HTC One X – Hands On Review

Android

This review will be pretty well similar to the HTC One S review I did a little while ago, but with some minor changes.

Thank you again to HTC for the loan of the unit for this review!

HTC One X

Specifications

Body

Not as sleek as the One S as it is plastic, compared to that arc oxidized metal, and then has a bit of a large camera bump which REALLY sticks out a fair bit.

I found the power button to be a little soft, and not as ‘responsive’, maybe it’s just the bezel.

It’s screen, although only marginally larger than a Nexus appears much larger.  The soft buttons means it gets to use ALL 720 pixels for the height, and really you can see that right away on photo viewing or youtube watching.

Also, the image quality is amazing on the device.  I had to pull out my Nexus a few times and watch the same video to see if it was just a trick.  Colours pop, and pixels are sharp!  Gorgeous

Software

It comes with ICS 4.0.3, and Sense 4.0.  With Sense you’ll find that it’s not as obtrusive as it once was.  Yes, you still have a plethora of apps and widgets to wade through, some useful, others just more decoration, but for the most part, Sense is pretty good.

The only issue I’ve had with Sense is relearning a new menu layout.  Some things are not where I’d expect them to be, but that’s getting used to any new phone, and if this is your first Android, you’ll do just fine.

I really like how the task switcher operates on Sense, it’s visual, but it works, and very webOS’esque with the cards style.

Organizing screens is also pretty easy, and you have the opportunity to ‘folder’ them like in stock ICS by long holding an icon over another to merge it into a folder.

The lock screen is very nicely done and has that innovated ‘pull the ring’ to open, or drag one of your system tray items to the ring to pop right into that app.

You’ll also like the keyboard, it does a great job of having a ‘swype’ style to it, and good predictions.

Overall, Sense really has that polished feel.  The way each of the menu items look and feel, and when pressed have that mini animations

Performance

 

Those are the numbers… anecdotally, it performs beautifully with no perceptible lag, until you really really pile it on.

In terms of battery life, I’m going to give it an edge over the Nexus, as I haven’t really ever had it whine to me about charging, and running apps on it that normally bleed my Nexus dry don’t really impact it all that much.

The only thing you could talk about more on this is the Beats Audio.  I don’t notice much difference (sure it’s got some bass, but nothing earth shattering).  And there’s an article from Android Police that talks about what Beats really is, and whether it’s a feature or non-feature.  Up to you to decide.  You can read that article here.

Camera

Amazing… TalkAndroid recently put out an article about how with a phone like this you can put away your camera.  You can read it here if you like, and it’s getting to that point.  Sure, some of the heavier photography stuff I’d do like portraits of family, I’ll use my good camera.  But 99% of what I shoot nowadays is snapshot stuff, and this camera is MORE than ready to handle it.

Throw in Google+ / Dropbox auto syncing and it’s like those EYE-FI cards.

The camera has a ton of options for you to play with, HDR, SLO-MO, Panoramic, and even has those cheesy filters to play with.

I didn’t take a lot of ‘stock photos’ with the camera, but I’ll put some here.  You can also look at the One S samples I took as well.

For the camera alone … this is a great phone.

Glitch?

I wasn’t sure if I should discuss this, but as it was the reason that Tom didn’t stick with his, and I did experience it to, I feel I must.

There was a time while using the phone it would for no apparent reason drop cell signal, and then never recover it.  It would have the X in the bars.  Now, normally if this happens on a phone, I can just try putting it on Airplane mode; which should shut the radio off.  Then turn the Airplane mode off, which should turn the radio back on, and then it’ll search for towers and re-connect.  Always has worked in the past the few times I’ve had to do it.  But it didn’t work with this.

I then tried to do the whole *#*#info#*#* and go in and change it to EVDO only, and then switch back to WCDMA preferred.  That sometimes causes it to ‘reboot’ the radio… nope.  The only way to bring the cell signal back was to hard reboot it.  I couldn’t figure it out.

Now, Tom still has this issue.  I don’t.  What we ended up doing was having Rogers send us a new SIM card.  Took a while for it to work initially, but since I got a new card, no issues observed.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t happen to you.

Overall

Well, that’s about all I can say about the phone.  It’s awesome.  I really would switch from my Nexus to it, but for a couple reasons.  I’m not 100% sold on Sense, and the layout… that’d take some time getting used to… but that’s a given with any new device, there’s some learning that should occur.

The biggest reason is that it currently is only available on Rogers.  Don’t get me wrong, Rogers is a great carrier!  But, in my area, our provider uses Rogers phones; which is great, but the service doesn’t match up.  So I’m hoping to make a switch to a different carrier.  If I do, I probably wouldn’t be able to take the phone with me … plus, I’ll have just signed a new 3 year deal with the carrier, so I’d have to break that contract, pay a huge ETF etc…

Other than that, I’d have no hesitation to get this phone.  It’s got everything you’d want in a phone and camera and media device etc.. etc.. etc..

Now, how soon will it get Jellybean?

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