Introduction
After years of
continued growth and ever increasing profits HTC was hit hard by its
failures last year after it flooded the market with a number of
ordinary android phones each indistinguishable from the last. Two
thousand and twelve therefore marks a new Ice Cream Sandwich (Android
4.0) filled beginning for HTC as they attempt to wrestle back the
initiative from Samsung, the Galaxy SII and incoming SIII. The HTC
One X is the flagship phone in HTC's One family spearheading its
planned revival and is certainly a piece of hardware to rival the
very best smartphones on the market, let alone the best android
phones.
Hardware and Build
Quality
Dimensions: 134.36
x 69.9 x 8.9 mm
Weight: 130g
Screen Size: 4.7inches
(1280x720)
Battery: 1800mAh
Camera: 8MP
HTC's devices have exuded stunning build quality
ever since the unibody HTC legend was released in 2010 and the One X
is no exception to rule. In this instance HTC has left behind the
aluminium unibodies of the Legend and Desire HD and has outfitted the
One X with a polycarbonate unibody like the one recently seen on the
Nokia Lumia 800/900. While you may at first think that polycarbonate
unibody is just a marketing term for plastic be rest assured that
this isn't the sort of plastic you might find in a sub £150 device.
Instead the One X is covered by a high quality soft touch back with
glossy yet still extremely high quality plastic. Indeed during the
review no creaking was noticed at all. On the left hand side of the
device you will find a micro usb charge/sync port and on the right
hand side there is just a solitary volume rocker. On the top of the
phone is a 3.5mm headphone jack, access to the Micro SIM slot and the
power button. Being a 5.3 inch device people with smaller hands might
have preferred HTC to place the power button of the side of the
device like on Samsung's Galaxy SII, although personally we found
after a little bit of use it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. The
4.7 inch (1280x720) screen is covered in gorilla glass and inside the
phone is NVIDIA's brand new Tegra 3 quad core chip. Finally a
slightly negative note is that there is no slot for expandable memory
so users are stuck with the 32gb of on-board storage (along with 25gb
of dropbox cloud storage).
Display
The display is arguably
the crown jewel in the HTC One X presenting incredibly crisp images
all in stunning 720p. The display measures 4.7 inches and certainly
represents the outer-limit we would be willing to accept on a
smartphone. Compared to the iPhone 4 the display is absolutely huge
and certainly takes some getting used to. The benefits to
web-browsing, games and videos swiftly become apparent, however, and
if you think you can live with such a large phone then you won't be
disappointed with the added real estate such a large, high resolution
display provides. The One X is not the first phone to use a 720p
display, the Galaxy Nexus also used one, but unlike the Galaxy Nexus
it is a SLCD2 display not pentile. Pentile has become increasingly
synonymous with grainy images due to its pixel arrangement and while
these deficiencies may have been blown slightly out of proportion the
One X's display contains none of these problems. Viewing angles were
extraordinarily wide with only a slight loss in brightness
noticeable. Blacks were deep and whites were especially vibrant and
lacked the greyness often displayed in the Galaxy Nexus display.
Overall the One X's display has certainly set a new benchmark in
mobile phone displays and after Samsung announced that the SIII will
also come with a pentile display it looks like we will have to wait
until the iPhone 5 to see a rival to this display.
Camera
When HTC launched the
One X one of the areas it was clear that they had paid the most
amount of attention to was the camera. The camera is an 8MP shooter
with an F2.0 28mm lens and while the images it produces are vibrant
they lack some sharpness. It is certainly the best camera that HTC
has produced but isn't necessarily the huge leap forward HTC had us
thinking it would be. More impressive, however, is the actual suite
of software that HTC has provided when using the camera. It is
possible to edit ISO, white balance and even add filters similar to
those on instagram. Finally HTC has also provided the camera with an
excellent burst mode as well as the ability to take still shots while
at the same time recording video. Overall the camera is good but not
excellent and although HTC's software is very promising there could
still be improvements to both the lens and software.
Battery Life and
Call Quality
Having such a large
high resolution display certainly takes its toll on battery life and
while the average user might find the 1800mAh battery to be adequate,
power users may wish that HTC had either included a removable battery
or a larger, 2100mAh battery as seen in the upcoming Galaxy SIII.
With mid to high levels of usage the phone is just about able to get
through the day with wi-fi and push emails turned on. Gaming and
watching videos severely depleted the battery, however. A fifteen
minute game of Temple Run, including a high score of 1,107,666, on
medium brightness depleted the battery 10%. Therefore as long as you
are not wanting to constantly play 3D mobile games or watch videos
the One X's battery is perfectly capable of getting you through a day
of emails and light browsing. It still would have been nice to have a
slightly larger battery though.
Regarding audio quality
the One X is excellent with calls coming through the speakers very
clearly and people able to understand us with ease. Although many
manufacturers seem to fall down on this area these days the One X
merely produced the sort of call quality we expect from a flagship
phone.
Performance and
benchmarks
Apart from the display
the other area that stands out on the One X's spec sheet is Nvidia's
Tegra 3 quad core processor. Previously only seen in Asus's
Transformer Prime, Tegra 3 is Nvidia's latest mobile cpu and the
first quad core mobile cpu to reach the market. The most important
question though is what does that mean in practice. You'll be pleased
to know that the processor performs exactly as you would expect.
Sense 4.0 flies under the finger with apps opening extremely fast and
even the most intensive games, such as those found in Nvidia's tegra
zone run without a hitch. Rapidly flicking between home screens on
previous HTC devices was both slow and cumbersome yet on the One X
there were no such problems. Although this probably has as much to do
with HTC's newest skin as much as the processor itself.
While performance in
everyday usage is exactly what you would expect the benchmarks showed
that while the Tegra 3 is certainly fast it isn't as big of a leap
forward as you might expect compared to some of the newer dual cores
entering the market such as the Snapdragon s4 found in the US version
of the One X. The Quadrant benchmark returned an average score of
4,573 with a top score out 4880. In smartbench 2012 the average
score in the productivity index was 4610 with a high score of 4682.
On the gaming index of smartbench the average score we got was 2707
and a high score of 2722.
Sense 4.0
Many people who heard
HTC was shipping the One X with Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) would have
let out a collective sigh when it was also announced that upon ICS
would be HTC's sense skin. While HTC may have aided user experience
with its skins back in the days of Froyo, Android has improved
dramatically since then to the extent that HTC's skin upon its
gingerbread devices was actually a detraction rather than a selling
point. Thankfully HTC has remedied this problem for the most part
with Sense 4.0 proving to be only a light skin. Whether or not Sense
4.0 actually a benefit is debatable but we found that it certainly
did not take anything away from the device. Gone are the overly
laborious animations replaced by a simple change to the next
homescreen. Even HTC's famous weather widget has been toned down
slightly so that it is less intrusive. Android purists will no doubt
still bemoan the fact manufacturers still feel the need to add skins
to their devices. Thankfully in the One X's case the skin is light
enough not to ruin the experience although if we are honest it would
be nice to see a uniform android experience pushed by Google such as
that of the Galaxy Nexus.
Conclusion
The One X is a
sparkling return to the top of the smartphone market for HTC and
should certainly be considered when looking for a new phone. We would
say that currently it is the top android phone on the market with
excellent design and build quality. Battery life is a slight concern
although certainly in no way a deal breaker especially when
performance and the display are so good. It would also be nice to see
manufacturers stop loading their skins atop of android although in
this case Sense 4.0 is a much more simplistic skin that doesn't
detract from the phone itself.
