Absolutely loathe face ID.
Love the X and the gestural interface, but Face ID has really tainted my experience. Makes the phone not a joy to use, but more of a chore.
Touch ID always worked for me, I could unlock it behind my head if I wanted to.
If I'm in the sun, wearing sunglasses, at a weird angle etc… it fails 95% of the time.
I should not have to adapt to using a device, it should adapt to how I want to use it.
If they don't bring in the in-dispaly Touch ID that some of the Chinese phones are already doing for the X.2, I might have to seriously consider leaving the ecosystem, which is crazy for a fanboy like me to say.
I was quite happy with Face ID in the beginning but over time it started to annoy me more and more. I also have it since six months now.
- Face ID is not only slower than Touch ID, it sometimes takes ages when it doesn't find my face and it definitely fails more often than Touch ID ever did. I taught Face ID a lot and it knows all my faces, for example with food in my mouth – no problem. Still it sometimes completely refuses to recognise me or it takes way too long to find me so that I would have easily typed in my six-digit pin code by the time it finally unlocks. This disadvantage is outwaying the advantage of not having to have my fingerprint read by far. Only very rarely I'm happy that I don't need my finger – when I unlock my phone with my nose in the winter - The minimum distance requirements are way too high. Often I use my phone lying in bed and naturally hold my phone quite close to my face. Face ID would NEVER work then, I always have to hold my phone far away from my face like a farsighted grandpa. Super annoying. I hope Apple manage to get the minimum distance way down in the next iteration even though that wouldn't help me with my iPhone X now since I'm not going to buy a new phone every or every other year. I don't think it can be solved through software because it probably needs new lenses that allow for wider angles. - One of my two shades doesn't work with Face ID. That is understandable since it is an optical identification process but still, Touch ID doesn't care what you have on your eyes. - Gone are the days where you could just unlock your phone when it lies flat on the table. Face ID doesn't allow for those angles to work. Having to pick up your phone every time and hold it in front of my face like a self-indulged Snapchat teenager makes me feel like an idiot that needs to obey a machine. Not Apple-like at all, the machine should work for me, not the other way around.
That all said, Face ID is not terrible. It's just not as good as Touch ID but I love the bigger screen-to-frame ratio in the iPhone X. I just wish they would have figured out fingerprint readers under the display earlier and more reliably, respectively.
So frustrating that after a false read (I'm often looking away at my phone when it's doing the initial read, either I don't orient it in time or I'm multitasking) it often defaults to the pin entry (I can't seem to pick up the pattern, maybe after a period of time it prompts the pin code instead of letting you try to swipe up again), and there's no way to re-scan unless you first cancel the pin, then swipe up again. When the pin screen is in place, touching the lock doesn't prompt another read, and swiping up doesn't trigger a read. Incredibly frustrating for something I do a hundred times a day. Anybody else experiencing this same annoyance? Either way, it's not a problem with FaceID, which seems to work great, but a problem with the UI implementation.
If I’m not looking at it during the initial read, the moment I look back it auto-re-reads and unlocks.
It's kind of funny, when I went to replicate this extremely frustrating thing before I posted, it worked flawlessly lol. There must be a timing component or something, where after 10 min a failed read defaults to the pin screen, hard to figure out the pattern. But it's happened again many many time since I posted. Either way, there should be a way to re-trigger the face read without having to cancel out of the pin screen and re-swipe up from the bottom.
Outside of this UI frustration, the actual Face ID has worked incredibly well. Almost never falters, even with thick rimmed sunglasses, and even when brushing my teeth, which I was surprised by.
This issue, the difficulty of getting to the fucking control panel, and difficulty cancelling out apps (sick of facebook spying on me and targeting adds based on what it picks up off the microphone) make the X kind of frustrating overall. Which is too bad, because otherwise it's an amazing phone.
. . . and there's no way to re-scan unless you first cancel the pin, then swipe up again. When the pin screen is in place, touching the lock doesn't prompt another read, and swiping up doesn't trigger a read. . . .
Yes, I would like to be able to tap on the padlock to try FaceID again. It was the first thing I tried after a failure, so it may be instinctive.
Comments
- Face ID is not only slower than Touch ID, it sometimes takes ages when it doesn't find my face and it definitely fails more often than Touch ID ever did. I taught Face ID a lot and it knows all my faces, for example with food in my mouth – no problem. Still it sometimes completely refuses to recognise me or it takes way too long to find me so that I would have easily typed in my six-digit pin code by the time it finally unlocks.
This disadvantage is outwaying the advantage of not having to have my fingerprint read by far. Only very rarely I'm happy that I don't need my finger – when I unlock my phone with my nose in the winter
- The minimum distance requirements are way too high. Often I use my phone lying in bed and naturally hold my phone quite close to my face. Face ID would NEVER work then, I always have to hold my phone far away from my face like a farsighted grandpa. Super annoying. I hope Apple manage to get the minimum distance way down in the next iteration even though that wouldn't help me with my iPhone X now since I'm not going to buy a new phone every or every other year. I don't think it can be solved through software because it probably needs new lenses that allow for wider angles.
- One of my two shades doesn't work with Face ID. That is understandable since it is an optical identification process but still, Touch ID doesn't care what you have on your eyes.
- Gone are the days where you could just unlock your phone when it lies flat on the table. Face ID doesn't allow for those angles to work. Having to pick up your phone every time and hold it in front of my face like a self-indulged Snapchat teenager makes me feel like an idiot that needs to obey a machine. Not Apple-like at all, the machine should work for me, not the other way around.
That all said, Face ID is not terrible. It's just not as good as Touch ID but I love the bigger screen-to-frame ratio in the iPhone X. I just wish they would have figured out fingerprint readers under the display earlier and more reliably, respectively.