software and other moneymakers. Nest, acquired by Google in 2014, had been operating outside of Google, the only profitable division of Alphabet, for the past three years.
Under the new org structure, Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz reports to Google's hardware chief, Rick Osterloh, a former Motorola executive who took charge of all Google's consumer devices in 2016. That includes Google Home smart speakers, Pixel smartphones and Chromecast streaming devices.
Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz says the company has shipped 11 million products to date. James Martin/CNET
"All of Google's investments in machine learning and AI, they can very clearly benefit Nest products. It just makes sense to be developing them together," Osterloh said in an interview Tuesday, which included Fawaz and took place in a meeting room designed to look like a home, complete with a kitchen and a washer-dryer setup. "It's the natural thing to evolve to."
Nest's brand, known for its 2011 internet-connected thermostat, isn't going anywhere, Osterloh and Fawaz said. In fact, the two drilled home the message that the reunion of the teams will "supercharge Nest's mission," as Fawaz put it. They used the word "supercharge" at least five times during our 40-minute interview at Nest headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Fawaz said Nest has shipped more than 11 million products since its first thermostat went on sale in 2011. Since it's been part of "Other Bets," Alphabet doesn't call out how much money Nest makes or loses.
The biggest change: Making Google's AI technology a staple in future Nest products. I asked if that means making every new Nest device an access point for the Google Assistant. That integration is "core to the strategy," said Fawaz, but nothing is set in stone. Nest has already begun building the Assistant into devices like its Nest Cam IQ indoor camera.
Nest and Google have already plotted out and finalized their hardware roadmaps for 2018, but in the next two years, they'll start co-developing products. Google also plans to offer more bundled packages for Nest and Google devices, like one deal last year that paired Nest products over $100 with a free Google Home Mini. Fawaz said people could also eventually use their Google accounts with their Nest app.
One thing that isn't changing: Nest, which won't say how many employees it has, will keep its offices in Palo Alto, instead of moving to the Googleplex in nearby Mountain View.
The decision to merge Nest with Google comes as tech's biggest companies work to infuse their software into every aspect of people's lives, from their cars to homes. People will spend $1 trillion on the so-called "internet of things" by 2020, according to Gartner. And they'll spend over $50 billion on smart home tech in 2022 -- up from $31 billion this year -- according to Statista.
But right now the gateway drug is smart speakers. Amazon dominates that world with its Echo devices, owning 69 percent of the market. Google is far behind with 31 percent, according to a report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Apple, meanwhile, officially enters the market when its new HomePod speaker goes on sale Feb. 9.
Nest was previously a semi-independent unit of Alphabet, Google's parent company. CNET
Nest's reunion with Google isn't a complete surprise. In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was considering bringing Nest back into the fold. Osterloh and Fawaz said the merger has been in the works for the last few months. Since the two groups already partner on supply chain operations, packaging and event launches, it made sense for them to be one unit, they said.
Being under the same org chart also makes it easier for Nest to use Google's AI technology, the foundation for its Assistant and the key to new products like its Google Lens and Google Photos services.
"We've leveraged AI capabilities from Google in the past, especially in the computer vision space and facial recognition," Fawaz said. "Being part of the Google family, we get closer to that."
'The whole world is shifting'
A lot has changed since Google bought Nest for $3 billion nearly four years ago. That same year, Amazon introduced its Echo smart speaker, a surprise hit and a big slap to Google and Apple, which were already working on voice search. Google followed in 2016 with Home, a smart speaker that promised to put Google's leading search engine a few voice commands away. And this week, reviews went up for Apple's HomePod, a $350 Siri-enabled smart speaker that Apple touts as having better audio quality than its rivals.
Google has bulked up its hardware efforts in other areas too. Osterloh, former president of Motorola, was tapped two years ago by Google CEO Sundar Pichai to create a new consumer device effort. Though Google has always dabbled in hardware -- think the Nexus Q media player or Chromebook laptops -- Pichai wanted to prove the company was all-in this time around. Under Osterloh, Google unveiled its first branded phone, the Pixel, in October 2016 to rival Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy. It also added a virtual reality headset, a Wi-Fi router and new Chromecast video and audio streamers to its "Made by Google" product lineup.
Maybe the biggest sign that Google no longer considers hardware a hobby is its $1 billion investment in smartphone manufacturer HTC, which brings to Google over 2,000 HTC engineers -- many of whom already worked on the Pixel phone. The deal officially closed last week.
Google also put on a show last month in Las Vegas at CES, the world's largest consumer electronics conference. In past years, Google has typically laid low while its manufacturing partners, including Samsung and LG, made all the noise. But this year, the company set up a massive stage to showcase its gadgets and plastered the words "Hey Google" -- one of the trigger phrases for the Google Assistant -- over the Las Vegas Monorail. White-suited Google workers greeted showgoers in booths across the conference floor with the sole aim of telling them about how Google Assistant worked with various gadgets, from TVs to headphones.
Nest will be joining Google's hardware division, led by former Motorola executive Rick Osterloh. James Martin/CNET
Meanwhile, after a two-year slump in which it didn't enter new product categories, Nest in September added devices and services, including the Nest Hello smart doorbell and the Nest Secure alarm system.
"It's just a logical move," said Bob O'Donnell, an analyst with Technalysis. "The whole world is shifting. Amazon did a good job of recognizing an opportunity. Others are recognizing it and adjusting accordingly."
Hey, Alexa
When it comes to their smart home rivalry, Google and Amazon haven't been afraid to play hardball -- sometimes at the expense of customers.
Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, doesn't sell Google Home. Instead, searching for that product on Amazon brings results for other products, including the e-commerce giant's rival Echo speaker. Amazon sells some Nest products, like the smart thermostat and smoke detector, but not others, such as the Nest E, a cheaper $170 version of its thermostat, or the Nest Secure alarm system. Also, after banning sales of Google's Chromecast streamers two years ago, in December Amazon agreed to bring them back.
Google, meanwhile, cut off YouTube from working on Amazon's Echo Show video device and Fire TV. And at CES, Google tapped partners including Sony to introduce four new video devices with the Assistant built-in to compete with the Echo Show.
Google has made big investments in hardware with its Google Home line of products. CNET
Google, Amazon and Apple know getting adoption for their voice assistants is the key to future riches. Over 5 billion devices that support digital assistants, including Alexa and Google Assistant, will be in use by consumers in 2018, according to IHS Markit, with nearly 3 billion more added by 2021. Of those devices, 39 million will be smart speakers, up from about 27 million units sold in 2017.
That all raises the question: Will Nest's closer relationship with Google mean Nest products stop working with Amazon Alexa?
"This announcement doesn't change that," Fawaz said. "If there are any changes in the future, we'll certainly make sure it's the right decision for consumers."
I pressed them again about the potential for this new arrangement to change the relationship with Amazon.
"I would call Amazon and ask them," Osterloh said. "We don't know. We want to work with Amazon in an open, transparent, symmetrical way. Hopefully they want to do the same. We're continuing discussions with them on that."
(We're checking with Amazon and will update this story when we get a response.)
A rocky tenure
When Nest appeared in 2011, it was a novel enterprise from a leader with a storied pedigree. Nest co-founder and former CEO Tony Fadell became known as the Godfather of the iPod after he played a key role, with Steve Jobs, in developing the seminal music player. Following Fadell's departure from Apple in 2010, he and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers focused on reinventing another market. The answer: a smart remake of home thermostats. The idea was to create a whole suite of forgotten household products that had been reimagined for the internet era. The startup announced its second product, the Nest Protect smoke detector, in 2013.
In 2014, Google bought Nest. That was, in part, to inject the search giant with some of the product magic Fadell brought with him from Apple. But Nest's tenure at Google has been rocky. There was public drama after Nest paid $555 million for Dropcam, maker of the security camera it eventually turned into the Nest Cam. After the buyout, Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy left the company and has since called the acquisition a "mistake." Under Nest, more than 50 Dropcam employees resigned. Duffy has said Dropcam's product roadmap was derailed.
When Google created Alphabet in August 2015, Nest became its own division, alongside other units including Google, the moonshot factory X and health tech company Verily.
It was Nest, though, with its own brand, team and offices, that was supposed to be the model for how the new Alphabet structure would work. But instead of becoming the Platonic ideal for an Alphabet company, Nest underwent more scrutiny. Meanwhile, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat tightened spending at the "Other Bets."
Fadell stepped down in 2016, and Fawaz took his place. Fawaz and Osterloh met in 2012 while both working at Motorola. Google briefly owned Motorola before selling it off to Lenovo for $3 billion in 2012, but neither executive came to Google as a direct result of that acquisition.
Today, all Fawaz will say about Nest's past is that the stories were "a bit exaggerated."
As for the way Alphabet is set up, Fawaz defended it. "Each bet is different. We have different journeys," he said. "In this particular case, Rick and I came together and said, '[Nest rejoining Google] makes sense.'"
"Other bets will have different journeys. They can have a different outcome," Fawaz added. "There's not one size that fits all in the model."
Nest co-founder Tony Fadell says Google hurt its smart assistant efforts when it spun off the maker of net-connected gadgets not long after acquiring it.
Google's announcement this week that it's bringing Nest back under its wing has some former employees of the smart-thermostat maker saying the company never should've been spun off in the first place.
Tony Fadell, co-founder and ex-CEO of Nest, said both companies' efforts in connected gadgets were hurt when Google made Nest a separate business less than two years after acquiring it. Google bought Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion, and the spin-off happened in 2015 during the restructuring that created the Alphabet holding company.
"From the outside it looked like Nest was the perfect poster child for Alphabet," Fadell told CNBC in an interview Friday, "but at the same time, separating it was undoing the thing that was most essential for both companies -- figuring out how to make them work together."
On Wednesday, Google said Nest would no longer operate as a separate divisionunder Alphabet's "Other Bets" group. Instead, it's rejoining Google as the tech powerhouse looks to work its artificial intelligence technology and smart assistant into new Nest products. That effort comes as rival Amazon unleashes a bombardment of Echo gadgets equipped with its Alexa smart assistant and Apple touts its HomePod smart speaker, which relies on Siri.
But Fadell, who left Nest in mid-2016 amid questions regarding sales goals and workplace culture, told CNBC that bringing Google's AI smarts to Nest gadgets had always been the point.
"Nest was acquired by Google for a specific reason," Fadell told the network. "I pitched it as 'We are the senses and you are the brain.'"
Two other former Nest employees, who wished to remain anonymous, told CNBC that after the Alphabet restructuring, Google and Nest staffers weren't properly encouraged to work together. The two teams were also kept in the dark about each other's projects, even when those efforts were similar, and even after Amazon began gobbling up the smart-home market with its Echo and Alexa products. Google reportedly tried to sell Nest in 2016 but abandoned that effort.
"I think it would have helped had the [mergers and acquisitions] team put something in place in the early days to structure and incentivize Google and us in a way that would have led to more cooperation," one of the ex-employees told the network.
"It was like a soap opera," one of the former staffers said.
A culture clash might have been involved. Fadell, an ex-Apple executive and disciple of Steve Jobs, is known as the godfather of the iPod, and played a key role in the development of the iPhone. His joining the search giant was seen by many as Google co-founder Larry Page's attempt to inject his company with Apple's storied hardware sensibility. But Apple's rigid and secretive culture is a stark contrast from Google's open and experimental one.
Fadell told CNBC he'd like to see Google's effort to marry its AI technology to Nest products succeed this time around.
"For the sake of Nest customers and talent," he said, "I hope they follow through on their commitment they made to us four years ago instead of trying to sell it off like they did just two years ago."
Otter's artificial intelligence absorbs recorded conversations and churns out transcripts that identify speakers, suggest keywords and offer text search.
If you don't hate transcribing, it's probably just because you don't have to do it very much.
Otter, a new, free mobile app from a team of vets from Google and speech-recognition company Nuance, aims to make voice transcriptions become as easy and accessible as typing into a Google Doc.
Voice is an obsession of tech giants right now. But companies like Amazon, Google and Apple are mostly zeroed in voice-command assistants like Alexa or Siri, premised on the bet that voice interaction will become the next stage of computing. Getting less attention, though, are voice transcriptions -- tech that takes a recording of people talking and turns it in to text -- even though that kind of technology could be transformative for people across different needs and professions.
Most transcription apps or services fall into two buckets. If they're free, they're not often accurate. And those that give you clean transcript are usually expensive. That's because voice-to-text is technologically tricky, and most services that provide you with accurate transcripts usually need a human to review the recording.
Otter, which debuted this week at Mobile World Congress, aims to make transcripts not only free and accurate but also smart.
Otter is a free mobile app aiming to make transcription simple and easy. Mark Licea/CNET
"This is a perfect time," said Sam Liang, the CEO and founder of AISense, the company behind Otter. "With A.I. tech and deep in the last few years, the accuracy for speech recognition has improved dramatically. A few years ago, this system wouldn't be usable."
To use Otter, you tap a microphone icon to begin a recording, and almost immediately, a live raw transcript of what you're saying begins to unspool in front of you. It's after that recording ends that Otter's artificial intelligence can really do its work. After processing, the cleaned-up transcript separates speakers as they take turns to talk. As part of your sign-up process, Otter takes a "voiceprint" of you by asking you to read a five-paragraph statement so it can learn your voice and specifically identify you next to the passages you spoke.
Otter's transcripts also are searchable, not only within one transcript but across all your stored recordings. It automatically generate keywords that you can tap to search. You can form teams in Otter, and content can be shared within the Otter app with individuals or team members. You can also send anyone a link to a transcript viewable on the web.
In one neat feature, the text and audio are synchronized when you playback the recording, so if you tap on any part of the transcript, the audio will jump right to that place for quick accuracy checks. The app also highlights each word as its spoken during an audio playback.
It's not a perfect transcription. Punctuation is sometimes out of whack. It misidentifies some words -- I told Otter "Hi, I'm Joan" and my readout picked up my name as John, for example. And it's less successful in a crowded environment or during cross-talk. And the app, which was released publicly Monday, is somewhat buggy in its early days. When I opened it once, all my recordings and their transcripts from the previous day were missing. Restarting the app restored them, but you may notice other bugs.
And it lacks some tantalizing capabilities, like importing a previously recorded conversation. The app and its baseline transcription service is and will remain free, but the company plans to add a subscription tier later that unlocks extra utilities, along the same lines as Evernote's business model.
Its privacy relationship with your materials is similar to that of an Evernote, too. Otter is confidential and encrypted. And the company isn't building an ad-based business with Otter, so it's not interested in peeking into your materials so it can creating a profile that will target ads to you, the company said.
Otter is available for devices running Google's Android system and on Apple mobile products. and will be available on the web, iOS and Android.
You'll see Amazon's Alexa dominate the New York Toy Fair as toymakers figure out how to use the digital assistant to add new sound experiences to games.
Alexa, shall we play a game?
Amazon's smart assistant is making her way into playtime, with Mattel and other toymakers adding Alexa voice commands to products to enhance game play. Several such toys are due this fall, and this weekend some will be on display at the ginormous New York Toy Fair.
In many of these products, you can't actually play against Alexa. Instead she's a guide, keeping score, reading rules and setting the mood with sound effects and music.
In an age when parents are accustomed to syncing toys with smartphone apps, it's not much of a leap for companies to want to leverage smart speakers. Industry watchers expect Amazon's Echo speakers to be in more than 66.3 million US households by 2022.
Why make your own voice recognition system and battle privacy worries when you can use one already trusted in millions of homes?
"We know that more than one in five parents of connected children own a voice-controlled internet-connected smart speaker," said Sven Gerjets, Mattel's chief technology officer. "Nearly all parents who have a smart speaker feel comfortable with their child using it."
Mattel's first dip into Alexa isn't geared toward young kids, though. It's a puzzle-solving game for adults called Escape Room in a Box: The Werewolf Experiment. It costs $29.99 on Amazon. Having an Echo isn't required, but it does add ambiance by playing a spooky soundtrack while also acting as a timer and a source for hints.
Alexa is required to play Sensible Object's "When in Rome," a travel trivia game out later this year. Sensible Object
London-based Sensible Object is taking a similar approach with its upcoming voice-augmented board game Voice Originals: When in Rome. The travel trivia game, to be priced at $29.99, uses voice actors and sound effects as the players explore the world. Alexa, and eventually Google Assistant and Apple's Siri, will help keep track of scores and will give guidance on rules. (Basically all the boring things.)
"No one wants to be the guy or girl that reads the rules and tells people they are doing something wrong," said Alex Fleetwood, chief executive and founder of Sensible Object.
But playing with Alexa means having to invoke her name throughout the game with the correct trigger phrase. "Alexa, which team is winning?""Alexa, ask Escape Room for a hint." "Alexa, this isn't my suitcase."
One startup is getting around that.
Novel Effect, based in Seattle, created a way for music and sound effects to play when parents are reading a classic book to their kid. No one wants to interrupt the middle of a bedtime story with Alexa commands, though. In "Where the Wild Things Are," when Max cries out to let the wild rumpus start, he's not asking Alexa for permission.
So Novel Effect is collaborating directly with Amazon to make the actual words from the books be the trigger words for sound effects (as long as you first activated the Novel Effect skill program).
Right now Novel Effect exists as an iOS app. But CEO Matt Hammersley says that when his Alexa program launches, it'll be smoother and quicker than opening up the app.
Voice over visuals
Voice assistants can replace the need to stare at a smartphone screen. The Play Impossible Gameball is a Bluetooth-connected foam outdoor ball stuffed with sensors. A smartphone app displays challenges for tossing the Gameball around, and and it keeps track of your progress and speed. Later this year, Play Impossible wants to just let Alexa keep track of your prowess.
Scout, the latest voice-recognition talking toy from Elemental Path, is scheduled to hit stores later this year. Elemental Path
Voice technology is tricky for toy companies to tackle. Parents can worry about the privacy of a toy that's always listening. And creating voice-recognition systems that understand little kid babble isn't cheap -- especially when the responses need to be safe, fresh and fun.
Take it from Elemental Path co-founder John Paul Benini. His company has been investing in this technology for three and a half years, creating several educational talking toys for kids ages 5 and up. According to Benini, Elemental Path has raised roughly $4.5 million so far, and later this year it plans to launch Scout, a $150 robot buddy programmed with a childlike curiosity that prompts it to strike up conversations with its owner.
Can Alexa show Barbie how to get down?
Mattel canceled an earlier attempt at doing voice on its own. Hello Barbie Hologram, revealed at last year's Toy Fair, was designed to be a type of personal assistant for young kids. A voice-controlled animated Barbie projection lived inside a glowing, pink speaker box. Powered by Mattel's own blend of secure software, it answered to "Hello, Barbie" and would report on the weather, set reminders, play music, give yoga lessons -- and also throw dance parties on request.
The problem? Too expensive. It was to be listed for $235, and Mattel's consumer testing found that it was too pricey for the play value, according to a company spokeswoman. It never made it to store shelves.
Leveraging Amazon's system is, of course, much more cost effective for toy companies big and small.
So perhaps Barbie may have to use Alexa to throw her next dance party.
There’s a lot to like, but Apple needs to rethink some things for 2018's iPhones.
For well over two months, my days have ended and begun with the iPhone X. Compared to older iPhones, the X feels impressively fast, slim and, with 5.8 inches of screen space, satisfyingly spacious. But as I've grown to appreciate some of its finer points, I've also discovered the traits that make me roll my eyes, gnash my teeth and occasionally erupt with a well-chosen expletive.
The funny thing is that almost all of these ire-inducing "quirks" stem from Apple's redesign of the iPhone X, which removed the home button and installed a bunch of swipes and taps to cover all navigation bases.
On one hand, Face ID and gestures prove that iPhone users can live without a home button. On the other, learning the ropes takes time, and the swipey stand-ins don't always make a lot of sense. Some iPhone X gestures feel half-baked.
So here we go, my five personal worst iPhone X navigation offenders. Stay tuned for a future piece on some of the things I truly do love about the iPhone X.
Face ID, Apple's replacement for the secure fingerprint reader, uses the iPhone X's front-facing camera to approve mobile purchases and unlock the phone.
It works by making a 3D map of your eyes, nose and mouth -- except when it doesn't. Face ID recognizes me often, but fails enough times to make me notice. For example, I have about a 50-50 success rate while wearing my polarized sunglasses.
Face ID doesn't work when your face i stuffed in a pillow. CNET
When it doesn't work is when I want it to most: as soon as I wake up in the morning. Part of the problem is biological. I'm near-sighted, which means that when I first reach for the phone while my glasses and contacts are resting in their cases, I wind up holding the phone closer to my face than the 25 to 50 centimeters that Apple recommends.
And then there's the fact that in my groggy morning state, I'm lying on my side with either one eye closed, or my face buried in my pillow.
There's no way Face ID is boring its way through that, and it's not Apple's fault.
What is Apple's fault is that the iPhone X doesn't have a satisfying backup plan to my morning squinty-eye. With Face ID, you don't get an immediate second chance to biometrically unlock the phone, not the way you do when the fingerprint scanner on a home button fails; you just tap it again.
No such luck here. You can wait some long seconds only to have to try again, or lock and unlock the phone to kickstart a new Face ID scan.
More often than not, I wind up typing in my 6-digit password, which is faster than waiting for Face ID to maybe or maybe not unlock. This gets annoying when you do it multiple times a day, every day. I'd love a biometric backup, or a faster do-over time if Face ID misses the scan the first time around.
Tip from David S.:
Regarding Face ID, you can re-drive a biometric check by "wiggling" the home bar after a failure. Just move it up and down slightly and quickly and it should re-check.
Tip from Jonathan K.:
One trick to fix some failures is to swipe up and then down on your unlock screen while holding your finger down the whole time. This allows you to unlock notifications without opening your home screen.
Bleh battery life
If you're switching from an older iPhone with battery life that can barely hobble through a single day (especially if Apple did this), the iPhone X is a fantastic upgrade. At least at first.
The iPhone X will last longer than your old iPhone, but not as long as a $1,000 handset should. James Martin/CNET
After two months, I noticed a steep battery decline. Of course your charge will take a hit every time you stream music or video, or use navigation. That's life with a phone. But even on days when I didn't engage these things, I found myself topping up the power reserves before going out for the night, unconvinced my phone would make it through the evening activities.
When you live on your phone -- texting, looking up stuff online, reading e-books -- that uncertainty makes the difference between a device you can trust and one you have to constantly manage.
This isn't just anecdotal, either. In CNET's looping-video tests, the iPhone X lasted just shy of 11.5 hours average after 9 tests. That's two hours less than the iPhone 8and iPhone 8 Plus results with the same test, and six hours less than the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (17.5 hours).
Anecdotally, it lasts longer than the iPhone 8 in real-life use, but peters out before the 8 Plus loses steam.
These time windows don't seem so short in a vacuum, but when you compare the results across the board, the iPhone X -- the most expensive mainstream phone you can buy -- drains as quickly as some midrange phones that cost less than half the price, if not faster.
To make matters more frustrating, Apple hides the iPhone X battery percentage meter; it isn't visible at a glance. Instead, you have to swipe down from the top of the phone on the right side of the notch to call up the Control Center. Only then can you keep a detailed tab on how much juice you have left.
Maps navigation shortcut only goes one way
Tap this to get back to your ongoing Google Maps navigation. Jessica Dolcourt/CNET
I use maps navigation quite a lot. When you pop out of either Google Maps or Apple Maps to do something else, the iPhone X helpfully puts a tiny blue Tic Tac around the clock, turning it into a nifty little button you can tap to pop back into the map again.
This is great, but Apple stops short. See, you can toggle from any app back into the map, but you can't toggle from the map back to what you were doing before. So if you're reading an article, you can pop into the map to check on the directions (using the shortcut) but won't be able to return to the story (no shortcut).
When you get used to pressing that shortcut button a couple dozen times during a long trip, you'll be cursing Apple that it only goes one way. Yes, there are other ways to return to a previous app (like swiping right on the bottom bezel of the screen).
The main point is that Apple is training you to tap a space to do one half of a task. Why ask you to apply a completely different muscle memory to get back? Hopefully a future version of the software will make toggling a two-way street.
By the way, the shortcut also works with the phone app (the button turns green), voice memos (red) and some third-party apps.
Is the alarm on or what?
I'm an inveterate nervous-alarm-setter, even on weekends. I just can't relax unless I know I won't oversleep (yes, I have problems).
That doesn't stop me from waking up bleary-eyed in the middle of the night second-guessing if I set the alarm for the right time, or even set it at all. I would like to be able to glance at the iPhone X and immediately see the alarm clock icon reassure me, before drifting back to sleep.
This is how it was pre-iPhone X and still is on the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Yet for some reason, Apple has decided to bury this information. You can still see it -- and your remaining battery percentage -- but you have to pull down the Control Center first.
I don't want to mess with my phone at 4am. I don't want to swipe a screen or use more brain cells than I have to. In short, I don't want to do anything that could wake me up and make falling back asleep harder than it needs to be.
But the biggest problem is…
The first iPhone was so beloved because -- in a world of hard-to-use phones that acted like mini computers with file systems, keyboards and styluses -- it was simple. Anyone could pick it up and figure it out.
10 years on, you can't use the iPhone X without a tutorial, which Apple does provide. Things that should be easy are complex. For example, don't you swipe up on the camera icon to open it from the lock screen? No, you hard-press and then release it, a change from the previous version, or swipe right.
In other words, you have to know how to interact with the button -- which has changed from the previous version -- or know how to gesture, in order to open it. That's not a good user experience, especially for a company that's made simplicity and ease of use its watchword.
Ten years on, the iPhone X is rife with hidden gestures you just have to know, including powering down the phone. Lexy Savvides/CNET
A few more examples. Apple's also changed the buttons you press to take a screenshot and power down the phone. If you mess this up, you might find yourself accidentally calling 911.
You have to know which side of the Notch to swipe for the quick-controls in Control Center (the right side) and which to swipe for your notifications (the left). And now, you double-press the lock button to finish installing an app and hold it down to fire up Siri.
While these changes are absolutely learnable, and even become second-nature over time, the iPhone X's navigability is a far cry from the logical layout that made the iPhone stand out from every other phone of its day.
It's not that I wish the iPhone X reverted to the stripped-down style of the original iPhone. It's that Apple, in paving the way with some new technologies, had the opportunity to rethink how we use a phone, and wound up making it more complicated to use -- not less.
