I'm always looking forward to these annual updates despite not planning to upgrade. It's always interesting to hear the new features to boast about as they get stranger as they run out of innovations. For example, those three rear cameras. It sounds silly to my ears. Is this a phone or a camera?

Many have been mesmerized by Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, he is the complete package: wealthy, genius, handsome, and charming. Not only that, he also wields the most sophisticated and powerful man-made armored suit. In sum, he is probably what many men would aspire to be.

Central to Mr. Stark’s jet-set lifestyle is J.A.R.V.I.S (stands for Just A Rather Very Intelligent System), an artificially intelligent digital personal assistant which helps Mr. Stark’s run his multi-billions businesses and assists him in designing his iron suits. More than just intelligent, J.A.R.V.I.S is able to converse and understand Mr. Stark and execute his commands to control everything from his iron suit down to his personal computer. So much for a science-fiction movie.

Today, not just in science-fiction, one can actually get a taste of living up the Tony Stark lifestyle by having a J.A.R.V.I.S-like digital personal assistant. At the forefront of such technology is Apple’s Siri with speech recognition feature that can be utilized to control, activate, and deactivate different features of Apple devices such as iPhone. More recently, Apple has brought this technology to a new a height. Catching-up on the trends of internet of things (IoT) and smart-home appliances, Apple launched HomeKit, an iOS framework that allows users to configure and control their smart-home appliances through Apple devices. Along with the launch of HomeKit, a number of third party vendors release smart-home appliances that are compatible with iOS.

If you combine Apple’s HomeKit framework, smart-home appliances and Siri, you will find yourself closer than ever to having a real-life J.A.R.V.I.S that not only controls your phone but also your house. One cool yet simple HomeKit device you could try and play around with is the Phillips Hue Lights. The hue light is able to emit different shades of colors of lighting. If you install a number of these hue lights together in a room, you can produce a particular lighting effect to create a certain ambience and help you ease into a particular mood.

In order to control the hue lights using Siri through your iPhone, you have to connect your iPhone and the hue lights to an intermediary device called Phillip Hue Bridge. You can actually use any of your Apple devices (iPod, iPad, and even Apple Watch) to control the hue lights as long as they are connected to the hue bridge and iCloud. Phillip’s in-built software also allows you to assign the hue lights into different groups for control purposes. You can then put lights that are placed in the same room under a group and control them simultaneously.

Here are some cool commands you could try out with the set-up:

“Turn on/off the lights in the living room.”
"Turn the living room lights all the way up."
"Make the lights blue in the bedroom."
"Hey Siri, set my reading scene."

You can now start living out your Iron Man dream!

The face ID function seem cool but it is not as practical as it seem everytime you have to unlock the phone first, then look into it before you unlock it or you can activate the iphone lift up function (i not sure of the exact name) and look into it to unlock (this way you don't have to press additional one button) But the ''lift up function'' is not that accurate and will unlock your phone with slight moment to the phone. For example, htc m8/e8 system of swipe up (when the phone is lock) to unlock the phone is more convenience, Anyway for the cost, everytime Apple introduce a more ''premium'' product, such as iphone 6 compared to iphone6 plus, the price increase significantly. So for iPhone X, the price increase significantly from iphone 8 and iphone8 plus and overally i think that it is too costly for a phone, even though i have always used high end phone. Overall its a very nice and appealing phone, but i think that it may not be practical to buy it at this stage of the time and considering the price.

After using the iPhone X for almost half a year, I'm still longing for the home button with touch ID. Although the touch ID home button on other iPhone models isn't flawless in the sense that a wet finger will not play well with the touch ID recognition, it still offers the great advantage of unlocking the phone by just lifting your finger as opposed to having to position your head almost directly over the iPhone X front camera (Face ID); especially in situation when your phone is affixed, mounted to a holder, or simply just lying on a table. Not to deny the fact that doing away with the home button frees up a tremendous amount of screen real estate, I'm just not quite ready to trade that off with the tactile feel of a button and a click to return to home screen. Call me old school if you want but I'll choose a good old volume knob over a touchscreen control on a stereo any time of the day...

Will the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus stand up to the iPhone X, Google Pixel 2 and others? Are they worth an upgrade from the Galaxy S8 and older phones?