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HTC’s quad-core flagship phone for 2012 launches this week, bringing Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset to mobiles and promising a leaner, meaner version of HTC’s Sense user interface. Plus Google’s “Ice Cream Sandwich” is onboard as the OS. It would appear to have everything.
What Is It?
A big, powerful phone, running Android 4.0.3 with version 4.0 of HTC’s familiar Sense user interface laid over the top. The One X’s 4.7″ display runs at 720×1280 resolution, while the Tegra 3 processor is there to power the experience, and does so extremely well. Plus HTC’s very happy with the results produced by its new 8-megapixel camera. And so are we.
The next upgrade for the army of Android users who came aboard thanks to HTC’s great phones of yore, such as the iconic Hero, the groundbreaking and incredibly popular Desire and the many, many slightly different Android models it’s released since.
The One X still has the recognisable speaker grille we’ve come to expect from HTC, but it’s in a much, much slimmer and lighter body than last year’s whopping great Sensation XL. The unibody case is a very clever construction, giving you shiny, polished sides that look like they’ve been enamelled, then seamlessly curving into a roughed up back that gives the phone a matte backside for grip.
Beneath the sharp and bright 4.7″ display sit three capacitive buttons, arranged in the standard modern Android 4.0 formation of Back and Home, with the all-new Recent Apps multitasking button to the right. These buttons are big, sensitive, backlit and easy to hit.
Round the back you get some big changes to HTC’s usual way of doing things. The Micro-SIM card slot is hidden behind a tiny door you have to pop out with a little metal tool, plus there’s a big fat bump housing the new camera sensor. We’ve already scratched that a bit after being a little rough with it, and there’s not much protection for the glass of the lens, so that may be a worry in the long term.
Also, the battery’s sealed within the One X’s casing, so there’s no option of swapping it. And there’s no SD card slot, either, just 32GB of onboard storage, of which about 26GB is free to use.
The display is a joy to touch and is subtly curved around its edges, sinking into the case and making the whole phone feel smooth to the touch and very luxurious. It’s quite similar in size and feel to that of the Galaxy Nexus, in fact.
This new HTC Sense interface will still be familiar to anyone who’s been near an HTC phone in the last few years. The main visual change is the reworking of the floating dock at the bottom of the display, which is now a more generic rectangle than HTC’s previous iconic curved array, offering four quick launch app shortcuts (and folders can be put here, too).
All key Android 4.0 features have survived HTC’s Sense coating, with the most obvious being the Recent Apps button. This pops up a vertical list of your recent activity in the unskinned Ice Cream Sandwich software as found on the Galaxy Nexus, but HTC’s flipped the orientation here so you get a horizontal list complete with big images of the pages you were last using. Which feels a little roomier and easier to navigate.
There’s one slight inconsistency with HTC and Google’s implementation of the Menu button, though. Without a specific physical Menu button on the One X, it’s left to the apps to decide where to put the Menu option. And if there isn’t one specified within the app, you get a full-width software Menu button appearing at the bottom of the display. Which looks a little odd and often has you playing ‘Guess the Location of the Menu’ each time you open a new app.
That’s about it for niggles, though, as the One X is absolutely stunning in general use. The Tegra 3 chipset does the business extraordinarily well, with apps, web pages, Home screens and games all running very well. It feels nippier in action than last year’s HTC Sensation, too, with Android generally fast and responsive wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Can’t fault the performance.
The camera here is absolutely amazing. It opens and focuses virtually instantly, producing bright, sharp, colourful results. Even grassy, leafy, organic parts of the shot are reproduced clearly, while the continuous shooting mode with its ‘Best Shot’ selection tool, which pops up after you’ve taken a sequence of images, means you really do get the perfect picture every time.
Plenty of hipster/retro filters are available to play with (plus an HDR option for boosting your shots’ intensity) and the camera app itself has a nice, clean layout with everything available though on-screen icons. 1080p video looks good, plus there’s a fast shooting option for capturing slow motion footage.
It’s the best phone camera out there right now in terms of photo quality and speed of use, no doubt about it, with the lock screen’s quick launch option making it super east to access in a hurry, too.
You’re probably not expecting a quad-core smartphone with a 4.7″ screen to have an amazing battery life. This doesn’t have an amazing battery life. We struggled to keep it going for a full working day of constant fiddling, so you’ll be needing to be a little careful, or start wearing a USB lead around your neck. It’s also quite slow to take a charge, meaning you’ll return to it after an hour to find it sitting there with only 37 per cent of power onboard.
Which is par for the course on today’s monster phones and complaining about it feels a bit like moaning your new Ferrari isn’t very fuel economic. But still. We’d rather trade a few millimetres of girth for a little more uptime for future reference, phone makers of the world.
HTC’s taken a leaf out of Apple’s book for its SIM card slot, which is only accessible by poking a tiny bit of metal into the hole beside it. Obviously this helps keep the bulk down and has allowed HTC to keep its case slim, minimalist and featureless, but it’ll be a bit of a pain for those who are constant SIM-swappers, who will leave a trail of straightened-out paperclips behind them.
The screen is incredibly bright. So bright that we never had to use the maximum brightness setting, as it’s dazzling to the eyes when displaying at full beam. On the lowest setting it’s more than usable, even outdoors.
Long-pressing on a Home screen pulls up HTC’s version of Android 4.0′s app, widget and shortcut installation menu, which is a very attractive and usable way of adding various shortcuts and live widgets to your Home screens. Mini Home screen icons appear above a scrolling list of available apps, then you dump the ones you want where you want them.
The music app’s a pretty little thing, which includes its own separate app shortcut section in its front-end that’s used to house links to music services you may have installed (or anything else you want there). HTC’s pre-loaded the 7digital music shop, the amazingly comprehensive TuneIn Radio internet radio system and the SoundHound track ID tool. SoundHound’s ad-supported, though, which ruins the vibe a little.
The interactive lock screen works a little differently to how it did on last year’s HTC Sense models. You still get to quickly access four apps from the lock screen by dragging them into the lock circle, but instead of being compiled from a custom menu, these shortcuts now mirror those you have on the main Android dock.
When booting the One X for the first time you’re prompted to register or sign in with a Dropbox account, with HTC boosting your online storage to 25GB as a thank you. The idea is you leave the app’s ‘Camera Upload’ toggle switched on, so it automatically dumps all your photos in your Dropbox folder for convenience and use as a back-up. And yes, you can tell it to only do this over a W-Fi connection.
Absolutely. The camera’s the fastest and best we’ve seen on a mobile and the screen’s very bright, sharp, smooth and responsive, while the Tegra 3 processor’s power keeps everything running incredibly smoothly. It has good media playback support (even HD MKV files worked for us), looks smart and more stylish than recent HTC models and is generally fast at running apps and displaying web sites.
It’s great all round. And it’s hard to imagine any company making a better Android phone than this in 2012.
HTC One X
- Screen: 4.7″ 720×1280
- Processor: 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3
- Storage: 32GB, no SD card support
- Camera: 8-MP rear camera with LED flash, 1.3MP front-facing camera
- Connectivity: HSPA/3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, DLNA, A-GPS, NFC
- Ports: microUSB (MHL compatible), 3.5mm headphones
- Battery: 1800mAh, non-removable
- Price: £495 off network
Glad to see that HTC has gotten back into the game after somewhat losing their way last year… Android shouldn’t be a one-horse race! And this guy should be giving the rest of the competition a run for their money!
Reading the part about the battery – The Verge are reporting that their review unit got a software update during testing which really improved the battery life. Wondering if this is the case here?
Gary’s still got the review sample, so I’ll see if he can force the update through and add an update about the battery life. But truth be told, I can’t remember the last phone review I read that *didn’t* moan about the battery life — I think we all have to accept that to own a smartphone means to have to charge it mid-afternoon and overnight.
That doesn’t make it right, of course!
Battery is always going to be a issue, but Gary is right I think most people would forego a millimetre here and there just for something a little more workable – once we get to the stage of 24 hours solid use then enter the slim race, till then give me a phone that keeps a charge, even if it is a chunky monkey.
I do like this phone, and I think a camera is the most important feature for myself on any phone, but like everyone I won’t be making a 2012 change till I see the Galaxy III.
Sounds like a smart move, I should think.
I’ve got a skinny Xperia Arc, about 8 months old and it regularly manages to hold a charge for 24 hours. Usually up to 30+ if usage is light.
With the right compromises, you can get a good android handset with great battery life. The best I’ve used is the Acer Liquid MT, which runs the newest version of Gingerbread. It’s only 800Mhz, but uses 2nd generation snapdragon processor, and 512MB of RAM. Easy root, and partition, and you’ve got a handset that can do about 3 days with everything syncing (multiple email, facebook, twitter). Wife is very happy with it!
On the face of it people claim they’d be happy with a few extra millimetres, yet when the iPad increased in thickness by less than 1mm people seemed to go crazy about it, and then started to complain when a battery with a 70% increase in capacity started taking longer to charge…
Unfortunately form does often win over functionality when it comes to public perception.
I get what you’re saying but I don’t think it applies to the consumers that end up buying Android products.
I really don’t think they could give a damn if something is the “world’s thinnest” or not.
I got to agree, everyone likes to have a super slim sexy phone, but if you are having to plug it in all day or run around without charge then it is the definition of style over substance – practical functionality is a must and not a possible feature.
I don’t think the complaints are that it is a larger battery or that it is ever so slightly thicker – the problem is that despite being such a massive battery it actually lasts less than the previous model
not necessarily, if you stick the official Samsung 2000mAh battery into the Galaxy S2 you can actually get a full day heavy use out of it, all by increasing the weight slightly and carrying the bulge on the bottom of the phone all the way through now.
Very very tempted to replace my bruised and battered Desire HD with this… even if it’s just for the camera
Do want.
But will wait to see what the SG3 is like
Totally agree..it’ll be between these two this year for androidedness!
Have to restrain wetting myself here. It looks incredible. Fuck the SGS3, this is where it’s at. Can’t wait for it to come through the letterbox in a couple days!
The one thing that sounded crap though – it has physical keys yet no physical menu key, so that appears on screen taking up screen space?
Aside from that it sounds awesome but that one thing sounds a bit rubbish. I don’t get it.
I think it’s because a lot of apps now shy away from the menu button (why that is, I am completely baffled), so its use is steadily becoming redundant. To maintain the super-slick and minimalist body, this is the compromise they’ve made.
That’s because Honeycomb (and now ICS) implements the new ‘Action Bar’ – that horizontal list of shortcuts that now sits at the top of new apps, and all of Google’s own apps. It’s supposed to make the Menu button redundant, but many apps haven’t implemented it yet, so ICS displays a virtual menu button on screen to give you access to the hidden functions in those legacy apps.
Once third party apps implement the Action Bar, this will slowly become a non-issue.
Cheers for your enlightenment. :>
Ok…
Why? why have they done this? Why add an action bar at the top of apps?
I thought the point was to have the on-screen context-dependant buttons on the bottom of the screen (where physical buttons would be).
So on a galaxy nexus there’s the pretend physical buttons on the bottom and also buttons on the top? What was wrong with having a menu key?
???
The buttons at the bottom of the Nexus are general navigation buttons, which are static and always present (with a few exceptions). The buttons at the top are part of the app you happen to be running at the time, which are dynamic and context dependent.
I suppose that one goal of the Action Bar is to have more functions exposed and at the user’s fingertips, instead of hidden within a menu. Perhaps this wasn’t an option when Android was first designed, as phones had 320×400 3.2in screens, but with modern phones having twice the screen area and higher pixel density, it’s more feasible.
The buttons on the Action Bar are also context dependent, and are more ‘rich’ than the relatively static menu controls. They can include drop-down lists, graphics and context-dependent icons.
A few of these screenshots might give you a better idea of what I mean:
http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/actionbar.html
One more thing I forgot (why can’t I edit? Grr…).
The Action Bar scales to operate on a variety of screen sizes and pixel densities, so it works on both phones and tablets. It just displays more buttons on the tablet (up to 5), whereas on phones (some of which can only fit in as few as 2 buttons) it’s forced to relegate buttons it can’t fit on the screen into a sub-menu, dubbed the ‘overflow’ menu.
I suppose this was one of the issues that Google had to tackle when they put the same OS on both tablets and phones.
Thanks for that link. Quite interesting. It all makes sense to me, I didn’t realise that the app designs were fundamentally changing. Now that I’ve read through that link, I can definitely see why we are moving away from the menu button now that we have the screen space.
Good to see Android really pushing design patterns, it all looks great.
Yep, couldn’t agree more.
Google have some fantastic resources for us developers, like that link I posted. Hopefully these changes will prompt devs to create more consistent apps, because the interface conventions are a bit of a dog’s breakfast at the moment. Once ICS becomes commonplace, more developers will fall in line.
So whats the verdict after it arrived?
The screen is amazing – better than I’ve seen on any mobile device and absolutely blows the iPhone 4S display out of the water (as to be expected seeing as it’s a newer phone). The camera is flawless and has a large range of features, however my only complaint is that it can get very noisy in low light – not that the vast majority of phones don’t. The video is also top-notch, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sound quality even in less-than-optimum conditions. Sense flies but I’d still prefer stock ICS. That said, the core apps in sense have some great features that I would find difficult to replace with Play Store equivalents.
Then there’s the processor. Tegra 3 chews through every game on the market with absolutely no lag except on Glowball, but that’s mainly when the ball is moving fast and the game is designed to showcase the GPU. App switching isn’t seamless, but it’s very smooth nonetheless and a lot better than on any other platform.
Oh, and the battery shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. You’ll struggle to find a phone the doesn’t compromise on any of the One X’s features AND increases battery life. I think, contrary to what most people are saying, the design would suffer dramatically if you made the phone any thicker.
Thanks.. how are you finding the battery? Mine is phenomenal compared to my Nexus S. I carried out a small fix I read about where an app was stored in the wrong folder (http://phandroid.com/2012/04/14/htc-one-x-battery-life-got-you-down-here-is-a-fix/), so I’m not sure if thats what made the difference, or whether it was the OTA update I got recently, but I ended up with 70% battery left at the end of the day yesterday
I have revieved no update! D: What network you using?
Talkmobile. I havent been able to figure out exactly what it was – some sort of patch I think
awww. you running a modified ROM, or you on stock?
Reading more online about this is seems to have a few issues to stop me getting it.
The sealed battery is a big one, I like to have a couple of spares for then I travel around. The mentioned lack of a SD card is an issue, a feature I like about android phones in SD cards – I don’t understand the logic of making a phone that does 1080p video and then asks you to live with 32GB and mobile cloud use. And I very small point, I read it has hardware buttons instead of minimalist software ones for ICS, something I’d like to have in my next phone.
Seems a good effort but I think in the next few months this phones screen, storage and battery will all be topped, and every other feature also matched or bettered.
I agree, but it`s a case of bleeding edge versus cutting edge, i generally just go for the best thing that`s around when i`m ready to upgrade.
I get fed up with waiting and waiting while i could be using. Still love my desire 1st gen, although the memory is painfully small, forcing me to uninstall programs. Not bothered going the rooting route yet
I’ve got a Desire too – rooting is an absolute must! You’ll see a noticeable increase in responsiveness and you can choose software tailored to your needs – especially as the ROM library for the Desire is very well stocked.
I want !! I wonder if I can get work to get me one, Hmmmmm….
“We struggled to keep it going for a full working day of constant fiddling” – tell me a smartphone that’s not true of.
FYI “quadcore”? – it has FIVE cores, one a low power core that means it sips energy when in standby.
When’s the actual release date? Hopefully this will prompt samsung to release specs and direct people towards the s3
I can probably live without a replaceable battery, but no microSD card is a massive negative for me. I Just got a fab 64GB card for my Galaxy S2 bringing it up to 80GB total and am loving all the extra space for music and movies.
I could live with the lack of an SDcard, but the fixed battery is a complete dealbreaker for me (I’ve got very used to an extended battery on my HTC desire, 3200MaH instead of the default 1400MaH one)
“We’d rather trade a few millimetres of girth for a little more uptime for future reference, phone makers of the world.”
Amen to that!
I need read no further than to find you cant swap out the battery. Monumental mistake which rules it out for just about anyone I know that doesn’t work in an office…..actually I dont know anyone that works in an office.. It can have the best features in the world but if its dead its a paperweight.
I’m willing to bet that 95% of users don’t swap batteries out
I’ll take that bet, its been the main reason people who dont work near a 13 amp plug dont buy iphones.
I was hesitating about buying a Galaxy Nexus because I loved my HTC Legend and Desire S and I suspected that HTC would produce something special. However the lack of a replaceable battery rules this out as an option for me. I bought two batteries for the Nexus for €22 on Ebay and although I don’t need to swap every day at least I can.
Interesting… I have the original Desire and I was bit pissed when HTC stopped suppporting it quite quickly after it released a bunch of phones. so i am a bit wary of getting this phone. I just found out that I am eligible for a new phone and am wondering if I should get this. The SG2 is cool but the size is too big for me , I find the original desire size to be ideal. The SD card bizness is a bummer. But I have a 16 gig now that has been keeping me happy for while so I guess its not a big deal.
Mines out to delivery location according to the parcel tracker..can’t wait to play.
My Desire HD has a astoundly bad battery life.. I have a lead at work, home, and in the cars..its bascially on charge all the time, so even 10 mins respite would be a massive advance for me. Can’t be arsed changing batteries all the time so not that bothered.
Never store anything on my phone except apps and related data, so the none upgradeable memory doesn’t bother me..cloud all the way.
I love the way the instructions show how to bend a paper clip to eject the sim..Nice and old school, I’ve not seen a paper clip in years. The actual supplied ejecter is actually of surprising quality and design, thought it would just be a plastic stick.
So you review this as a great phone -> when the general consensus from most reliable sources is that the One X is currently actually inferior to the Galaxy nexus.
eg Phone arena: http://www.phonearena.com/reviews/HTC-One-X-vs-Samsung-Galaxy-Nexus_id3001/page/3
In the galaxy nexus review you mark it down for its camera? but this clearly shows that the HTC has a worse camera -> but you review it as being good?
A second issue with the new HTC phones? the bloated sense software which lags more than Vanilla ICS… but apparently the HTC One X has ‘champion performance’?
I’ve learnt not to pay attention to Gizmodo reviews any more. The standard is poor, and inconsistent. This one in particular appears to be a review by spec sheet!
No doubt the One X and S will be outstanding phones once they can be rooted and flashed with a largely Vanilla ROM (like Android Revolution HD)… but currently they are not up to scratch considering their spec.
I don’t think it clearly shows the One X camera worse than the Nexus at all… that writer’s jaded. the entire article is so pedantic and geared towards the nexus.
“after using each for a while it’s hard to chose, blahblah” – this is indicative with all technology. just because something is inferior doesn’t make it any less useful.
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I got one of these yesterday. Rooted it last night and so far its behaving really well! super quick, lovely (huge!) bright screen. Love the music player and the camera, as mentioned above, is awesome!
Havent really had it long enough to comment on the battery useage, but so far its not looking too bad.