HTC One X Android smartphone
Quad-core corker
Review HTC messed up in 2011 by releasing too many similar handsets. There was nothing actually wrong with phones likes the Sensation, Sensation XL, Sensation XE or Incredible S but equally none of them had me itching to upgrade my Desire HD ahead of schedule.
The X factor: HTC's One X
Now HTC is hoping to turn things around by putting its eggs in the One basket. For the penurious it has the One V. For middle income types the One S. But what I have here is the top tomato, the One X. A phone HTC is hoping will be considered the best you can get.
Let’s start with the headline specs. The screen is a 4.7in 720p affair with a pixel count of 312dpi. The CPU is a 1.5GHz penta-core Nvidia Tegra 3 unit with 1GB of Ram. Keeping all that in step is Android 4 Ice Cream Sandwich allied to HTC’s new Sense 4.0.
Long and slim
The exterior of the One X is a gently curved and understated affair and the back has a pleasant matte surface. The look works for me because it doesn’t try as hard to impress as Sony’s new Xperia devices or the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Build quality is rock solid too, due to the body being carved from a single chunk of polycarbonate plastic much like the Nokia N9 and Lumia 800, while the screen is good old Corning Gorilla Glass.
Below the screen you will find three capacitive buttons – back, home and recent apps – rather than the four of previous HTC handsets. I never use the fourth search button on my Desire HD, so it’s a change I can’t complain about.
Screen resolution is a pin sharp 312dpi
The edge of the handset is interrupted only by a 3.5mm audio jack on the top, the power and volume controls and a micro USB port – with the optional AC M490 cable this connection provides an HDMI output. There’s no memory card slot but with 32GB on board I can live with that. The X takes a micro SIM rather than standard-sized card.
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COMMENTS
When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........
...........somewhat torn. Yes, this phone is very lovely and yes, the specs are very "drool-worthy" but I cannot get past the fact that all the major OEMs consider, allegedly, that design criteria (thinness and lightness) are of such overwhelming importance that battery life and expandable storage become the victims of collateral damage. The former is still, by any rational standards, poor (regardless of which high-end phone we are talking about, it tends to vary between just about tolerable and downright pony) and expansion is being increasingly thrown out of the lifeboat on the assumption that punters with larger storage needs will use the cloud (the potential costs of such dependence of course could very easily blow a very large hole in your "plan"). Whilst we may not be talking the kind of "lock-in" we associate with a "curated system" such as that practised by A Well Known Major Phone Producer we are none the less on the way to ending up in a hardware-driven usage pattern lock-in where the phone producers are basically telling us how we shall use and manage our smartphones to a degree that we simply did not automatically associate with the Android os as recently as half a year ago. You want/need extra storage - use the cloud. You want a selection of videos on your phone - stream them via the cloud. I do not believe that I am the only one who sees the pattern here. It is not just design issues IMHO that are driving this. The hardware producers are essentially cooperating with the creation of a degree of carrier lock-in and dependence on large amounts of bandwidth and the costs thereof it we are going to be able to use our smartphones as, well, smart-phones. I can foresee a point coming where carriers will no longer offer smartphones on contract that have locally expandable storage and I fear that the OEMs are cooperating with doing their dirty work for them.
Re: Specs
>And you are going to use this "power" for what exactly?
For good, obviously.
Just remember this
Just remember this screen next time you are reviewing a 700quid 15" laptop with a 1366 x 768 screen.
Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........
For me it's not the storage space, it's the fact that it's not on a card that I can take out and move to somewhere else, and I sure as hell don't want to be reliant on "Cloud storage" (which I just don't like).
Hell, I can make do with a tenth of the storage they're offering - I've got an mp3 player for music, and a camera for photos, so I barely use what I have on the Desire HD I'm using now, but I want it to be in a way I can move it around without having to try and find a USB cable every time.
Specs
And you are going to use this "power" for what exactly?
Battery life is much more important.
