Apple announces their long awaited anniversary edition of the iPhone. The phone is visibly missing its signature circular home button, replaced with a swipe up gesture.

Featuring an all glass front and back design, it hails to be the most durable glass ever in a smartphone. The device comes with an edge-to-edge 5.8-inch Super Retina OLED display at a million-to-one contrast ratio, as well as HDR display supports Dolby Vision and HDR10. The addition of True Tone dynamically adjusts the white balance of the display to match the surrounding light for a more natural viewing experience.

It runs on the new A11 Bionic chip, supporting wireless charging and is water and dust resistant. The A11 Bionic is a six-core CPU with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion. It also integrates a GPU, engineered to render graphics 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. The neural engine in A11 Bionic is purpose-built for machine learning, augmented reality apps and immersive 3D games.

Along with the release, Apple introduces Face ID – a biometric security feature leveraging the TrueDepth Camera for unlocking, authenticating and making payments. All saved facial information is protected by the secure enclave to keep data extremely secure, while all of the processing is done on-device and not in the cloud to protect user privacy. Face ID only unlocks iPhone X when customers look at it and is designed to prevent spoofing by photos or masks.

The device sports dual 12-megapixel cameras, with dual optical image stabilisation (OIS), aperture values standing at F1.8 on the wide angle and F2.4 on the telephoto lens. The camera features advanced pixel processing, wide colour capture, faster autofocus in low light and better HDR photos. A new quad LED True Tone Flash offers twice the uniformity of light and includes Slow Sync, resulting in more uniformly lit backgrounds and foregrounds. The front sports a 7-megapixel TrueDepth camera that enables Face ID.

The iPhone X is also designed for AR capabilities, with the TrueDepth camera allowing for games and apps to be more immersive. The camera delivers 4K videos up to 60fps and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. Portrait mode and Portrait Lighting features allows users to capture studio lighting effects. Apple also introduced Animoji, allowing users to send emojis that mirrors their facial expression.

Apple also announces the AirPower mat for wireless charging of iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods simultaneously. The AirPower mat is only available next year.

The handset will be available in silver and space gray in 64GB and 256GB configurations. iPhone X comes at a starting price of US$999. It will be available for pre-order beginning Friday, October 27 in more than 55 countries and territories; in stores beginning Friday, November 3. No local availability or pricing has been announced yet.