Brain drain
Battery life could be better though looking at the spec sheet nobody should be surprised by this. Looping a 720p MP4 video file drained the battery in 5 hrs 35 mins. Playing Shadowgun for 2 hrs 55 mins did the same.
Google Docs with HTC keyboard and Google Books
The same daily routine that sees my Desire HD need a top-up every 12 hours saw the One X needing the same, despite my HD only having a 1250mAh battery - the X's is 1800mAh - and being 18 months old. Personally I can live with the X’s hunger but then I never leave home without my 7,000mAh rechargeable juice pack.
As for cost, expect to pay about the same for an unlocked One X as you would for an iPhone 4S with its tiny 3.5in screen and easily-filled 16GB of storage. On contract you are looking at around £40 a month over two years.
Par for the course battery life, but performance is in a different class altogether
Verdict
A perfect smartphone? Very nearly. Some will bemoan the absence of Micro SD expansion and the lack of a dedicated HDMI port. I expected better from such a large battery too, but the screen is huge and glorious, the CPU powerful enough to run a small country, both cameras are good and the build quality superb. Suddenly my Desire HD feels like the relic of a bygone age. ®
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HTC One X Android smartphone
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.
