Chart topper
At 130g HTC One X is 5g lighter than the Galaxy Nexus and 10g lighter than the iPhone 4S. Yes it’s taller and wider than the iPhone but it has a much bigger screen, so what do you expect? Unless you have the hands of a child, the size is no impediment to use.
NFC options and a hotspot of a different kind – the AntuTu score
Wireless connectivity is bang up to date with Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC accompanying the usual (2.4GHz only) 802.11n Wi-Fi. At the moment, the first two are more about future-proofing than anything else but better to have them than not. Oh, and if you’re inclined to use the HTC One X as a PMP with a Bluetooth headset, it also supports AptX audio coding that’s claimed to deliver an output as good as a wired signal.
With that Tegra 3 chip you’d expect this handset to go like the blazes and you’d be quite right. Just like the Asus Transformer Prime the HTC One X returned an AnTuTu score of over 10,500 and runs almost supernaturally quickly. The UI is supremely slick.
Shadowplay running at 720p
The One X’s ability to run 3D games like Shadowgun and play 1080p video in any and all formats is so all-encompassing it’s easier for me list the things it can’t do. Which is nothing. And, boy oh boy, do games and videos look good on that HD screen.
Is the display better than that of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus? Tough call. The Samsung OLED manages a better absolute black, but colours look more natural on the HTC’s IPS LCD panel. Both are bright and have very robust viewing angles.
Home screen and 25 pages of widgets
Enough has already been said about Ice Cream Sandwich – including by yours truly – and like it though I do in vanilla form, HTC’s Sense 4 does make a case for itself. There are widgets aplenty and integration with Evernote, SkyDrive and Dropbox as well as the usual social and photographic suspects. One X owners also get an extra 25GB of Dropbox storage free for two years.
Next page: AV aficionado
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.
