AV aficionado
Thanks to an f/2.0 aperture lens, a back-illuminated sensor and the ICS panorama capture facility the 8Mp camera fitted to the One X closes the gap on the best from Sony and Nokia. Even casual snaps look rather impressive and you get more shooting effects than you can shake a stick at and the ability to take still images while recording video. It’s a fast camera too.
Easy access to camera settings
Talking of video the main camera shoots at the expected 1080p but the 1.3Mp webcam can record at 720p which is handy for capturing yourself in HD. Both output content as H.264 and the front camera also supports Skype.
As goes the visual, so goes the audible. This is a Beats Audio phone and the sound quality it produces knocks the Desire HD and the other-half’s iPhone 4S into a cocked hat. The bundled Beats earphones are very impressive both in terms of sound quality and of comfort. Call quality is good and the single speaker is powerful and composed enough to make watching films without earphones a pleasant experience.
Plenty of browser options and Beats Audio settings
Chinks in the X’s armour? Well, the Flash player didn’t work until I found and installed a firmware update, the Wi-Fi radio sometimes took its own sweet time to connect and HTC’s excellent e-book reader app seems to have vanished, which is a shame.
Next page: Brain drain
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.
