Almost two weeks ago I came into possession of one HTC One X made available by Orange Romania. I used the device for a week with the idea of seeing if it is really a terminal for which it is worth giving up an iPhone 4S or any other iPhone model. I am not doing a complete review of the device, but I will only discuss my experience with the terminal, everything being presented exclusively from my point of view.
HTC One X has a 2-inch Super IPS LCD4.7 screen with 1280 x 720 resolution, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 1.5 GHz processor, 1.3 megapixel front camera, 8 megapixel normal camera (capable of recording Full HD at 30 fps ), 1 GB RAM, 1800 mAh battery and that's about where the pompous specifications stop. At first contact with the device you will be "amazed" by its size but also by the fact that only its screen is almost as big as the entire iPhone terminal and that says a lot about the way everything was thought out. On the outside, the HTC One X looks pretty good, the only aspect that didn't impress me has to do with the way the company chose to highlight the terminal's camera. I like the subtle designs and I think that the beautiful shape of the case is not complemented by the way the camera is placed, but the decision of HTC cannot be changed, so if you choose the device you will have to "live" with the decision.
After a brief inspection of the exterior, you open the terminal and you are greeted by HTC Sense 4.0, an interface made by HTC for its users, the interface that native Android does not have, an interface that no other mobile phone manufacturer can implement . Being the owner of some iDevices, I can't say that I'm a "fan" of Android and what HTC offered me didn't make me change my mind, at least for now. The terminal has powerful hardware "under the hood", but Android does its job perfectly and brings it to its knees when "it is needed", giving me the impression that I am not holding a quad-core smartphone but a single/dual-core one. I add to the not-so-great experience the fact that certain applications do not offer many customization options, the fact that the One X had problems displaying notifications and applications that were either not optimized for the terminal's resolution, or ran extremely hard for unknown reasons thousand. Except for the notification problems that HTC is trying to solve, the rest of the problems belong exclusively to the Android OS and some of them I encountered at The Galaxy S III I have now.
Testing such a device I would have expected to run everything instantly on it, but unfortunately things were not like that, sometimes I even felt that I was holding an iPhone 3GS in my hand because the simultaneous running of several applications proved to be difficult in certain conditions. Those from HTC have implemented a new multitasking system in One X, so the applications did not run permanently in the background, but were suspended and the system became annoying when I reopened a browser and it loaded every time the page I had left open. The system should be similar to that of iOS, it should consume less resources, but sometimes it works worse and does not help in any way to improve the overall performance. The same system could affect the autonomy of the battery to a certain extent, but I will talk about that later.
In the same idea, I expected the HTC One X to be faster than the iPhone 4S for all the tasks undertaken by me and the difference to be large, but reality proved the opposite and this is not limited to the One X. HTC One The X takes pictures faster than the iPhone 4S, opens the camera faster than it, loads videos from the Internet a bit faster, but does not load web pages faster, which is extremely important for any smartphone user. No, I did not use flash to surf the Internet when I tested the two devices, I used the native browsers, and the differences were minor. Testing Google Chrome or Firefox from Google Play I had similar results, but the good part was that the browsing experience on the page was much better than I expected. For me, surfing the web is very important and I expected that quad-core to make its presence felt, but this did not happen, the iPhone 4S being equal to the One X without activated flash. The same can be said about the performances in games where the two terminals were equal, but it should be mentioned that for the time being there is a complete lack of games that use all 4 cores to their true value.
Moving on from performance to the camera, I'll tell you that it turned out to be a bit better than the one in the iPhone 4S, you have enough comparisons on the net and I'm not an expert in this sort of thing, so I can't bore you with technical details. I found the Beats By Dre speakers more interesting than the camera, which reproduce the sounds of the multimedia content played by the operating system much more faithfully than on the iPhone 4S, but I also don't forget the headphones, which for me proved to be more "faithful ” than those of the iPhone 4S.
We leave the camera and switch to the screen, which for me turned out to be "too much". I think that the 3.5-inch screen of the iPhone must "grow", I hope that Apple implements a 4-inch screen in the iPhone 5, but I hope that it will never go to the trouble of implementing a 4.7-inch screen. When I use a smartphone, I want to be able to use it with one hand, because I use it when I leave the house, when I'm walking, when I'm in public spaces and not when I'm sitting at home. When you sit still, the 4.7-inch screen offers you more than the 3.5-inch one, in terms of content display, but when it comes to real-world utility, things change. I am not 2 m tall and have a 5-inch palm, and with my (opposite) finger I cannot reach from one corner of the screen to another and writing a web address, a message or pressing a button from the opposite side of the finger turned out to be a the real adventure. From my point of view, screens like this have nothing to do with smartphones that must be easy to use, with pleasure, and I say this because I always had the impression that I would drop the HTC from my hand every time I used it. I took it out of my pocket and used it outside.
For me, the only problem with the screen was the size, because in terms of quality it is at least as good as the iPhone's, it faithfully reproduces the colors, but in direct sunlight it does not do better than the Retina Display . The good part is that you don't see the pixels on the screen when you use it, and videos and pictures will look extremely good on all its 4.7 inches, but you have to be indoors to enjoy the images because outside you won't see too much All in all, I was very pleasantly impressed by the One X's screen and I think that Apple must come up with something new in the near future because only marketing is left of the iPhone's Retina Display, with the competition falling behind the technologies of Apple.
Big screen, quad-core processor, good camera, 1800 mAh battery, long autonomy? Although you would expect the smartphones of 2012 to have great autonomy, the reality is that this HTC doesn't offer you something like that, in my case it worked even less than the iPhone and that in the conditions where it had no active notifications. HTC didn't optimize the hardware and software in the HTC One X that well, and the 6 hours of use on the iPhone 4S turned into 5 hours on the HTC One X, but without notifications turned on. Don't imagine that I listen to music for 6 hours a day because I use the smartphone for calls, surfing the web via 3G/Wi-Fi, games, GPS, etc., and the autonomy of the One X does not withstand such tasks. I didn't run videos for x hours to see how long the battery lasts because no one does that in everyday life, but I can tell you that 3G (as in the case of the iPhone), together with the screen are the biggest energy consumers, the information coming from the dedicated Android menu. Of course, HTC can improve the autonomy over time, but you have to wait for the updates released by the company.
We talked about good and bad and I think it would be useful to present you a list of strengths si the weak ones of HTC One X:
- pleasant and original design, a very important aspect in a market where manufacturers are sued for the slightest infringement of a patent;
- the low weight and thin profile mitigate the impact of using a smartphone with such large dimensions;
- the quality of the images displayed on a screen at least as good as the Retina Display in the iPhone 4S;
- the Beats by Dre speaker and headphones that faithfully reproduce the sounds;
- the possibility to add application widgets to the Homescreen, but I praise this option with reservations because those widgets do not have a 100% correct functionality;
- the speed with which pictures are recorded using the included camera.
- the large screen, difficult to use with one hand;
- problems in displaying images on the screen in direct sunlight;
- HTC Sense, which still needs improvements;
- battery autonomy;
- problems in running and displaying certain applications available in Google Play;
- the design of the packaging (packaging with a clearly inferior design to the one designed by Apple for the iPhone, a packaging that does not give you the impression that you have purchased a high-end smartphone but a cheap mobile phone); - because many people do not understand why I emphasized here, I will make a small explanation. Looking at the packaging for the iPhone 4S and the expanded styrofoam box of the One X, I don't want to buy it anymore. When you hold the box in your hand, you realize what I mean, and that matters a lot for a buyer. You practically have the feeling that you are holding a product made on a ship from China and an iPhone 4S. Yes, there is something else inside, but until you get to it, you run into the expressionless box made of extremely cheap material.
- the impossibility of displaying the battery percentage without rooting.
The HTC One X is a very interesting terminal, one of the best Android smartphones released this year, but is it worth exchanging an iPhone 4S for this device? For me there won't be such a change and that's because of the very large screen that I can't use easily and that I would never get used to. It's nice to see more content on the screen, but it's not nice to struggle to use a device that should allow you to do so many tasks. Leaving the screen aside, even the performance of the One X does not make me believe that I would switch to a more powerful smartphone, so I would only make a change with the idea of trying something different, or of purchasing the One X as a terminal secondary.
If I were to compare the two devices, I would say that they are equal, the unfinished software, the large screen, the problems regarding the autonomy and the problems regarding the running of the applications holding the HTC in place. The One X is an interesting terminal, it is worth going to an Orange Shop at least to test it and in the end I can say that it is better than iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4.
The HTC One X can be purchased from Orange Romania and on this occasion I thank those there again for the opportunity to test this smartphone.
