We’d love to bring you a full review of the exciting new iPhone X camera, which hit the shops today.
- Update: we got a working iPhone X, here’s our iPhone X camera review
Sadly, the device we have received in the post today seems to be somewhat of a dud.
After setting up the iPhone, including the jazzy new Face Recognition, I couldn’t wait to give the new camera a go. Would it be all it promises to be?
I launched the camera app from the home screen, only to be met with a black screen – as if something was covering the camera’s lens(es). A quick look at the back of the phone revealed that was definitely not the case, but nothing I did could get a picture to appear in the frame.
Tapping the zoom button to activate the iPhone X’s second 2x zoom camera did nothing either. Feeling pretty confident that this could not be a problem with the brand spanking new iPhone and I had only moments earlier released from the box, I tried a few other steps to get it working.
I tried force quitting the app, and restarting it. That didn’t work. I tried switching the phone off and on again (yes, really). Next, I tried connecting the phone to iTunes to make sure I had the latest version of iOS. This will do the trick, I thought. What seemed like several hours (probably in reality more like 20 minutes), the camera still wasn’t working.
Factory Restore
Time for a factory restore. Another eternity passed by waiting for it to finish restoring, and I went through the entire setup process again. This will definitely be the fix I thought… but no, still a black screen. Weirdly enough, I seem to be able to get the 2x camera to work when in “Time-Lapse” mode – still, I’d prefer to have a fully working camera if at all possible.
It gets worse. I thought the front-facing camera was working – at least I could console myself with a few selfies. While it appears to work for standard Photo mode, the much-lauded new “Portrait” mode shows nothing but a blur. At this point, I’m trying not to get offended that the iPhone has decided it can’t deal with taking photos of my face.
As a last-ditch attempt to double check what the issue could be, I have installed a third-party camera app. In this case, Camera+, which appears to let me access the camera – hurrah! But, it doesn’t let me access things like the second camera, or indeed the new Portrait mode. On the upside, this suggests that it could be a software issue, and not a hardware one – in other words, something which could be fixable via a software update.
So – that’s the end of my very brief review of the iPhone X – it doesn’t work. It looks like I might not be the only one facing this particular conundrum – a quick scan of Twitter reveals a few Tweets suggesting similar problems. Given that the iPhone X has only officially gone on sale today, there could well be more who face the same problems.
Let us know if you’ve got a working iPhone X … I’ll swap ya 😉