Cellphone Review: HTC One X

Cellphone Review: HTC One X

HTC versus iPhone and Samsung Galaxy

HTC’s smartphones have been side-tracked against big players in the high-end mobile phone market with iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy lines dominating the scene. However, with the release of One X for AT&T, the counterpart to One S for T-Mobile, HTC is now putting up a serious competition against these big players. Although it shares rants and raves from techies and users along with the IPhone and the Galaxy Nexus, a first hand experience of the HTC, may add up to the odds of what phone should you get.

One X’s Slim Design and HD Resolution

HTC One X is made up polycarbonate polymer giving it a light weight and a slim look, almost resembling the curves of a Galaxy Nexus. However, this is compromised by its 4.7 inch touch screen. If you are used to handling a phone with one hand, prepare yourself to using both. You may want to consider the fact that this may not fit in your back pocket. If it will, then that may be uncomfortable. But, that may be a short-term concern as it is made up of Gorilla glass known to have high resistance to damage. And setting aside aesthetics, it still is able to render sharp and vivid display even when you are directly under the sunlight. Moreover, the resolution is at 312 per inch on a 4.7 inch screen, making it more impressive than an iPhone 4S as far as high definition is concerned. HTC One X’s rear is a white matte where the battery is located. This somehow becomes another weakness for the smartphone, because that battery is not removable. But just like a fan of any smartphone, an Android update may give the battery a boost. A battery fix can add up to at least one fifth of the battery life.

Android 4.0 and HTC Sense 4.0

One X also operates using the Ice Cream Sandwich platform or the Android 4.0 with the integration of HTC’s own, Sense 4.0 interface. While Android 4.0 promises are fulfilled including fast-loading and switching from one application to another, the integration of Sense may somehow disappoint you. It provides handy features as well as applications that you’d rather not work with. For example, the application for messaging is difficult to follow.

HTC One X 8 Megapixel Camera

The 8 megapixel camera is both great and bad for the smartphone. It’s great as far as switching from camera to video mode. It doesn’t take awhile to change modes so you don’t have to worry about missing a wonderful shot. You can even take out frames from a video; add spice to it putting effects such as sepia, much like how you would do it in Instagram. Also, it is great for taking outdoor and wide-angled photographs. However, it’s bad as it throws in an error when saving a photo with a size of more than 3mb. At times, photos taken in a bright background still comes out blurry and when zoomed in, comes out grainy. But, just like any manufacturer would do, fixes and updates through the operating system may do the trick for you. And, as far as how One X performs in this area, it may not be the best but still is at par with that of an iPhone.

Dr. Dre’s Beats on HTC

Probably the most anticipated entertainment feature that comes with One X is its music player. HTC spent around $300 million so they can integrate the very popular Beats audio system by Dr. Dre. The good news is that HTC was able to prove the investment’s worth with the sound quality of whatever music you’d play on One X. Others may find the overly amplified bass a bit of an annoyance but you have an option to turn Beats off.

4G Technology and NVIDIA Tegra 3

As far as connecting to the web is concerned, it uses 4G technology and with a quad-core processor NVIDIA Tegra 3 at 1.5 GHZ, it is well above par in terms of connectivity in comparison to other smartphones. You’ll find that when playing back videos, it’s almost like it’s not buffering. One X also has an HTML and an Adobe Flash web browser where you can easily zoom in and out while the text would automatically adjust to fit on the screen

But again, you must take note that it seems like there is no official data regarding its battery life. Users testing on that were averaging at 8 hours with a maximum of 12 hours. So, this is another factor that you may want to weigh against its Internet connection capabilities and the way you would use the phone.

Storage and other Perks

Another thing that may surprise you is that One X does not have any microSD slot to add some memory. But to make up for that, the internal storage is at 16GB giving you around 12GB of free memory. It also gives you the perk of having Dropbox storage of 25GB. If you think about it, you are putting less force on your smartphone by storing fewer files which in turn prolongs its actual life.

It’s really hard to place a verdict on whether HTC One X would be a great buy or not. What’s important is how well you will benefit from it now that you know its strengths and weaknesses.