HTC One X: The Fastest Android Yet

Let’s see now… how do you talk about a phone that’s already been talked about so often that most details would just appear repetitive? The HTC One X, the first of its kind in the mobile kingdom, is slated to be the apparent game-changer in the new-age, high-speed, mobile arena. Loaded up with all the latest and “greatest” goodies that HTC could throw at you, the One X is aimed at the high-end mobile users who won’t settle for anything less than a great user experience and super speedy functionality. Naturally, we at tech2, were as curious as the next tech-freak to see just whether or not this funky new handset lived up to its promise so we put it through its paces and here are our findings.

On video: HTC One X

Form Factor
Sticking to an otherwise ‘ho-hum’ HTC styling, the minimalistic design on the One X, especially since it’s just 8.9mm in depth and weighs in at just 130g, still manages to look very chic. Going the unibody route the One X takes the iPhone-esque design a step further with a pin-to-release microSIM card slot. The SIM card slot located at the rear of the White edition has a remarkable resemblance to the iPhone 3GS’ (also located in a similar position). HTC has also designed the One X’s brilliant 4.7-inch (720 x 1280 pixel resolution) display with a slight raised edge and an all black border. The effect, much like the Nokia Lumia 800’s, gives you the impression of an Edge-to-Edge display. With corning glass to keep those nasty scratches at bay the Super IPS LCD display is quite a vibrant sight dishing out colors and highlights quite well.

Speediest handset on the shelf

With brightness set to Auto, viewing angles in broad daylight aren’t optimal, although most details are visible, we expected just a little more.

The white edition gives the One X a simple yet refined look and though the shell proved to be quite sturdy, it felt a little too much like ordinary plastic. A set of volume keys are located on the right hand side of the device while a micro USB port is on the left. What’s missing is a dedicated camera shutter release button that would have been handy.

Large clear display

HTC has deviated from their usual design form with this one but only by a tiny margin. However, on the bright side, this is one seriously slim, lightweight handset.

Features and Performance
Interface
Sense UI 4.0 is certainly a step up from the older versions, but could still use a few minor tweaks. Since we’re looking at the very first ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), Sense UI 4.0 device, it wasn’t clearly evident what to expect, nevertheless, in a nutshell, things on this 1.5GHz Quad-Core (NVIDIA Tegra 3) running beast ran seamlessly. However, we’re yet to see an ICS device running the Stock ROM make it out in an official capacity, since the Galaxy Nexus never made an official debut. Sense UI seems heavy but in reality, it isn’t and functions very smoothly. It has more perks than drawbacks. ICS can be seen on some of the inner workings of the device but is not altogether up front since Sense takes precedence. Rooting is the only obvious way to get to ICS’s stock offering though we wish there were a simpler method.

A painful stretch to reach the menu key sometimes

One major issue with ICS is that in lieu of the menu/settings button you’ve got three vertical dots as singular on-screen option to access sub-menus. The problem with this is the positioning that is not consistent. For most part it’s placed at the right hand corner at the very top of the display making it extremely difficult to access it if you’re not using both hands. Should you have average sized hands, it’s quite a stretch to awkwardly reach the menus. This is no good. However some apps like the Whatsapp messenger, Gmail, Facebook etc. features this same menu button but at the bottom of the screen making it so much easier to use. Another little flaw with Sense UI’s iteration of ICS’ Running Apps menu is that in landscape mode, although the orientation changes, the tabs do not and it all looks rather ridiculous. The tabs retain the orientation of the App when it was in use – if you were using Google Maps in portrait mode, the system will always show the thumbnail in portrait even if you’re in landscape.

There are plenty of Widgets to choose from in many categories but the overall look and feel of Sense UI layout hasn’t undergone any drastic changes. Thus, transitioning from older HTC devices to the One X will be stress free.

All New UI but a tad cluttered

Sense has the most efficient contacts integration system for linking details to your various social networking accounts and your regular phone book. The App drawer still looks a bit cluttered and the organization system according to Alphabet or date could work for some, but an option to create folders (available only on the desktops) or move the items around manually would have been better.

32GB of storage makes sure that you’ve got plenty of space for apps, videos and audio. Of course out of that 32GB, 26GB is actually what you can use. That’s still quite a bit. And once again, following in the steps of the almighty iPhone and so many other new devices, HTC has also decided against the option for external storage, so your microSD card will be have no place in the One X.

AnTuTu’s benchmarking tool gave us an impressive score of 10123 second only to the Asus Transformer Prime that was only a little bit ahead. Linpack gave us a Single Thread score of 39.95 (average) and 130.9 (average) MFLOPS.

AnTuTu scores put it better than the best

Just to reiterate – we long for a stock ICS running handset that isn’t as high priced at as the Galaxy Nexus. Other than that the One X, does a great job even if we only get a tiny glimpse of the true Ice Cream Sandwich.