CUPERTINO, California - Apple Inc unveiled its most important new iPhone in years to take on competitors ranging from Samsung Electronics Co to Google to Chinese smartphone makers.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook showed off the iPhone X with an edge-to-edge screen during an event at the company's new $5 billion headquarters on Tuesday. Cook pronounced the name "ten", but it's written as "X".

Coming a decade after the original model, iPhone X is Apple's first major redesign since 2014. It starts at $999 and comes in 64 GB and 256 GB storage versions. Pre-orders start on Oct. 27, and the phone will be available beginning Nov 3, the company said.

The iPhone X's almost $1,000 price is potentially a psychological threshold for consumers that Apple will try to overcome with augmented reality features and other new technology.

"With expected innovations around AR, wireless charging, viewable screen size, OLED and more, the next iPhone is clearly poised for its largest upgrade cycle yet," Ben Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities USA Inc, wrote in a note to investors before the event.

In China, once the biggest growth driver for Apple, the company has seen its revenue slide for several quarters as users switched to domestic phones from companies such as Xiaomi and Huawei. In the second quarter, Apple was the fifth-largest smartphone vendor in China, with a market share of 8 percent.

Here are some of the iPhone X's features:

Design: Almost the entire front of the phone is screen, save for a cutout at the top for the earpiece, selfie camera and sensors. The sides

have a continuous stainless steel band and the back is glass.

Edge-to-edge screen: With no bezels and no borders on the top and bottom, the focus is on the new screen: an OLED display that more accurately reproduces colors and makes content crisper.

Face ID: There's a 3-D facial recognition sensor instead of a fingerprint scanner for unlocking the phone, approving payments and creating animated emojis based on facial expressions.

No home button: Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to quit apps or open multitasking.

Battery power: The new phone lasts two hours longer than the iPhone 7.

Processors: The model has a new chip called the A11 Bionic, with motion sensors and other features optimized for Apple's ARKit augmented reality software. There's also an Apple-designed graphics processing unit that the company said is 30 percent faster than previous GPUs in iPhones. There's a new chip Apple calls Neural Engine for running machine learning algorithms, a popular type of AI software.

Cameras: The rear cameras are vertically rather than horizontally aligned, for better augmented reality apps. A "TrueDepth" camera system includes the front camera, 3-D sensor and infrared sensor.

New charging: The phone has inductive charging. Put it on a wireless charging pad, and it will fuel up the battery.

Bloomberg - China Daily