A few months ago, HTC announced that they are changing the way they do phones and releasing fewer phones so they can focus on the quality of the devices. The launch of the One series represents a thorough reboot of the company’s image, philosophy, and hardware.
The One series is not just about three interesting new phones – it’s about a new way of doing business. The HTC One X, S, and V ooze HTC from every nook and cranny and they all look stunning.
The One X is the most important of these One devices. It’s certainly the most powerful, thanks to a 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, a 4.7-inch 720p display, an 8-megapixel camera with some aggressive specs, and 32GB of storage. Of course, we’ve learned countless times that all the specs in the world don’t make for a great device — it’s a marriage of hardware and software.
I’ve had this phone for about three weeks now and I cannot get over the fact of how good it looks. If a phone had to be judged by design and materials alone, the One X would be an instant winner – it looks and feels amazing and does a good job of framing the beefy hardware within it.
Making a phone look and feel this good becomes hard as the displays gets larger, but there’s nothing awkward about the One X — it’s a great-looking phone from top to bottom. It’s also very thin and feels perfectly balanced in the hand.
The One X adopts a curved profile similar to the Galaxy Nexus – hold it sideways and you’ll notice how the top and bottom edges very gently curve up. The majority of the case is a seamless matte plastic. I own the white version of the phone – it looks absolutely fantastic, but I’m a little worried about staining. The case has a tendency to retain dirt very easily, even though so far nothing that I couldn’t remove with a damp cloth.
The earpiece and loudspeaker grilles are microscopic and are so well integrated that you can’t feel them if you run your finger over them. The camera, surrounded by an attractive matte silver ring, is raised just enough so that the loudspeaker picks up a megaphone effect when you’ve got the phone sitting on a table. Furthermore, the design prevents the camera lens from getting scratched.
Looking at the sides, you’ve got an MHL port on the left (which serves both as your Micro USB and HD video out connections) and a volume rocker on the right. The primary microphone hole is along the bottom right, while the noise-cancelling secondary mic is on the top left next to the 3.5mm headphone jack. The power button is in its usual top right location. Notably missing is a dedicated camera key. The top of the phone is dominated by the 4.7-inch display, black glass and white plastic. There’s a notification LED embedded underneath the earpiece grille which is bright and easy to make out in any light conditions.
The One X’s display is the best I’ve ever seen on a phone. It has a near-perfect 180-degree viewing angle and perhaps the most accurate colour reproduction and temperature available. At 720p, it falls well into retina territory where the individual pixels become invisible to the naked eye. Viewing in bright light is also great and the automatic brightness sensor does a great job at adjusting the screen brightness for ideal viewing.
Initially, I thought that battery life was going to be a major concern. After all, four cores at 1.5GHz paired to a bright 4.7-inch display couldn’t be easy to satisfy. I was surprised to see that I can get about 13 to 14 hours. That said, the One X can get warm if you’re pushing the Tegra 3 to its edge. It’s never so hot that it’s uncomfortable, but it can get quite noticeable right below the camera on the back and in the same area of the display.
Audio quality is superb. The earpiece offers clear, loud calls, and the rear-mounted loudspeaker works very well, especially when compared to my previous HTC Sensation which had really bad speaker sound. The 3.5mm headphone jack outputs clean, noise-free music. The One X carries the Beats Audio branding, as most HTC devices now do. I’m still not sure what to think of the Beats Audio features as to me it just sounds like bass boost. Then again, I haven’t yet tried using a Beats audio compatible headset.
One X’s camera functionality is probably the best and easiest to use of any device on the market. I love the fact that HTC has integrated photo and video modes into a single viewfinder. You’re always in both modes at the same time – if you want to take a still shot, you press the shutter button, and if you want to start recording a video, you press the video button. Both operations happen almost instantaneously and HTC has managed to squash almost all shutter lag in the still mode. The One X’s autofocus is consistently fast and accurate. Burst mode and still capture during video recording work well and can be extraordinarily valuable in some situations. I was worried that there might be some compromise to the quality of the photos I took while shooting video, but that’s not the case – they are as good as if you weren’t recording.
As for image quality, I can confidently say these are the best camera phone photos I’ve ever seen, which was what I was expecting considering what a big deal HTC made about it when these handsets were announced. That said, at 100 per cent crop you can easily identify that the photos are coming from a camera phone. They’re great, but not the game-changers we’ve been led to believe they would be. It’s a similar case for video.
With regards to the One X’s performance, there’s an overall toning down of Sense. HTC made it clear that there was an effort to integrate Sense more tightly with the platform and make it less of a bright, overdesigned experience than it’s been in the past. The user interface is cleaner and more user-friendly. The new dock functions more like stock Android 4.0, with the exception of the centre button (which launches the app drawer), and every icon can be replaced at your discretion. Conveniently, the icons you place here also automatically become the four app shortcuts on your lock screen.
But there are places where Sense 4.0 doesn’t go far enough, or changes stock Android functionality or design simply for the sake of changing it without any real benefit. Android 4.0 was itself a major toning down of the platform with a more consistent design but sometimes UI developers go overboard and change this just to have something different.
Just to be clear, there isn’t any single UI issue in the Sense 4.0’s design, but rather a series of trivial bits that combine to weaken the experience as a whole. Some small annoyances include Sense’s odd checkboxes, which are light green on white by default, so they’ve got very little contrast. The One X’s task switcher – which takes up the full screen of the phone and only lets you see one app thumbnail at a time – is a marked downgrade from stock Android’s. HTC’s customised browser hides the status bar and strangely, some apps like ‘downloads’ are virtually untouched and totally break the design aesthetic HTC is trying to achieve. In fact, Downloads even uses Google’s stock checkbox design, not Sense’s.
Sense 4.0 includes a revamped keyboard, but I can’t recommend it. For some odd reason, HTC has decided to include a row of directional keys at the bottom, which makes the keyboard take up nearly half of the display when open. The Swype-like T9 Trace works quite well, but unless you intend on making it your primary input method, you’re better off grabbing a third-party option like SwiftKey.
Bundled with the phone, you get also a 25GB of Dropbox storage for two years – this is a nice perk. HTC advertises that Dropbox is integrated with Sense, but don’t be fooled – the integration is very light, and you can get the same functionality on any other Android device.
I can’t possibly write a single complaint about the One X’s performance for now. I’ve used the phone since two days after launch and I can’t recall a single incident of lag or stutter. The only issue I noticed is that while using Instagram for extended times, going back to the main screen takes a while and sometimes reloads the main screen from scratch, but this might be the case of a poorly optimised Instagram App.
There’s no doubt that the One X is a masterpiece and the best Android phone I’ve ever used. HTC really crafted something special here, with a brilliant combination of branding, industrial design and user experience.
A technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.