How do you like it and what did you have before?
A little better update now that I've actually used the phone a bit more.
Phone has an iCarez 3D Double Defense edge to edge screen protector on it, and a frosted/white Tozo (identical to Peel) ultrathin case on it.
-I really like how heavy and thick it is. It feels so nice in the hand.
-Build quality is really, really solid. No camera rattles, no sharp edges, no nicks or scuffs, buttons feel solid.
-The silver phone looks like a piece of high end jewelry. Never realized the silver back was lighter colored and more iridescent than my 8 before it.
-Face ID is great and my understanding is it will get faster as it learns, but there's definitely room for improvement with Face ID 2 coming, at least in my use case, not needing to lean over a desk to unlock it (yes I did my Face ID setups at different angles and used both appearance options - still need to lean over a bit). Don't miss Touch ID one bit.
-Tap to wake is the second greatest thing behind Face ID (hate using raise to wake, so have always had to press a button to wake my phone up)
-Don't really care for the fact different color pixels on OLEDs use different amounts of energy, makes you conscious of how you are using your phone (I like a plain white background which is the worst of the worst with OLED).
-Blacks are great, but the other potential issues/pitfalls don't really make OLED worth it, a high PPI LCD would be just as good IMO and wouldn't carry the energy use-case penalties OLED does. Nor would LCDs have bad tint shift, but this OLED example I have is pretty good in terms of this and it's not too bad.
-Saturation and colors pop slightly more than my 8 which I wasn't expecting since all new iPhones are calibrated to P3 gamut.
-Brightness is same as 8, as expected.
-Signal strength on Verizon, at least so far, seems fine with the Intel modem. Jury is out on which one is better.
-The screen is a really nice, accurate white when looking straight on, but I still would prefer a color temp slider to cool it off just a tad - the whites when viewed slightly off axis are ideal for me personally. I just can't see the screens getting warmer than this though; I've now owned 4 (the three I had plus my wife's) and looked at countless display models and they are all calibrated pretty consistently at least; if we are at 6500K white point now as Apple claims, which is also claimed to be color accurate, we should finally be done moving warmer and warmer after doing it for the last 5 years with each release. I'd like to see it go back the other way a little, or at least give me a color temp slider - color filters are a poor substitute since they apply a filter over everything, not just a white point adjustment. My 6 had the best color temp IMO.
-The notch doesn't bother me, in fact I actually like it - I don't like hiding it with a black background.
-Pulling control center down for battery percentage is stupid.
-App switcher from the bottom of the screen is sort of meh, don't really like that.
-Too early to tell with the battery but I'm trying to be more conservative with how I use the phone being that it is new. Seems good though; sitting at 97% at 1:30 PM, been off the charger since 6:30 this morning (white background but low brightness and not using it too much).
-Camera? Don't care, haven't used it much yet.
-I think the right price for this is $850; I do think it's better than phones before it and worth a small premium, but not a grand.
