The iPhone X feels like a concept car, or a secret project. That’s because of the X name, probably, and the legacy of 10 years of iPhones. It’s also the fact that this is an optional step-up model — like an 8 Plus, but smaller. It’s a bold new design, different after three years of each iPhone looking very much the same.

I love new technology and the wild ideas that come with it. I love to be immersed in new concepts. But I’m also practical when it comes to tools. Will I use a fully rethought phone? Will it work for me when I need it to? My phone is my mission critical everything. It’s my Indiana Jones hat. Will Face ID work as well as the trusty Touch ID home button? Will I feel safe?

Ultimately the all important question is simple: Is this *the* must-have upgrade? Should my mom get it? Should my sister? My brother-in-law? My best friend? You?

I’ve spent a day now with the device to begin to answer this question. Consider this a living review that we’ll be updating throughout the week — and beyond — as we test, retest and experience the iPhone X.

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Face ID works pretty well…

You’ve been able to unlock an iPhone with Touch ID using your fingerprint since 2013. The original iPhone shipped with a home button a decade ago. Apple’s making a big leap by getting rid of both in one fell swoop and replacing them with Face ID. Your face — or a passcode — is the only way to unlock the iPhone X.

Face ID worked well in early tests. Setup is quick: Two circular head twists and the iPhone adds your face to its secure internal database.

Unlocking isn’t automatic. Instead, the phone « readies for unlock » when it recognizes my face. So I look at the iPhone, and then a lock icon at the top unlocks. But the iPhone still needs my finger-swipe to finish the unlock. It’s fast, but that extra step means it’s not instantaneous. Face ID did recognize me most of the time but sometimes, every once in a while, it didn’t.

I tried the phone with at least five of my coworkers. None of their faces unlocked it — although none of them look remotely like me. I also attempted to unlock it with a big color photo of my face on a 24-inch monitor, but that didn’t register as a face to the iPhone X either. The TrueDepth camera recognizes face contours to identify you.

Face ID worked perfectly in almost completely dark room, too, lit only by the iPhone’s screen. (It uses infrared). We’ll still need to do a lot more testing to see what Face ID’s limits are. By default, it requires « attention » at the display, but that requirement for direct attention can be turned off for those who need it, or those who prefer to speed up the process.

…but it’s not perfect

By design, the iPhone X doesn’t unlock with just a glance. Once you’ve identified yourself with your face, you need to swipe up with your finger to get to your apps. Not only does the swipe remove the immediacy of Face ID, it means you need your hand to do anything. Quick access to the phone wasn’t quite as quick as I expected.

I pushed my face testing hard. I got a haircut, shaved my beard into several shapes, then off completely. I tried on sunglasses and other frames. I wore hats and scarves. Then I went to more absurd levels, including some that wouldn’t happen in most real-world scenarios, trying on wigs, fake mustaches and steampunk goggles.

The preliminary results are in my video. This is by no means a final test, but the bottom line is that most of the « real world » tests worked and showed me that Face ID is more resilient than I expected. Face ID didn’t mind my sunglasses. Scarves presented some challenges, but that makes sense if they’re pulled up over your mouth since they’re hiding essential aspects of your face. All the tests worked far better than Samsung’s face unlock feature on the Galaxy Note 8 — though Samsung kept its fingerprint reader on, as an easy backup.

The iPhone X occasionally asked me to re-enter the passcode after a failed Face ID attempt, then locked out further Face ID efforts until I entered the passcode again. If you’ve used Touch ID, this will remind you of trying to use an iPhone with wet fingers. 

The big OLED screen is a welcome addition…

The 5.8-inch screen is the biggest on an iPhone to date, and the first Apple handset to use OLED (organic light-emitting display) technology versus the LED/LCD in all previous iPhones. In addition to better energy efficiency, OLED screens offer much better contrast and true, inky blacks — not the grayish blacks of LCD screens.

At first use, the bigger screen feels great. I’ve wanted more screen real estate on the iPhone, and the X comes closest to all-screen. Picture quality improvement isn’t immediately noticeable over previous iPhones, but that’s a testament to how good Apple’s previous TrueTone displays are. The larger screen gives the iPhone a more current and immersive feel.

I’ll need more time to compare the screen to other iPhones — and to other OLED phones, such as Samsung Galaxy models.

…but the X’s screen feels different from an iPhone Plus

That said, I grappled with a few X display quirks. Sure, there’s a notch cut out of the top of the screen where the front-facing camera array sits. But this isn’t just the Plus display crammed into the body of a 4.7-inch iPhone. The X’s display is taller than recent iPhones — or, when you put it in landscape mode, narrower. For some videos, that means they get letterboxed (black bars at the top and bottom) or pillarboxed (black bars on the left and right) to fit properly and the effective display area ends up a bit smaller than on the 8 Plus.

The rounded edges of the display mean that even if you expand a picture to fill the screen, parts of the image or movie end up cut off.

The notch didn’t bother me — much…

Hear me out. The notch and the two extra bits on either side end up feeling like bonus space: most apps don’t use that area, and it ends up relegated to carrier, Wi-Fi and battery notifications, which saves that info from cluttering the display below.

…but your favorite apps might not make the most of that screen

Many current apps aren’t yet optimized for the iPhone X. These outdated apps end up filling the same space as on an iPhone 8, leaving a lot of unused area. That’ll certainly get fixed for some apps over time, but it’s a reminder that the extra screen room here might not end up meeting your needs, until or unless the apps are optimized.

Living without the home button takes some adjustment

A number of new gestures take the place of the old home button. I kept reaching for the phantom button over the first few hours, feeling like I’d lost a thumb.

Unlike phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, which adds a virtual home button to create a « press for home » experience, the X remaps familiar gestures completely.

• Swiping down from the corner now gives you Control Center, instead of swiping up.
• Swiping up is the new « home button. »
• Swiping up and holding brings up all open apps.
• And another new trick: swiping left or right on the opaque bar below all apps, flips between apps for quick multitasking.

Meanwhile, there’s a new, large side button that brings up Siri and Apple Pay. I instinctively pressed and held it to shut down my phone, then I realized that is not what that button does. (To turn off the phone, you now hold that same side button *and* the lower volume button at the same time, which feels far from intuitive.)

Those gestures added up to some difficult maneuvers as I walked Manhattan streets in the Flatiron between my office and a local barber shop. At the end of the first day, I admit: sometimes I missed the simple home button.

You’ll need to adjust your Apple Pay routine

Double-clicking the side button brings up Apple Pay, but an additional face-glance is needed to authorize a payment. I tried it on our vending machine at the office and sometimes it worked great. Sometimes Face ID didn’t seem to recognize me. Maybe my timing was off.

I’m definitely going to need to check this out at more places in the days ahead. The bottom line: you don’t want to be the guy holding up the line at the drugstore because your double-click-to-Face-ID-to-NFC-reader flow was off.

The rear cameras are similar, not identical, to the iPhone 8 Plus

Like the iPhone 8 Plus, the iPhone X has a dual rear camera with both wide-angle and telephoto lenses. But X has two changes: A larger aperture (f/2.4 vs. f/2.8) on the telephoto lens, and optical image stabilization on both lenses (rather than just one on the 8 Plus), which should make for better-lit, less blurry zoomed-in shots at night or in lower lighting.

My colleague, CNET Senior Photographer James Martin, has done a deep dive on the new front-facing iPhone X camera, experimenting with portraits and shots around San Francisco.

The front camera is great with Portrait Mode…

In addition to handling Face ID duties, the TrueDepth front camera brings most of the magic of Apple’s rear cameras to the selfie world.

Portrait Mode, where the subject is in the foreground in focus with a blurred background, and Portrait Lighting, which applies various lighting effects to a photo after the fact, both now work on your selfies. Vanity, thy name is Portrait Mode.

…but not great with Portrait Lighting and my face

Portrait Lighting is officially in beta on both the iPhone’s rear and front cameras, and my experiences with it confirmed Apple isn’t finished perfecting the software that makes it work. My face ended up looking oddly cut-out and poorly lit. Unlike the rear cameras, which seemed to produce hit-or-miss Portrait Lighting shots, I haven’t had luck with my own selfies.

Get ready to be bombarded with animojis, and other TrueDepth AR and face-mapping apps

Animojis are exactly what they sound like: animated emojis. They’re cute. They’re also Apple’s showcase for the fancy TrueDepth camera, which maps your facial expressions onto monkeys, aliens, foxes and even a pile of poop. (If nothing else, the 10-second clips made my kids laugh when I sent them a few.)

Third-party apps also use the TrueDepth camera for real-time 3D effects. Snapchat created new face filters I got to play with, and some did an amazing job staying on my face. I’m curious to see how future apps use this tech for even more advanced face-aware AR.

Apple’s Instagram-like video app Clips has an update coming that also uses the camera to green-screen my face into different scenes, like an 8-bit gaming experience or a Star Wars filter where it looks like my face is a blue-tinged hologram. Again, it’s fun. For many people, the filters Snapchat already provides are probably enough. 

Apple nailed the size and feel: Did it nail the entire experience?

I think the X is in the sweet spot that the older iPhone sizes could never perfectly be. It’s a good-feeling phone with a nice, large screen. The shift to Face ID and the removal of the home button feel like changes that some might be fine with, and others will find unnecessary. I’m still learning the X’s design language.

We’re just getting started!

Want to know more? So do we. This is the beginning of our iPhone X journey, not the final word. We’ve got plenty more on deck, including battery tests, benchmarks and in-depth comparisons to rival phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and Google PIxel 2 XL.

We’ll continue to update our experiences throughout the week as we count down to the iPhone X global launch on Friday, Nov. 3.

For now, our CNET review of the iPhone X will be ongoing with a lot more tests. 

Stay tuned and reach out to @jetscott with your questions on Twitter! 

BRUSSELS/MADRID (Reuters) – Catalonia’s ousted leader Carles Puigdemont on Tuesday accepted the snap election called by Spain’s central government when it took control of the region to block its push for independence.

Puigdemont, speaking at a news conference in Brussels, also said he was not seeking asylum in Belgium after Spain’s state prosecutor recommended charges for rebellion and sedition be brought against him. He would return to Catalonia when given “guarantees” by the Spanish government, he said.

Puigdemont’s announcement that he would accept the regional election on Dec. 21 signalled that the Madrid government had for now at least gained the upper hand in the protracted struggle over Catalonia, a wealthy northeastern region that already had considerable autonomy.

Resistance to Madrid’s imposition of direct control on Catalonia failed to materialise at the start of the week and the secessionist leadership is in disarray.

Spain’s Constitutional Court on Tuesday blocked the unilateral declaration of independence made by the regional parliament on Friday – a largely symbolic move that gained no traction and led to the assembly’s dismissal by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy less than an hour after it was made.

“I ask the Catalan people to prepare for a long road. Democracy will be the foundation of our victory,” Puigdemont said in Brussels, where he showed up after dropping out of sight over the weekend.

The Spanish government has said Puigdemont was welcome to take his chances and stand in the election, called by Rajoy as a way to resolve the stand-off.

Rajoy, who has taken an uncompromising stance throughout the battle of wills over Catalonia, is gambling on anti-independence parties taking power in the regional parliament and putting the brakes on the independence drive. Puigdemont will hope a strong showing for the independence camp will reboot the secessionists after a tumultuous several weeks.

Although Puigdemont did not say when he would return to Spain and denied he was fleeing from justice, he could be called to testify before the court on the rebellion and sedition charges as soon as the end of the week.

The Supreme Court also began processing rebellion charges against Catalan parliament speaker Carme Forcadell and senior leaders on Tuesday.

CATALONIA SPLIT

The political crisis, Spain’s gravest since the return of democracy in the late 1970s, was triggered by an unofficial independence referendum held in Catalonia on Oct. 1.

Though it was declared illegal by Spanish courts and less than half Catalonia’s eligible voters took part, the pro-secessionist regional government said the vote gave it a mandate for independence.

European nations including Britain, Germany and France have backed Rajoy and rejected an independent Catalan state, although some have called for dialogue between the opposing sides.

Puigdemont, Vice President Oriol Junqueras and other Catalan leaders had said previously they would not accept their dismissal. But their respective parties, PdeCat and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, said on Monday they would take part in the election, a tacit acceptance of direct rule from Madrid.

The struggle has divided Catalonia itself and caused deep resentment across the rest of Spain, although separatist sentiment persists in the Basque Country and some other areas.

Two opinion polls showed support for independence may have started to wane. A Sigma Dos survey published in El Mundo showed 33.5 percent of Catalans were in favour of independence, while a Metroscopia poll published by El Pais put that number at 29 percent. That compared with 41.1 percent in July, according to an official survey carried out by the Catalan government.

Opponents of secession say a majority of Catalans want to remain part of Spain and did not take part in the referendum.

DIM HOPES

Despite his dash to the European Union’s power centre, Puigdemont’s hopes of engaging the bloc in his cause seem dim. Member states lined up after Friday’s independence declaration to assert their support for Madrid. EU institutions in Brussels say they will deal only with Madrid and that the dispute remains an internal matter.

“Our position remains unchanged,” EU Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said in Brussels on Tuesday.

But some analysts say the dispute is not going to disappear anytime soon despite the present state of play.

“Spain is heading for a period of disruption, and like the UK and Brexit, having its policy agenda dominated by one political issue while other key challenges fade into the background,” said Raj Badiani, an economist at IHS Markit in London.

“A more tangible impact from the crisis could evolve from early 2018, with the uncertainty set to build as Catalans push harder for a legally binding referendum.”  

The government’s move to impose direct rule received the backing of several influential Catalan business lobbies, which called on firms to stay in the region. The chaos has prompted an exodus of businesses from Catalonia, which contributes about a fifth of Spain’s economy, the fourth-largest in the euro zone.

Spain’s IBEX fell slightly as Puigdemont began speaking in Brussels but then rose again.

Some people in Barcelona displayed exasperation at the imbroglio.

“It’s a farcical and completely ridiculous situation,” said Ernesto Hernandez Busto, a 42-year-old editor. “This extreme nationalism, this separatism, has taken Catalonia to the most absurd situation and the worst inconvenience we have had in the last 40 years.”

Additional reporting by Paul Day and Sonya Dowsett in Madrid, Lucasta Bath and Clement Rossignol in Belgium, Writing by Angus MacSwan,; Editing by Janet Lawrence

“The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm,” Mr. Trump wrote. “What he know about Crooked Dems is earth shattering. He and his brother could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled. Fake News weak!”

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Mr. Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were charged in a 12-count indictment with a series of money laundering, tax evasion and foreign lobbying crimes stemming from work for pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine. While the crimes alleged began years before Mr. Trump’s campaign, the indictment asserted that Mr. Manafort’s scheme to defraud continued through last year until early this year.

Mr. Papadopoulos was named by Mr. Trump in March 2016 as one of five foreign policy advisers. While the president and his team now seek to minimize Mr. Papadopoulos’s importance, at the time Mr. Trump described him in flattering terms. “He’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy,” he told The Washington Post.

According to a statement of offense signed as part of his guilty plea, Mr. Papadopoulos admitted that he spent months last year cultivating contacts in an effort to arrange meetings between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials.

Mr. Papadopoulos said a London-based professor with extensive Russian contacts introduced him to a woman described as “Putin’s niece” and told him the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton based on “thousands of emails” of hers. (The woman was not actually related to President Vladimir V. Putin.)

The professor, identified on Monday by a Senate aide as Joseph Mifsud, told Mr. Papadopoulos about the emails in April 2016, three months before WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 hacked Democratic emails. Mr. Papadopoulos kept senior campaign officials informed about his efforts and they encouraged him but made clear they wanted to keep some distance publicly. “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” a top campaign official wrote in an email at the time.

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Mr. Papadopoulos was not charged with any crime for making those efforts but instead pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents about the matter. He was arrested secretly in late July and has been cooperating ever since with the team of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

“George was a low-level volunteer who might have attended a meeting of the foreign policy advisory team, the one meeting that took place but he was not a person who was involved with the day-to-day operations of the campaign, or a person who I recall interacting with on a regular basis at all,” Corey Lewandowski, who ran the campaign before Mr. Manafort, said on the “Today” show on NBC on Tuesday.

Mr. Lewandowski said he did not learn about the hacked Democratic emails until they became public. “To the best of my knowledge, absolutely not,” he said. “When I found out about that, I found out about it through public press reports.” He added that he has not spoken with the F.B.I. but would be “happy to do that unequivocally.”

Mr. Papadopoulos’s efforts are the second known effort by a member of Mr. Trump’s team to obtain damaging information about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians. Several weeks after the meeting where Mr. Papadopoulos learned about the Clinton emails, Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Manafort and Jared Kushner, the future president’s son-in-law, met with a Russian lawyer after being promised incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton from the Russian government.

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They said later that the meeting did not yield such information, but the president has defended their decision to take the meeting as a routine opposition research. The original statement to The New York Times by Donald Trump Jr. describing the meeting, crafted with the participation of the president, omitted the promise of damaging information. Mr. Mueller is now looking into that statement.

In Moscow’s initial reaction to Mr. Mueller’s indictments, Russian state-run news media and government representatives on Tuesday emphasized that the accusations laid out against Mr. Manafort did not mention Russia. Instead, media reports highlighted that he was accused for his actions in Ukraine. But his work in Ukraine was for the pro-Russian party of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was driven out of office by street protests in 2014.

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, called all accusations of Russia’s involvement in last year’s election “laughable, unqualified, groundless and unsubstantiated.”

“From what we have read in the media and seen in the statements by participants of this process, so far Russia was not mentioned in any way in the accusations, other countries were,” Mr. Peskov said at his regular news briefing.

“Moscow has never felt guilty to feel vindicated now,” Mr. Peskov said. “We were always puzzled about these groundless and unsubstantiated accusations of Russia’s alleged involvement in American elections,” he said. “We have resolutely denied them from the beginning and we deny them now.”

American social media companies told Congress on Monday that Russia was prolific in its efforts to reach American voters last year to sow discord. Russian agents published inflammatory posts that reached 126 million users on Facebook, published more than 131,000 messages on Twitter and uploaded over 1,000 videos to Google’s YouTube service, according to prepared remarks obtained by The Times.

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If you’re like most tire dealers, you have a go-to list of marketing tactics to attract and retain customers. Emails, social media, direct mail – but what about video?

For years now, you’ve been hearing that video marketing for small business is on the rise. Perhaps you’ve been ignoring this trend for a variety of reasons:

• I don’t like myself on video

• I don’t understand video

• I don’t have the equipment for video

• My customers aren’t going to watch a video

This was me. Personally, I don’t watch a lot of video. I hate myself on video, and I don’t have any fancy equipment or editing experience with video. So I’ve been ignoring it.

But this was a mistake as the video trend keeps moving forward.

Take a Look at Some of These Statistics

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, by 2021 the global consumer internet video traffic will account for 82% of all consumer internet traffic, and this doesn’t even include video exchanged through peer-to-peer (P2P).

This data is backed by the increasing number of views video social networks are experiencing; During its 2015 Q3 call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network is generating 8 billion video views daily, while in April 2016, Snapchat said it was generating 10 billion daily video views. Those numbers have likely gone up since then.

It’s clear that video isn’t going away; it’s only going to become more ubiquitous. The good news in all of this is that it’s also becoming more natural and organic. The combination of social media and video is giving companies more access to their customers. And mobile platforms are providing more access because of the flexibility they provide in capturing and streaming live events.

This means that your customers don’t need fancy, high-dollar productions. Let me restate that: your customers don’t want high-end productions. What your customers want is a glimpse into who you are as a person, as a brand. They want the feeling of knowing you and being in relationship with you.

This means that regardless of how you feel about video, there is a way to make it uniquely your own without spending a lot of time or money. So the biggest obstacle in using video today is you.

Video Marketing Versus Video Advertising

Part of the reservation people have with video comes from seeing video marketing and video advertising as synonymous. They’re actually quite different.

Here’s a simple explanation from an article entitled “The Difference Between Video Marketing and Video Advertising” from business2community.com:

Video Marketing: The use of video as content in websites, landing pages, social media and email to inform, educate, and engage.

Video Advertising: Running video commercials online across all screens, and using advanced audience and geo-targeting to reach precise markets.

Video advertising gives you the potential to reach a huge audience that would be difficult to reach through traditional advertising channels. YouTube advertising has the potential to reach more than 800 million visitors worldwide.

The key distinction is in the “intent” of the video. Video marketing is more content, education, information, and engagement focused. Video advertising focuses more on the traditional brand building and call to action that we’re all familiar with. So with millennial eye-balls moving away from traditional television and over to social channels and on-demand video viewing, the use of video marketing and advertising to reach your ideal customer will only go up.

While a lot of that content may seem like cat videos and blooper reels, video marketing also presents a golden opportunity for your businesses to capitalize on the video marketing boom. Even if you know nothing about video, it’s not too late to get familiar with this strategy.

You Need a Strategy

According to an Adcend2 survey, nearly 48% of companies stated that the most challenging obstacle to video marketing success was lack of a video strategy.

Here are a few tips:

1. Who is your audience? I know, you’re tired of hearing this, but understanding your audience will get your video content in front of the right people.

2. What do they want to see? Focus on the questions they want to be answered, or focus on the top three or five problems you know your customers are dealing with.

3. What do you want to accomplish? Are you building awareness, or are you looking for customers? You may want customers, but you may not have established your brand well enough that potential customers are comfortable with you. If that’s the case, create videos that will prove your expertise, or create videos that will quickly solve customer problems.

4. Focus on creating an emotional response. While your product or service may have some awesome features, what emotion do you want your customers to feel? Frustration? Relief? Think about what emotions you want to trigger in your customer and then create video to better engage by triggering those emotions.

5. Distill your message down to a few core points. Keep it simple, brief and concise. Better to do a series of related videos if you want to cover more than a few concepts.

Keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate this part of the process. Just focus on your ideal customer. What’s important to them? Educate, entertain, and help your customer find the right solution to their problem. Also use it to reinforce common recommendations given in store.

Don’t Be Scared, Just Jump In

Sooner or later, you will have to find a way to incorporate video into your marketing.

Don’t let all of these stats and ideas overwhelm you. Take a look at the info provided here, and then choose one idea you’d like to try. Maybe you want to do an interview. Or maybe you want to ask for a customer testimonial. It doesn’t matter. Just do one thing today, and do another thing tomorrow. Take one step at a time and before you know it,  you’ll be a video star.  TR

Ivana Taylor is a nationally renowned marketing influencer and publisher of DIYMarketers.com. She helps business owners and entrepreneurs like you save time and money by simplifying their marketing with low-cost marketing tactics and strategies. Learn more at www.diymarketers.com.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Gay rights advocates celebrated a federal court decision Monday that prevents the Pentagon from enforcing the Trump administration’s ban on transgender troops.

In response to a lawsuit filed by GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction on the ban, requiring the Pentagon to “revert to the status quo” set in June 2016, when then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced transgender troops could no longer be kicked out for their gender identity.

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Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy organization, called the decision “a major step forward in exposing President Trump’s policy as a hate-fueled attack.”

« Today’s victory reflects what a majority of Americans have been saying: that transgender service members should be thanked and not relegated to second-class citizenship,” she said.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed its own lawsuit in Maryland on behalf of six currently serving transgender troops, predicted that Monday’s decision — the first to strike down the ban — “won’t be the last.”

“The federal courts are recognizing what everyone already knows to be true: President Trump’s impulsive decision to ban transgender people from serving in the military service was blatantly unconstitutional,” said Joshua Block, senior staff attorney with the ACLU.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump tweeted in July that transgender troops would no longer be able to serve in the military “in any capacity,” then followed up with official guidance that ordered the Pentagon to begin implementing the ban by March.

The court’s ruling means the military cannot kick out transgender troops who are now serving and must continue to provide them medical care. But recruitment of transgender troops will still be delayed until Jan. 1 under an order previously issued by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

LGBT military advocacy groups estimate that about 15,000 transgender troops are currently serving. The American Military Partner Association, which represents LGBT military spouses, said the court’s decision “gives our military families hope that justice will ultimately prevail.”

The White House declined to comment on the legal hurdles the administration’s ban would face as a result of the decision. But legal experts said they expect the government to appeal the ruling to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond’s School of Law, said the ruling from District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who he called a “really experienced judge,” is likely to carry a lot of weight. She was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton.

“She enjoys a lot of respect in D.C. and around the country and has ruled in a lot of difficult cases,” he said. “Given the composition of the D.C. Circuit and the care with which she has crafted this opinion, my sense is the government is not likely to win in D.C. Circuit Court.”