THIS is why iMessage on iPhone X is awesome.

What's up, guys? Eric here from TechEssodeTV, and today, we're taking a look at iMessage. Now, for years, iPhone people have told me that iMessage is the best app ever, and it's really the only reason why they could never switch to Android, is because iMessage is just so good. And when they told me that, I'd always ask the question, what's so good about it? Why is it such a great application that you can't switch to Android just because of this application? And the overwhelming response would basically just be, it just works. Well, to which I kind of think to myself, so does every other messaging application I've ever used. It just works. And they never really got into detail about why iMessage is so cool. So I went out and bought my first ever iPhone, the iPhone X, and I dug into the iMessage app to find every cool feature that's available to see what it was about this app that made it that iPhone users wouldn't switch to Android just because of this one application. I just want to throw out a quick disclaimer. If you're one of those people that only uses messaging applications for sending text messages and nothing more, you don't send emojis, you don't send images, you don't send GIFs, videos and files, nothing like that, then iMessage doesn't offer you anything that any other messaging app doesn't already offer you. So if you're one of those people, you can go ahead and leave the video now. But on your way out, go ahead and smack that like button because that just saved you a ton of time. All right. Now, the disclaimer is out of the way. Let's go ahead and open up iMessage and get started. So when you first open the application, it looks like a basic messaging application. Nothing special here at all. And if I were to type the word hello, so I'm just going to hit that type of hello. If I tap this blue button here, that's just going to send the message like any other messaging application. But if I 3D touch this arrow, I can send this message a bunch of different ways. So if I tap this slam effect, then the message when someone else gets this message and they have iMessage, it's going to come in with that slam effect where it just comes in and slams down like that. That's how they're going to see the message appears. So if I tap this blue arrow here, you'll see that's how the message comes in with that slam effect right there. I'm going to go ahead and hit hello again and we'll see what the other effects are. So the next one here is loud and that's going to make it basically come up and wiggle a bit and then gentle. It starts off really small and then gets a little bit bigger. And then finally, you have invisible ink. That's one's pretty cool. If I go ahead and send this, you'll see that they can't actually see what the message is. And it's not until they wipe across the message that they can actually see what the message says. And then after a few seconds, it's going to go back to this hidden view again, where it's kind of like this little sparkle effect. Now this also works for images. So if I sent an image, the entire image would have this kind of sparkle effect on it and they'd have to wipe away the whole thing to see the image. So that's it for effects that change how a message appears. But there's even more. So I'm going to go ahead, hit hello again, 3D touch this, and then I'm going to tap screen. Now this changes what the entire messaging application does. And let me turn the volume on here so you guys can actually hear what's going on. I'm going to turn the volume up all the way there so you guys can actually hear what the effect is. Because these effects that you're about to see, they have sound effects that go along with them and they also have a vibration effect. So if I tap this and send this, you can hear that it kind of echoed the hello message and had them pop up all over the place. So that's one of the effects. And there's a bunch more. So let's go ahead and go through them here. So that was echo. If I swipe over, you get spotlight. This one's actually pretty cool. I like how this one sounds. So there's that. That's pretty neat. Let's go ahead and tap again. See what the next one is. This is balloons coming up. All right. So that was just the sound of like balloons filling up and kind of rubbing together. And now we get confetti. So it kind of pops and then confetti flies down. That's pretty neat. The next one is a heart that blows up. This next one is a laser effect. And we have fireworks. The next one is a shooting star. There you go. And it seems like that sound effect was kind of off. I feel like that kind of chime sound should have happened when the star got brighter, but it didn't. So maybe that's just a bug that'll get fixed in a later update. And all the way at the end, you get the last one, which is this celebration sparkler effect. That's pretty cool. Now, something that you guys can't obviously see from the video is that the phone is actually vibrating going along with the different effects. And it's different than the vibrating motor that you get in any Android device. The vibrating motor used on iPhones, Apple calls it taptic feedback, and it just feels very different. It's kind of hard to explain. I mean, I guess it is kind of like a tapping sensation that happens on the phone. I mean, it's it's just it's very different than the vibration you get with a regular motor in any other phone. And it makes for a really cool experience when receiving a message that has all these different effects. And it's one of those things where if you have a friend that has an iPhone, just have them send one of those messages, hold the phone in your hand and just see for yourself how the vibration feels. It's actually really cool. And I think that the the celebration, the very last one I showed you is one of the coolest one in the fireworks. Those are really kind of the coolest for the vibration effects. The rest of them are kind of neat, but I think those two really highlight how cool the vibration effects are. So that's it for different ways that you can modify a message before you send it. Now it's time to take a look and to see what other types of things you could send. So if you tap this little store icon here, this is where you get to your emojis and a bunch of other things. So if I kind of took this up to me, you'll see that there's an emoji I can animate my eyebrows. It's it's animating to my mouth as well. You can see his mouth is moving. And you know, this is you know, you guys have all seen emojis by now, I'm sure. So you can also hit this record button and you can record 10 seconds worth of audio and obviously an emoji kind of action going on there. And then when you hit stop for 10 seconds worth of audio and obviously an emoji, right? And then you could send it. But what's nice about this is it actually sends us a regular gift to anyone who doesn't have an iPhone. So if I wanted to send this to someone who has a Galaxy Note eight, for example, they'd still be able to get it. It would just show up as a gift and the the audio would still be in there as well. So that's it's a pretty neat thing. I kind of like emojis. I know this seems to be kind of a polarizing feature. I mean, some people seem to just really hate emojis and they hate anyone who likes emojis. So if you're one of those people, I'm sorry, I kind of like them. So I guess you can hate on me for that. Anyways, next up, we have this digital touch feature. Now what this does is allows you to send a few different things. One, you can kind of draw around on it and you can change the color and you can draw different things. And what this will do is when you send this, it'll show that drawing real time to whoever you send it to. And that's kind of neat. Other things you can do are tap to make these little circle things and you can change colors as you go and tap a bunch of different things. And then with these tapping circles ones, those send automatically once you're done tapping. So what that means is I can't tap a bunch of circles and then draw because what this just did, if I go back here, that sent the tapped circles. And then when I started drawing, it just automatically sent the circles and then the drawing started a new message. So you can't kind of mix and match these things, which is a little disappointing. Something else you can do is tap with two fingers to make these little lips appear. And depending on where you put your two fingers, the lips will align with them. So there's that. And then again, once you're done tapping, it's going to automatically send those as well. Another one is if you hold with two fingers, you'll see a little heartbeat. And then if you let go, it'll send it or you can drag down and it breaks the heart and then it'll send that animation. So you see the heart beating and then it's going to break in a second as well. So there's the break. And then the last thing you can do is force touch or 3D touch. And this little fireball appears and you can kind of animate it moving around the screen. And then that will send, whoops, that will send as well. So I guess this is what it looks like if you're receiving it, right? You get that little fireball moving around and that's that. Something to point out really quick is that if I change these different colors here, the lips and the fireball don't change color at all. The fireball is always going to be this red color and the lips are always going to be this kind of purpley pink color. So it doesn't matter what colors you pick here. Those are just going to be what they are. You can't change that. These colors only affect the little circles and also the drawing lines. That's the only thing that these colors affect. Another thing you can do with digital touch is tap this little record icon and that's going to bring up your camera. Then you can tap here to switch to your rear camera. Tap again to switch back to the front camera. I can tap to take a picture and then I can draw on it. I can add some kissy face things and I can tap to add circles. Normally you can tap to add circles. Let me try to change it. There we go. So you can tap to add circles and then obviously you already saw there's a little fireball there and all these things kind of animate on there. So when I send that, you'll see that it's going to come through and animate all of it together. So if you wanted to use a bunch of different types of effects in one message, the only way you're going to be able to do that is by taking a picture and then animating on top of the picture, which is fine. I mean, I guess, I guess you could do that. Maybe take a picture of a black background if you wanted it to be a black background and animate a few different things. You can do that. And then let's go back here and take a look at the video part of it. So if you record a video, you're going to have 10 seconds of recording and then it's the same deal. You can tap to do circles. You can draw lines. And this is obviously you can move around and film different things while you're drawing all this stuff on there. But after the 10 seconds, that's going to finish, you're going to have 10 seconds of recording. And then it's the same deal. You can tap to do circles, you can draw lines. And I think you guys get the point. So that's going to play through that 10 seconds. I could send that and then that'll show up in the other person's message. And as you saw, it'll have the audio on it and it'll have all the different animations as well. The next feature here are GIFs. So this is obviously I can just kind of scroll through here and see a bunch of different ones, try to find one that I think is appropriate for me to send for the given situation. Or I could just tap find images and I could say, you know, OK, here we go, laugh. Or I could type something custom in and see a bunch of people laughing and find something that I think can be pretty funny to put into to a message. Sounds pretty basic. We've all seen GIF keyboards before, but this is all just kind of built in nicely into iMessage. The next option at the bottom is from Apple Music. Now, this allows you to do is send a song that you recently listened to to a friend. So if I went and tapped this song, it's going to put in the message and I could send it and that's going to send right over to whoever I sent that to. And if they also have an iPhone and iMessage and they have Apple Music as well, they have that subscription service, then they can go ahead and tap this play button and it'll actually play the song from right within iMessage, which is pretty cool. And the same thing works for YouTube videos, too. If I sent a YouTube video, I'd actually be able to play the video right from within iMessage. So that's it for built in applications that come with iMessage. However, if you install other applications, like if I scroll over here, I've got Google Maps here, Pandora, Realtor.com and a few other things. Just by installing Google Maps, Pandora, et cetera, it automatically populates these options here in iMessage. I don't I didn't have to set this up. I didn't have to install special iMessage versions of these applications. They just support iMessage and it all just gets brought in automatically. So if I wanted to send a Pandora song to somebody, that functionality is built in right here. If I wanted to send them an address, that functionality is built in right there. If I wanted to send them a link to a house I've been looking at recently, again, the functionality is just built right in. So anytime you install a new application, go ahead and check an iMessage and see if that application shows up at the bottom for you to quickly send things to friends. Now, if you scroll all the way to the end, there's going to be this little more option here. And what this allows you to do is rearrange the order that the OK, I can just. There we go. OK, so that allows you to rearrange the order that they show up at the bottom. So that's kind of neat. And then you can also toggle different ones on and off, like if I don't want to be sending you know, any maps things or Pandora or Realtor dot com, whatever, I can just shut those off and then those aren't going to show up on the bottom anymore. Those are going to be taken out. Now, if you wanted to download iMessage specific applications, applications that are more like just plugins that go directly into iMessage and they don't have their own dedicated app outside of iMessage, then that's when you go to this little store icon here, you tap visit store and all of these are applications made specific for iMessage. Now, a lot of these are little sticker packs that are animated and then there's also a bunch of games in here. So let me show you a sticker pack first. This is one of the ones I downloaded. It's a smiley sticker pack. This one was free. Pretty basic. But as you can see, all of these smiley faces are animated. And if I tapped one of them and sent it, it would send this little animated smiley face, which is pretty cool. And what's also great about this is I could tap the smiley face and I can apply one of these effects to it as well. So I can go ahead and do that and send that and that just kind of slams in there with the wink face. So that's pretty neat that you can kind of combine effects by doing all this together. That's pretty nice. And speaking of that, let me go back here really quick to digital touch because you guys saw that there was that message icon thing as well. I can't 3D touch this to send a special message or send this in a special way. This just sends as it is. I can't add any other special effects to it. As far as games in iMessage go, I'd say one of the most notable games is Game Pigeon. And the reason is because Game Pigeon gives you a ton of different games that you can play with someone else who has iMessage. Everything from Battleship to paintball to checkers, really, there's just a ton of different games here and they're all turn based. So basically, if I tap this sea battle one, for example, this is basically Battleship and I can send that off and I can tap the play button here. I can then arrange my battleships around so I can go ahead and move them. And then I click start, it would go to the opponent or whoever I sent the message to. They would move their ships around. And then you basically get this open platform here and it literally works just like Battleship. You tap which squares you want to try to hit. You tap go and then it'll show an animation and there will be some smoke and stuff. If you successfully hit the other person's ship and then you'll know when you sink all their ships. First person to sink all the other person's ships wins. Now, to be fair, there are a bunch of games that already do this that you don't need iMessage for like words with friends, for example, allows you to play Scrabble with anybody. And again, that's a turn based thing that goes back and forth. And there's a messaging part of that built right in as well. So you don't necessarily need iMessage to do these types of things. But iMessage does make it a bit easier to have one application that you come to to do all these different things. And then you get a bunch of different games, too. You don't need a bunch of different applications that you need to jump back and forth between. It's all contained in just one app. So let's take a look at some of the more basic features. If I 3D touch this microphone icon, I can start recording audio. And as you can see there, it's actually showing the waveform. So when I pause, you'll see that it stopped recording. And now you just kind of see the waveform there. And once I'm done recording, I can just let go and then send that message. And it's going to send that audio clip to somebody. So if there's a situation where I don't have time to type out a long message, they maybe they asked a ton of different questions and I don't have time to call them and talk on the phone, but I just want to send them a really quick message. This is a great way to do that. Another nice feature is that if you send an emoji, like just a single emoji by itself, then it actually shows up substantially larger than if I were to send the same emoji along with some text. So if I went back to some ABC text here and I said, you know, whoops, can't do swipe on this one. Hello. Right. So if I did that and I sent that and obviously you could see the emoji is substantially smaller. So when you send just emojis by themselves, they're much bigger, which is kind of cool. And then same thing. If you receive emojis, it's the same deal. Even if someone sends you an emoji and they don't have an iPhone or using an Android phone, you'll still get a much larger emoji. If all they sent was an emoji or a handful of emojis, you can send a series of emojis. As long as there's no text, you get a larger emoji. If you double tap on a message, you can actually get a quick response. So I can go ahead and tap this haha thing. And then the other person who sent it, we'll get this little haha bubble that'll pop up and then you can double tap it again and you can actually change it. And then that'll change it on the other person's iPhone as well. And we'll switch to now two exclamation points. So that's a, that's another nice little feature. Another thing you can do is send PDFs and other file types. It doesn't just have to be images and videos that you can, you can send pretty much anything through iMessage, which is pretty nice. And as long as the other person has iMessage too, they can go ahead and interact with those files and download them and do all that kind of stuff as well. And speaking of videos and photos, iMessage sends messages not through regular multimedia messaging, but through just a different type of messaging. It's very similar to like sending a video over Facebook versus a regular text message. And the significance there is that you can send a much larger videos and pictures and you don't get that awful compression that you'll sometimes get if you're sending it from like, let's say you're sending it from two Android phones with just the basic texting applications. You're probably going to have videos crunched down. They're going to look kind of grainy and not so great. So what iMessage does is it sends the videos over your wireless network and you get a much more crisp looking video. Another thing you can do is if you tap this information icon here at the top, you can hide alerts. So let's say you're on a group message, like maybe it's just like this big family group message and there's like a dozen people on it and everyone's just constantly commenting and you're at work or something and you don't have time to read all these alerts or to have your phone keep buzzing, you can just tap hide alerts for a specific conversation and only that conversation will have the alerts hidden. And then later when you have time to kind of unhide and actually look through the messages, you can just change the toggle again and you'll be able to get notifications again. The other thing you can do here is send read receipts. You can toggle that on and off individually for each person. And this is good for if you don't want somebody to know that you read or that you saw their message. Then you can go ahead and keep this toggle turned off so that no one knows you, uh, that you, that you've seen the message yet and they're not waiting for your reply or they send like other messages saying like, Hey, I message told me that you saw my message. You know, are you ignoring me or whatever? Blah, blah, blah. Yes, I am ignoring you. And that's why I have this toggle turned off these, uh, this images and attachments. These two icons here. If I were to send a bunch of images to someone or they were to send images to me or attachments like I was mentioning earlier, like they sent a PDF or something like that, I wouldn't have to scroll through the message to see all of that. It would all show up here. So images, I'd see every image they ever sent me and vice versa, any image I ever sent them and then attachments, same deal, anything I sent to them, anything they sent to me, that's all going to show up under these two sections here. You can see here that I could also send my current location to somebody and I can also share my location. The difference between sending your current location and sharing your location is when you send your current location, it'll send where you currently are at the moment you tap that thing. It's going to use your GPS, find it where you are, and it's going to send that to the person one time. If I tap share my location, it'll share it for an hour, share it to the end of the day or share it indefinitely so the person can track where I'm going. So let's say I'm going to meet somebody at a park or maybe I'm going to like Six Flags or something like that and I want them to be able to find me. I can share it for an hour, I can share it to the end of the day and then whenever they get to Six Flags, they're already going to know where I'm at and they can just head right over and find me. They don't need to keep texting back and forth, oh, we're by this thing that looks like this other thing and you know, trying to figure that kind of stuff out. They can just find me right away with the GPS and get close enough that we could probably be within earshot of each other. Lastly, up at the top, we have a shortcut for FaceTime or for making a regular call. And if you tap this arrow in the corner, that takes you to the contact profile where you can change anything you want. If the message you received is an important one and you don't have time to respond to it now, but you want to be reminded about it later, you can just have Siri help you with that by saying something like, hey Siri, remind me to respond to this message tomorrow at 12 p.m. So at 12 p.m. tomorrow, I'm going to get this reminder here and if I tap the bubble, then it's going to take me right into the message and allow me to quickly respond to them. If you're on the main messages screen, you can 3D touch a message to see your recent messages and then swipe up and you'll be able to add a quick reply here and these quick replies are automatically generated. So as you can see, the last message was want to grab lunch so I can quickly respond, yeah, no or good. I don't know why good would be an appropriate response to this. So obviously it's not perfect, but it does give you some suggestions here and if you tap custom, it actually just takes you into the message and then you can just start typing whatever you want to send to them. This next feature isn't limited to just iMessage, this also works in other applications where you pull up your keyboard, but if you 3D touch the keyboard, you can actually move the cursor around the keyboard and navigate to the exact letter you need so that you can go ahead and quickly fix it and then send the message after that. Now right about now, I'm sure there's a bunch of diehard Android fans in the comments who have been just writing as much as they could to say, well, all of these features can be had on an Android device. If you install X, Y, Z applications, you can do all of these different things or most of these different things. And that's true. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that all of these different things are built into a single application. You don't need to install a bunch of different apps to get this kind of functionality, which is nice. And that kind of adds to the simplicity of things. Now iMessage isn't perfect. There are still some things that other applications do from other devices that iMessage doesn't do. Like, for example, if I want to schedule to send a message, like let's say I wanted to send a happy birthday message to somebody, but I wanted to write the message up before their birthday and I wanted it to automatically send on their birthday. Maybe I typed it up a week ahead of time because I know I always forget their birthday and I want to make sure it gets to them. Well, on a Samsung device in the built in messaging application, there is a schedule option and I can send that message whenever I want. I can pick the calendar day and I can pick the time as well. And whenever that time comes up, it will automatically send that message. Another thing you can do with a built in messaging app on a Samsung phone is add or remove people from a group message. Even if it's not a group message and it's just a single person, you can still add more people to it. The only way to do something like that on an iPhone would be if every single person was using an iPhone. So if everyone had iMessage and everyone was using iMessage, then you can add or remove people from the group. But that's it. And the chances of getting four or five people or more in a group chat that all happen to also be using iPhones is pretty unlikely to happen, especially nowadays. One more quick thing that you can do with Samsung's messaging app that you can't do with iMessage is pin specific conversations to the top of the messages list. So I communicate a lot back and forth with my wife. And so I want that message to always stay at the top. And so I can pin it to the top. So even if other messages come in after, maybe like six other people text after my last conversation with my wife, then her message will still stay at the top so I can quickly get to it. And that's a nice feature that I do take advantage of on my Samsung devices. So to sum it up, is iMessage so good that it warrants not switching to an Android phone just because of iMessage? I'd have to say probably not. iMessage offers a lot of really cool features. I mean, I showed you all the amazing things you can do in iMessage. But to be honest, the only thing that's really completely exclusive to iMessage is the effects that I showed you when you send a message. So where it slams in or when you have the spotlight effect and things like that. And Animojis, those aren't actually even exclusive to iPhones either. There are other applications you can get on Android that give you Animoji type functions as well with different characters. So even that's not something that's exclusive to iMessage. I will say that iMessage does a better job of facial tracking with the Animojis. But if you just want Animojis, you can get that elsewhere. And these other applications do have some pretty detailed looking Animojis compared to what you get with the iPhone. So what do you guys think? Is iMessage this super awesome thing that completely warrants not switching to Android just because iMessage has so many amazing features? Or to you, is it just another messaging app that has some neat features that you're probably never going to use? Personally, I do use a lot of the iMessage features relatively often, but maybe that's just because this is the first time I've ever used an iPhone and who knows, maybe two, three months down the road, I'll never use one of these features again. Either way, let me know what you guys think in the comments below. And don't forget to like the video if you liked it, share it if you loved it, and subscribe to see the rest of my iPhone X coverage. In particular, my iPhone X versus the Galaxy Note 8 video, where I compare as much as I possibly can between the two devices, and go as far as to pick a winner at the end. That's it for this techisode. I'll see you guys in the next one.