HTC One X Smartphone – Indepth Analysis

Rating: 8.0.

HTC took the fast track to smartphone fame with phones like the HD2 and the Desire family, but the Taiwanese company lost its way a bit last year. Now they hope to get back on top with a trio of Android 4.0 powered smartphones, known as the One series. What we are looking at today is the international version of HTC’s flagship One X (not to be confused with the Qualcomm powered One XL). Can the One X put HTC back on top?

The HTC One X and its One series brothers are the revival of a more streamlined product strategy in order to offer better final products and post-launch software support. Last year at Mobile World Congress HTC unveiled five Android powered smartphones, a lineup that did not include the Sensation, their 2011 flagship device. Last year, HTC went ahead and added to what Android is most often negatively known for; a fragmented ecosystem.

Earlier this year at Mobile World Congress the Taiwanese company offered just three phones; the HTC One X, One S and One V. Three phones with three various target markets and demographics. HTC are primarily dedicated to these three phones (excluding regional variants) from here on out.

Speaking of firmware, the One X is running the latest and greatest Android iteration, Ice Cream Sandwich. As you might expect HTC Sense is also present and version 4.0 of HTC’s user interface is a welcome upgrade over previous versions.

Hardware wise, the One X is the first smartphone to become available with Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset inside. The 4.7 inch display is packing some serious pixels with a 1280 x 720 display. All of this and much more fits neatly into a polycarbonate shell that is just 8.9mm thin, weighing just 130 grams.

Key Specifications:

• 4.7 inch Super IPS LCD 2 1280×720 capacitive touchscreen display
• Display protected by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2
• Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC
• 1.5 GHz quad core Cortex-A9 processor
• ULP Geforce GPU
• 1 GB of RAM
• 32 GB of internal storage – no MicroSD slot
• 8 MP rear camera with 1080p video recording
• 1.3 MP front facing webcam
• HTC ImageSense
• Quad band 3G (850/900/1900/2100)
• WLAN 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth 4.0
• NFC
• 1800 mAh Li-Po battery
• Weighs 130 grams
• Just 8.9mm thin, full dimensions are 134.4 x 69.9 x 8.9mm

The 130 gram mass is spread out across a large area, making it feel light in hand but not to the point it feels cheap. The HTC One X has a premium feel to it – a matte polycarbonate finish and a slight curvature add to this equation the best.

The 8.9mm thickness takes 2nd place for the thinnest HTC phone available, although it doesn’t feel amazing in hand.

The front of the HTC One X is dominated by the very fine 4.7 inch display. To be more precise it is a Super LCD 2 unit that is straight up brilliant. It has a traditional RGB matrix rather than the poorer quality Pentile matrix as seen on the Samsung Galaxy S III.

The display has a 1280×720 resolution and the bulk of the front of the phone is protected from scratches by Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2. It is the first phone to be available with this, which is 20% thinner while being just as strong as the original Gorilla Glass. I took a few stabs at it with some keys and there was nothing to show for it.

Colours are amazing, vibrant, and are saturated to near-perfection. Viewing angles are also very impressive and colour shifting does not occur at all, even at ridiculous angles.

To me it isn’t a display; it’s a moving picture and is easily the best display I have seen on any smartphone, let alone tablet, monitor or TV. One of the default wallpapers looks more art than pixel.

The PPI count on the One X is 312 PPI and while this lags slightly behind the iPhone 4S (330 PPI), pixelation is still not worth mentioning.

The One X also supports 10 finger multi-touch, though you do have to disable HTC’s gestures to enable the detection of four fingers or more. If you do wind up using something like that Media Link HD accessory, then you’ll have to choose between the two.

We found touch responsiveness to be hit or miss, where we were intending to do a quick flick, the phone thinks of it as a actual touch. It may not be linked but I noticed this happened the most in the morning after it had been on the charger all night. Whether the two events are linked or not we’re not sure, but the problem definitely resolved itself as the day wore on.

The capacitive touch buttons below the display are in the order of back, home and multitasking. This means the multitasking key is closest to you if you are right handed, and it is probably the least used key. Contrary, in the landscape orientation the back key is closest to you.

The same buttons also light up in a svelte blue colour, taking me back to the days where the colour of a phone’s keypad was a great source of discussion.

Above the display is the HTC logo and the call speaker hidden behind a bunch of pinholes. Also behind the plastic mesh is a green/red notification LED, that is also visible through the gap between the display and body. The notification LED stops flashing after five minutes in order to conserve battery life.

Just to the right of the mesh is the 1.3 MP front facing camera. The front camera lens is recessed into the body slightly (unlike the rear camera) which could prove to be a decent dust pool over time.

The rear of the One X continues the white polycarbonate body, which itself feels really good in hand. The Micro SIM tray is there in the top left, which will probably require many people to go out and buy a new SIM or a SIM cutter tool. Luckily, HTC includes a nifty little tool for opening the slot. The exposed slot also means you can change SIM cards whenever you please.

The camera exposes itself like a volcano, with its sides covered in a silver finish. The camera lens is not recessed by much, if at all, and will be very prone to scratching. Even an HTC employee we recently spoke to admitted to having scratched a lens.

Further adding to possible camera problems the sensor is not fixed firmly within the housing. Shaking the phone causes it to rattle around inside and this has been proven to be a widespread problem. Its real life complications are yet to be witnessed however.

Perching to the right of the camera unit is the LED flash, which also doubles as a rather decent flashlight.

Moving down the phone you have a shiny silver HTC logo followed by a smaller Beats Audio, whose implementation is strictly software only with the One X. No Beats earphones are present in the packaging like the Sensation XE and XL late last year.

The loudspeaker sounds pretty good, but not amazing. It struggled with the lows but this is expected with a speaker of its size. Also sound enhancers, like Beats Audio cannot be enabled when using the external speaker, although they work fine whenever the 3.5mm jack is involved.

Also found on the rear on the One X are five pins that allow charging and data connections with docks that are compatible with it. So far this list is rather limited to HTC’s own car and desktop docks, though DIY docks are a possibility.

Before you start wondering where the mention of the battery compartment is – well there is none. Not because we’re lazy, but because the 1800 mAh Li-Po battery in the One X is non-removable. To those who wonder what happens if the phone freezes then a long hold of the power button will make the capacitive keys flash and subsequently force a reboot.

There is also no MicroSD slot, something that is not much of an issue to most users when there is 32 GB of internal storage. Of which 2.11 GB is available for applications and 25.24 GB is there for everything else. It is worth mentioning that HTC One owners get 25 GB free Dropbox storage for two years.

The sides of the HTC One X are finished in the same white polycarbonate as the back, except it is a glossier – and less grippy – finish.

The top edge is the most busy of the four on the One X with the 3.5mm headphone jack, secondary microphone and power button. The button itself doesn’t sit completely flush with the body but maintains the streamlined design.

The lefthand side mixes things up a bit, at least compared to previous HTC phones. The MicroUSB slot has been moved from the two thirds down the edge to two thirds up the lefthand side. The MicroUSB is also MHL capable for all your wired connectivity needs. DLNA is also present for those who have other compatible devices.

The bottom of the HTC flagship is home to the primary microphone. The volume rocker is found on the upper right hand side and looks much like a stretched version of the power button. Some users have complained about the positioning of the rocker but we really do not see or have encountered any issues.

With the launch of the One series HTC also introduced its brand new and much refreshed Sense 4 user interface. Google has pushed manufacturers to stick more closely to their design guidelines and HTC has followed orders.

Lockscreen

The Sense 4 lockscreen remains much the same compared to previous Sense versions but the quick launch app shortcuts are now linked to the homescreen – rather than being independent. You can remove these completely as well if you don’t like them.

We found that launching these applications were hit or miss. Sometimes upon launching an application or accessing a notification from the lockscreen it would just resort back to the lockscreen. Unlocking the screen for the second time will reveal that the application had launched behind the lockscreen.

The main area of the lockscreen can be modified to a bunch of different HTC presets, including photo album, weather, friend stream, clock and stocks. These all give you quick access to related information.

By default however, the lockscreen will happily display music, a new text message and missed call information. Aside – if you’re a hip hop fan, you really have to check out Krizz Kaliko’s new album.

Security wise, Android 4.0 adds the ability to unlock your phone using facial recognition. We did play around with it for a bit but it is largely a gimmick, and can be fooled by pictures. The other usual security options such as a pattern or PIN are present as always.

Homescreens

After unlocking your friend’s phone with a picture with them, your first encounter with the homescreens will likely remind one of a slightly modified Ice Cream Sandwich launcher.

For the first time ever in the Sense interface the landscape orientation is present. However, to get it working under normal scenarios you will have to use a third party application. Using the Media Link HD or a MHL cable will activate landscape homescreens the way HTC designed it.

Above is my slow evolution of my main homescreen over time. Sense 4 also marks the death of the horrid apps/phone/personalise bar at the bottom of the homescreen, instead replaced by four applications or folders interrupted by a link to the application drawer.

A long press on an empty area on the homescreens will bring up the option to quickly add widgets, apps or shortcuts to the homescreens. If you wish to change your wallpapers you’ll have to go through the Personalize app where other Sense options are also found.

Folders can now be created with the more traditional and simpler iOS method (lawsuit coming in three, two, one…) by sliding one application on top of another.

This Personalize application is where you will find yourself changing scenes – you might want a specific and different homescreen layouts for home and work. The skin determines the overall colour scheme of the Sense interface.

This is where you will be able to change the wallpaper, lockscreen style and a toggle to have the four applications shortcuts on the lockscreen. From here the option to modify default ringtones is also present.

As with any other Android smartphone there is the usual pull-down notification area which has room for all your latest Gmail and other notifications. You can clear single notifications by swiping them to the sides or you can just clear them all at once. There is also a link to the settings menu in here as well. The notification area is now accessible from the lockscreen.

Application Drawer

The application drawer in Sense 4 remains much the same as Sense 3.5, the only real additions being a few buttons that replace the retired Android keys (search and menu) and a link to the Google Play Store.

The ability to sort applications by something other than alphabetical order is present, you can also view them by most frequent use and most recently downloaded. You can also remove the most frequent use and recently downloaded tabs, but the all applications tab must remain present at all times for rather obvious reasons.

Long tapping an application here will give you the option to place it in one of the homescreens or uninstall it. If you wish to ‘uninstall’ an system application you can into the settings and freeze it – very useful for carrier bloatware.

Multitasking

Multitasking on the One X is rather different compared to other versions of Android. On older HTC phones on Android 2.3 multitasking was accessed by a long press of the home key that displays a small menu overlay. This was not ideal, and neither is the multitasking solution on the One X.

Thanks to some aggressive RAM management settings by HTC most recent applications are frozen (like iOS) rather than being kept live in the background. On resuming to the app you can visually see the application restart and attempt to get back to where you left it.

Other than that you can flick the tiles upwards in the multitasking menu to clear them completely. Personally we prefer the multitasking experience offered by stock Android 4.0. This includes a transparent menu overlaying the display and isn’t nearly as aggressive with RAM management as Sense is.

The stock web browser on the One X starts off with a URL bar linked to the top of the webpage. Other interesting things found here include a page-dependent read option which converts the page into a print ready type state.

By doing some kind of finger gesture (scroll up as far as you can and then random scrolling is our best guess) a mini menu at the bottom is revealed that allows you to add that page to your bookmarks, homescreen or save it to a read later list.

Other links found here direct you to bookmarks, saved pages and tabs. Ideally we would have preferred to have a link to the tab menu as part of the URL bar or at least allow gestures to change tabs like on Chrome. On that note, incognito tabs are present.

Looking into the menu, some points of interest include a search function and quick toggles for desktop modes and the flash player.

Web browsing experience

The browsing experience offered by the 4.7 inch is quite easily going to be one of the best possible on a device under 5 inches. The RGB matrix display offers crisp text – even when it becomes too small to read without strain. Text flow is present to prevent this or constant panning occurring.

Scrolling performance is much improved to what we remember earlier in our time with the One X so we’re guessing one of the updates brought with it improved browser performance. For the most part panning and pinch to zoom is glassy smooth except on more intensive sites.

1080p Youtube videos play just fine, although it is painfully full of lag when trying to set it to 1080p playback and panning around the screen. A task I might add is handled with ease by the Samsung Galaxy S III.

Sense Keyboard

The HTC Sense keyboard is the only option keyboard option on the One X, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

New to the Sense keyboard is a Swipe-like feature which works well in theory as well as reality. However, the ever present button that hides the keyboard takes up valuable space and shrinks the spacebar in the process.

The arrow keys are present in both portrait and landscape modes and I probably used them once or twice – not really worth the space they consume. There are also context specific keyboards with .com shortcuts in them plus it can auto-complete email addresses from a large list – sadly @KitGuru.net is not included.

Looking at the software behind the visuals the predictive text was intelligent but not up to the level of third party keyboards such as Swiftkey. If you ask me phone manufacturers should license third party keyboards and skin them to fit their own UI.

As is normal with HTC’s Sense UI the skin goes much deeper than just the homescreen, application drawer. It has been a few months since I’ve played around with stock Android 4.0 but it is my belief that virtually everything I encountered has been modified by HTC to some degree. The lack of which actually pained me deeply when I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy xCover a month ago.

The Sense integration is very deep, and what it adds is for the most part very useful – from the famous weather widget to the settings menu. We won’t go into too much depth, rather giving an quick overview of the rest of the applications.

HTC is keen to point out its much improved car dock application. It gives you a few big buttons and quick access to phone calls, Google Maps Navigation, your music library and the internet radio service tune-in radio. Going into one of these menus offers up a largely blown up version of the stock application.

There is also a movie editor present, which is actually pretty functional. Sure you can’t add in custom titles and such (I believe you can do this on the stock Android 4.0 one) but you can add in as many videos and pictures as you feel like. Once you’re done creating your cinematic masterpiece you can save it in any of the widescreen 720p, 540p or 360p formats. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJQkQpsBYs']

Above is a little something I put together in about five minutes after getting to know the app. The quality isn’t amazing but its impressive coming from a phone.

The other bundled HTC applications not mentioned elsewhere in the review include:

• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock
• Flashlight
• FM Radio
• Friend Stream
• HTC Hub – app store with games and Sense themes
• Locations – HTC’s (not complementary) offline navigation app
• Mail
• Mirror
• News and Weather
• Notes
• PDF Viewer
• Polaris Office
• Show Me – includes many tutorials advising new users how to do common tasks
• Stocks
• Task Manager
• Tasks
• Teeter – a basic marble tilt game
• Transfer
• Voice Recorder
• Watch – HTC’s movie rental and purchase service
• Weather
• Wi-Fi Hotspot

Percentage of above applications I will perhaps never use: a whopping 67%. Luckily with Ice Cream Sandwich you can disable (but not uninstall) system applications that you will never use.

Other present applications (Google+, Maps, Youtube etc) are baked into Google’s Android experience and aren't mentioned in the above list.

The international edition of the HTC One X has quadband support for GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz) and HSPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz) cellular connectivity. This means it is able to work on basically every mobile network around the globe – until you get to North America where there is so much diversity even we can’t get our heads around it. The One X is capable of HSPA+ and HSUPA connectivity with speeds theoretically peaking at 21 Mb/s down and 5.76 Mb/s up.

In our testing we found cellular reception to be flawless. Plus as the updates rolled in (from 1.26 to 1.28 to 1.29) reception was improved with progressive radio updates.

For what it is worth, above is a screenshot of a few speedtests. A peak of 4 Mb/s down and 2 Mb/s up is what we got, but as per your location and carrier you are bound to have different results.

Looking past the cellular radio, the One X is one of the first devices to ship with Bluetooth 4.0 that brings power drain improvements over previous versions. It also supports AptX as well, which is a higher quality audio over bluetooth codec than AD2P, which is also supported. We had no way of testing this but we did have a play with a Bluetooth mouse.

The mouse connected to the phone just fine and performed flawlessly except for page scrolling in Chrome where there was noticeable lag. Left click/drag does your usual touchscreen operations while the wheel can do scrolling in browsers and the application drawer.

On the Wi-Fi front the One X supports a/b/g/n networks as well as DLNA for wirelessly streaming media – but more on that a bit later on.

We found Wi-Fi to be a bit touch and go at times – especially after the latest update (1.29.401.11) where it was completely disabled for a few days. I was unwilling to pin this issue on either the phone or my home network at first. Disabling Wi-Fi auto-disconnect seemed to fix any issues and I have only encountered periodic issues since. When the issues did occur again, as crazy as it may seem, I found toggling random settings under the advanced Wi-Fi settings fixed the connection most of the time.

Wi-Fi performance was impressive, easily maxing out our 14 Mb/s down and 1 Mb/s up connection with pings equivalent to the phone’s long lost wired counterparts. Link speeds are capped at 65Mb/s which I believe is the phone's peak rather than my router's.

Text Messaging

The default messaging application at home on the One X is quite easily the smoothest I have experienced on any Android phone so far in my time. On other phones where there is a bit of lag, the One X appears to handle it with ease.

The One X messaging application is pretty standard – exactly like the one you will find on any other phone with threaded messages.

The search function searches both contacts and messages, although selecting a message earlier in the conversation only takes you to the most recent messages. There is also the ability to backup messages without the need for a third party app.

There is a email forwarding system built in which is to be honest going to be pointless and rather costly. Instead of using a data connection to send an email to yourself it sends a MMS message to your chosen email address.

Within the message threads themselves you can pinch-zoom to change the font size and browsing through the menu will allow you to select from a small collection of pre-determined messages such as “Check this out!” and “Urgent! Please reply…”

Phone Dialer

The Sense 4.0 dialer remains much the same as the one found on slightly older devices on Sense 3.x, except for some welcome user interface updates and other tweaks.

Filtering contacts either by name or number is possible and tapping a contact will of course call them.

The contact cards have Facebook and Skype integration, giving you quick access to their Facebook profile and photos. There is also a tab displaying recently used methods of contact with that person – although it is limited to text messages, calls and email.

Call Quality

Personally, I’m not a big user of the task that mobile phones were originally designed for all those years ago. Saying this, the calls that I have made were crisp and clear (well at least as far as a phone gets) on both ends of the radio waves.

The default video player is fully functional (obviously) and includes some neat features including the ability to take screenshots of the video and lock the display to avoid accidental exits.

It managed to handle 1080p H.264 MP4 files fine yet anything more and it started to struggle. A 40 Mb/s MKV file stuttered every few seconds and at one point gave up completely. This was a continuing trend – strain the player too much (whether the file is of a higher quality or from too much playing with the extras) and it will just throw an error message saying it cannot play the file.

Playback was much smoother when using a third party play such as Dice; under this player it played the aforementioned 40 Mb/s MKV file just fine.

Youtube playback was smooth no matter what medium I went through. HD/HQ playback was fine in the Youtube app and on the mobile site. Most impressively however was smooth 1080p playback in the stock browser. It is pretty tedious getting it to play 1080p and into fullscreen due to massive lag but the only stutters I noticed past this were purely network/buffer related.

DLNA

Since this was the first time we’ve had a DLNA capable TV on hand we thought we would give DLNA a go with the HTC One X. Music can be streamed over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (presumably this also includes Apt-X), while pictures and videos are limited to Wi-Fi.

For the most part decent DLNA functionality was either hit or miss. For what it was worth sending pictures across the network to the TV worked fine every time. From there it just gets worse, the TV would recognise that music was being attempted to be played but seven times out of ten the music just would not play.

Video playback did not fare any better – when it did work we were impressed but when it didn’t (which was most of the time) it was annoying. Most recently the favourite error message it likes to throw up is “Sorry, this video cannot be played. (701)” even though it will playback on the TV until you formally acknowledge the error.

On the whole DLNA performance was largely buggy; saying this your own experiences could be different depending upon your own network and DLNA capable devices.

Music Application

From the word go you are presented with links to SoundHound, TuneIn Radio and 7digital. Fortunately for most people these app shortcuts are not baked into the music application (and there is also the option to add more links).

You have the ability to access media services and we found this to work reliably, a lot more so than DLNA, though it’s not quite the same function as the audio is heading the other way.

I’m sure all of you can find your album or song of choice, no matter how bizarre the layout. All that needs to be said is that it is not a chore on the One X. Even if you load thousands of songs the search function browses through artists, albums and individual songs.

Soundhound is integrated into the app but why this is needed when we more than likely already know what the song is is a bit beyond us. HTC also includes a function allowing you to update album art using Gracenote but we found it to crash most, if not all times we used it to update the entire library (some 300 songs). However, it seemed to work fine when updating individual albums/songs.

Audio Quality

We found the HTC One X’s audio quality to be pretty good, we could not notice crosstalk of any kind and both high and mids sounds nice and clear.

As is common with HTC smartphones since last year Beats Audio is present on the One X. I find it to be little more than a equaliser that fills out the low end and smooths vocals slightly. Further adding to the Beats Audio gimmick is that it (and other equaliser presets) can’t be enabled when using the phone’s external speakers.

The HTC One X has a 8 MP BSI (back side illuminated) sensor that includes a F2.0 aperture and a 28mm lens. The rear camera supports Full HD 1080p video recording. The front facing camera has a resolution of 1.3 MP and supports 720p video.

With the One series of phones HTC has a dedicated image processor marketed as ImageSense. This allows for some pretty neat things such as zero shutter lag, image capture while recording video and a burst capture mode.

Starting with the camera application the first thing you will notice is that there are quick buttons for image and video capture – no need to play around with slide buttons here. The polaroid stack of pictures below links to the gallery.

The blue circle includes Instagram-like filters as well as distortion and vignette effects among others. These do prevent the burst mode from being used but it’s a fair tradeoff. Combined with the gallery image editor the One X’s software is a certain Instagram killer. Personally, I’m not into overly modified pictures of the world around us in the first place.

Sadly the zoom is not adjustable by the volume rocker. The A on the right stands for auto and it changes depending on the selected image camera scene. Other scenes include HDR, panorama, portrait, landscape, whiteboard, close up and low light. Each has their own uses; whether you want to take a family photo or capture notes off a whiteboard.

There is also a toggle mode to switch between flash, auto flash and no flash.

The cog represents the settings area and here is where you are able to switch between which camera to use. Further settings include self-timer, image adjustments and auto upload. From the latter you can set it so pictures automatically upload for Facebook or Flickr.

You have the option to enable 4:3 widescreen images within here. By default it is in widescreen mode. Even though the image resolution states 8 MP when in widescreen mode, it actually decreases the vertical field of view and takes 6 MP images.

Picture and Video Samples – be sure to click on the samples for the full sized samples

Standard Samples:

Panorama Sample

No matter what we found there to be some degree of visible image stitching in our panorama samples. However it does offer acceptable image quality for roughly 9100 by 1600 images.

HDR On and Off:

Enabling HDR brightens the foreground and tones down the definition of the clouds in the background. We found that it worked well, except it did take a few seconds to process each image.

Burst Sample:

The number of burst shots can be limited to 20 shots or unlimited. We found this unlimited mode to be capped at about 100 shots but it also appeared to depend on the phone’s ability to save them all to memory. In burst mode 3-4 images are taken each second.

Sample while recording video:

You can also take pictures while recording 1080p video, however these images are limited to 6 MP (3264 x 1840). As a bonus pictures taken while recording video appear to match those taken separately.

Video Samples: [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO6QukJGoHY'] [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaY7bqZp5nw']

Video quality didn’t amaze us, nor did it disappoint us. It does appear to have some kind of issue getting a true focus while panning, though the samples did turn out alright. Wind noise was a bit of an issue when wind was virtually non-existent. Sadly, there is a two second delay before hitting record and 1080p video being recorded, this issue was significantly reduced when recording in 720p.

Video image stabilisation doesn’t appear to do much in reality – if you want decent image stabilisation then we advise you to rely on Youtube or other third party programs.

The focal length of the sensor is pretty long at roughly 3 inches so true macro shots are terribly out of focus. We also found it to be heavily influenced by different light scenarios, making us think that a backside illuminated sensor is not always better. Overall we found the camera to be impressive – helped by the bonuses added by ImageSense such as zero shutter lag and burst capture mode. It will easily take very capable shots in most situations and is a good alternative to cheap point and shoots and even bulky DSLRs for holidays.

The HTC One X has Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset inside which includes four ARM Cortex-A9 cores clocked at 1.5 GHz (max). However, due to some aggressive CPU governor settings in the HTC provided kernels the cores rarely reach 1.5 GHz in the quest for extended battery life. This is somewhat of a desperate battle when the chip is produced on a 40nm process rather than the 32/28nm lines Samsung and Qualcomm are taking advantage of.

Regardless of this, the Tegra 3 chip in the One X has a maximum clock speed 100 MHz higher than the Asus Transformer Prime we reviewed last month – which comes as a surprise considering it is a phone that is over 4 times lighter than the tablet. Occasionally the rear of the phone does heat up around the camera sensor while gaming but even then it does not cause much concern. In addition to this there is a full gigabyte of RAM, of which roughly 980 MB is dedicated to the user. This is more than other smartphones with one gigabyte of RAM as the ULP Geforce GPU has its own dedicated VRAM.

There is also 32 GB of internal storage, of which 2.11 GB is available for applications and 25.24 GB is for media and file storage. There is no MicroSD slot which may annoy some people to the point they will not purchase the One X. Personally, after a month of usage I have only used roughly 25% of both the app and file storage partitions.

Hardware Benchmarks

We ran the benchmarks on both the 1.26 and 1.29 firmware versions but there was no major difference between results so the results you see are from the latest 1.29 firmware.

In all of our tests the One X beats the Transformer Prime by small margins, and in the case of Linpack Single Threaded performance the One X’s win was noticeable. It also comfortably wins against the dual core OMAP processor found in the Motorola Atrix 2.

We’re also starting to get vertical sync limited results in GLBenchmark so from now on we’ll be including offscreen results as well.

As far as pure benchmark performance is concerned the HTC One X currently takes the lead, something that is bound to change once we got our hands on Samsung’s Exynos 4412 found in the Galaxy S III.

Browser Benchmarks

We ran our browser benchmarks on the stock HTC browser rather than Chrome or Opera for better comparative testing.

The One X and Transformer Prime are neck to neck in Browsermark, afterall they are powered by the same chipset.. The HTC has a small lead but it is well within any margin of error. It again wins in Peacekeeper with marginal wins over the Huawei MediaPad and Motorola Atrix 2.

Javascript performance is impressive on the One X; it is our first device to break the 2000ms barrier in Sunspider’s test. In Vellamo, a Qualcomm produced benchmark, the One X takes its biggest lead in the browser benches.

The battery found in the One X is a 1800 mAh Lithium Polymer battery which has a total capacity of 6.66 Whr. This number is somewhat left behind in comparison to the 2500 mAh battery in Samsung’s Galaxy Note and the 2100 mAh battery in the Galaxy S III.

Any One X user will soon discover that the Tegra 3 chipset (while active) and the 4.7 inch 720p display are the main sources of power drain.

Because of this, gaming battery life is not amazing, especially when you crank the graphics details up in Riptide GP. A single 20 minute session of it drained the battery roughly 15 percent on one occasion. Under continued heavy use like this you could expect about 2.5 to 3 hours of intensive gaming battery life.

If you find yourself having a lazy Sunday (or Friday afternoon at work) don’t go purchasing a One X expecting a day full of gaming and movie watching on a single charge.

When watching videos with roughly 20% brightness using the default gallery application (which takes advantage of Tegra 3’s fifth companion core) the battery will deplete about 15 percent per hour. This was based purely on non-HD .avi files so we freely admit 720p H.264 files could go through it faster. Based on our context scenario you could expect 6.5 hours of battery life.

We know this result is much longer than other sites have experienced, this is because of lower brightness settings and lower quality video content used.

Idle battery life has been highly touted by One X users and we have to disagree with them and we put it down to the battery figures not being reported correctly by Tegra 3’s fifth core. Over a 6.5 hour period with only 3G data enabled, Wi-Fi and auto-sync were disabled battery life fell 6%.

After a couple of minutes of light use (disabling alarms, scrolling through Gmail) the phone reported a 3% fall in battery life.

We don’t think this is bad, it just isn’t the amazing 2% battery loss overnight some users have been fantasized by (followed by 10% drops after five minutes of use). Of course, enabling flight mode you will only lose a few percentage points overnight but this doesn’t resemble a realistic usage scenario.

Looking at a more subdued usage scenario over the course of an entire day the One X lasted me until I slept every day – unless I did some intensive gaming for a respectable amount of time. 30 minutes of Grand Theft Auto 3 or Riptide GP will put a nice dent in battery life and will likely result in it not quite making it to the end of the night.

Typically my 17 hours of daily usage would involve an hour of music playback, 30 mins of ebook reading, 20 mins of video playback and up to an hour of other tasks including texting and some gaming. Other functions including auto-sync, 3G data and Wi-Fi were commonly used.

Under the above usage scenario, where I often ended the day at roughly 20% (less if I played games for more than 15 minutes) of juice remaining is acceptable but not impressive. We don’t consider battery life on the One X bad at all; mediocre would be the best word to describe it.

Heat

With a Tegra 3 chip manufactured on a 40nm process you’d be mistaken if you thought the phone would stay as cool as the surrounding winter weather. While I was on the older 1.26 firmware the rear of the phone around the camera sensor would heat up to a if not uncomfortable then certainly concerning temperature while gaming.

Fortunately the newer firmware updates (1.28 and 1.29) have since fixed most heat issues. This could have come at the cost of gaming performance if reports of HTC modifying the CPU governors in favour of battery life are anything to go by. However, heat is still present under some scenarios – I noticed it while stress testing the burst capture mode on the camera.

I've spent over a month with HTC's One X now, which is noticeably longer than what most other reviewers have had with their own units. For this reason I've grown rather attached, yet also distanced to the phone. It's a bit of a love-hate friendship; where it impresses me, it does it well. Where it doesn't the HTC flagship leaves some small but noticeable things to be desired.

It is very easily one of the best looking phones available at the moment with the matte polycarbonate body blending into the second generation Gorilla Glass of the front. It is also durable as well, we’ve stabbed both the back and front of the phone with keys to no lasting effect.

The 130 gram shell feels light in hand yet feels solidly built (even if it is plastic at the end of the day), and apart from the camera lens I don’t think I’ll ever end up scratching it. However, this impressive looking design comes at the expense of something more important – ergonomics. The One X just doesn't feel nice in hand for such a large phone.

The 4.7 inch 720p Super LCD 2 display is hands down the best display I have experienced to date. Viewing angles are class leading and colour reproduction turns the impressive factor up two notches compared against other displays. You won’t be seeing any individual pixels either with a PPI count of 312 and the impressive RGB matrix.

Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset in the One X trumps everything we’ve tested to date. While this is something that is bound to be to be eclipsed by the Samsung Galaxy S III, the One X barely skipped a beat, except in some intensive games. This is something that should hopefully be corrected in an upcoming software update.

Speaking of software updates, the One X has received three over the air updates since its launch barely two months ago. HTC are obviously dedicated to offering the best software experience possible – each update has fixed major and widespread bugs. This list includes gaming performance, random stuttering and screen flickering. Granted, these issues shouldn’t have been an issue in the first place but we’ll give HTC the benefit of the doubt for fixing them in an acceptable time frame.

Sense 4.0 is much improved over previous versions and while we still don’t believe that Sense 4.0 is an improvement over stock Android 4.0 – rather an sideways alternative. Perks include a more functional lockscreen, deeper modification and additional application drawer filters are countered by small miscellaneous (yet annoying when they occur daily) bugs and a neutered multitasking experience.

The camera is of a high quality with the 8 MP BSI sensor, and it has some really neat additions such a burst capture thanks to ImageSense. Video capture was also to a high, but not amazing standard.

We found battery life to be mediocre and it isn’t worth writing home about. It’s going to get you through a day of moderate usage, anything more and you’ll find yourself attached to a charger for an extra half an hour a day. Adding to this, heat was a noticeable issue on earlier firmware versions but has appeared to be fixed (possibly at the expense of performance) in recent updates.

Other phones to consider

There is only one true competitor to the HTC One X and that is the Samsung Galaxy S III. The Galaxy has a faster processor, larger (although not as wonderful) display and better battery life to mention a couple of things.

Software Information

Our unit was running Android 4.0.3 with software version 1.29.401.11

Pros

• Unibody body is one of the best designs currently on a phone.
• The display is quite possibly the best out there at the moment.
• The Tegra 3 processor remains the fastest we have seen.
• Sense 4.0 is one of the most functional interfaces for Android.
• HTC are dedicated to software updates.
• 8 MP sensor takes very respectable pictures.
• Strong cellular reception.

Cons

• Doesn’t feel wonderful in hand.
• Sense can be a bit buggy and slow.
• Annoying amount of added applications.
• Tegra 3 performance can be matched by the processor in the mid-range HTC One S.
• Mediocre battery life.
• Non-removable battery.
• Limited to 32 GB storage – no MicroSD slot.
• Camera lens will be prone to scratches.
• Video recording delay.

KitGuru says: Don't get your mind made up by the fact that the cons list is longer than the pros; with all qualities being summed up the HTC One X lives up to its flagship status, and rightly so. The 4.7 inch Super LCD 2 display with its 720p resolution is possibly the finest display out there. HTC's additions to Sense 4.0 have made it an excellent quality OEM skin, yet at times lacks smoothness that so many lust for. The beautiful unibody design while nice to look at doesn’t feel trustworthy enough for full time one handed operation. This unibody design also comes at the expense of a removable battery, and perhaps more importantly, a MicroSD slot.

HTC isn’t quite back at its peak judging the One X, but they’re slowly returning to being the pinnacle of the smartphone world.

Become a Patron!