The HTC One X for AT&T represents the top of the line phone in the HTC One series. The One X is a high-powered and beautifully design Android 4.0 smartphone that HTC hopes will put them back on top of all Android smartphones.
Beautiful Industrial Design With Powerful Specs To Match
Let’s make this clear. This is the best phone HTC had designed to date. The phone comes with a sharp 4.7 inch Super LCD Contour display with Corning 3-D Gorilla Glass that product vibrant colors and solid viewing angles. With such a large display the device is incredibly thin and light weight and comfortable to hold in the and. It weighs in just at 4.58oz and 0.38 thin.
Even with that thin body it still packs a powerful 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor with 1 GB of RAM which keeps everything running very smoothly with no lag and fast loading apps. A solid 8 megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture paired with a 1.3 megapixel front facing camera that records in 720p which we will get into later. There is a 1800 mAH battery that is non removable which will be disappointing for some but will get you between 8-12 hours of battery life with heavy usage of AT&T’s 4G LTE getting you about 8 total and normal usage getting to closer to the 12 hour mark. Speaking of 4G LTE you get remarkable speeds on this One X with top speeds of about 55 Mbps down and 19 Mbps up here in the Boston market. There is also no removable storage which is a bummer but you get 16 GB of on-board storage and 25 GB of Free of Dropbox cloud storage for 2 years. There is also Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS to round out the specs.
All these great hardware specs wouldn’t matter unless the phone works as a good phone and the HTC One X works solid as a phone with great reception and clear audio quality on both sides of the call. To put it simply the One X is a impressive a beautiful piece of hardware.
HTC Sense 4 Finally Makes Sense and Beats Audio For All
I’ve been very critical over the years with Sense UI and how clunky, unintuitive and non-android the UI was to the point where at a press event in San Diego I told the community manager that it flat out sucked. It looks like they have listened because Sense 4 is the best version of Sense UI ever. They have taken a clean and simple approach and it has worked there. It looks a lot more closer to stock Android 4.0 than in the past. They kept the quick access shortcuts on the lock screen while changing the home screen dock to simple shortcuts that you can customize to what you want them to be.
The notification tray is now de-cluttered and just shows your notifications and settings option. Navigating between home screen desktops is fast and fluid but lacks the spinning 3D carousel affect which I’m sure many will not miss. You get the same folder creation and multitasking features of Android 4.0 ICS with and added Sense UI graphical presentation to them. What is missing is the stock keyboard. By default you only have HTC’s keyboard to choose from which is a find keyboard but not as good as the stock Ice Cream Sandwich keyboard. To get that you will have to download it from the Google Play Store and then activate it in the software settings and reboot your phone for the keyboard option to be available and they will show up in the notification tray when you tap on a text box to input. There is also a cool feature in the default browser that lets you remove all the clutter from a webpage and just focus on the readable content which is nice for those sites that don’t render well on a mobile browser.
Beats Audio is also included and is now available for all apps to use. Before it was restricted to just the stock HTC Music app but now Google Music, MOG Music, Pandora, YouTube and more can now take advantage of Beats Audio technology to get the best sound possible. When the software is active it will pop up in the notification tray and you can easily switch in on or off to see the difference. Beats Audio makes a difference in audio quality compare to the standard audio from a phone. Does this mean you can just buy any cheap pair of earphones or headphones and get awesome quality? No, you will still want to get a good headphone or earphone set to get the best listening experience.
For those gamers out there you’ll be happy to know that games like Cordy, Temple Run and Angry Birds will run fine and will support more power-hungry games down the line. Games are responsive and look great on the 4.7 inch 720p HD display. Now some games will look a bit pixelated since they won’t scale well on the screen size but the more phones that come with HD display we should see the graphics improve more on android games.
There isn’t a lot of pre-loaded software on the One X but what is there you can’t remove and there is a redraw issues that can cause a delay when you open up the app tray. It has to turn the clear top bar dark to match the menu and there is a delay with that sometimes and the tray really looks out-of-place in the new Sense UI. It should use a transparent background to match the theme better. Even with those small gripes this is by far the best I’ve seen from Sense and if this is the direction they are heading with the software it’s a great one to go in.
The Best Camera Quality On Android, Improved Software
The HTC One X comes with an impressive 8 Megapixel camera. Last year the Amaze 4G was their first good quality camera from HTC in a long time and they have taken what they have learned from that, improved it and applied it to the One X. The One X users HTC ImageChip and HTC ImageSense technology to product high quality photos that rival digital point and shoot cameras. The images look great and when in perfect lighting you will get an amazing shot. Indoor shots have improved but still closer to standard cell phone quality. There is a five stage flash that will automatically put out the correct brightness depending on the environment. The software layout for the camera is also much better and simpler to get around to the settings and shot you want. They have include cool options such as Panorama, HDR and Slow Motion video. There is a 1.3 Megapixel front facing camera with 720p but there isn’t anything impressive about the quality there. Very standard. Another good thing we can finally say about a HTC camera is that it record good audio with the 1080p HD video capture. The sound isn’t the best but more than passable for uploading to YouTube and Facebook. HTC has done an excellent job here with the One X camera making it the best camera on an android phone to date.
Panorma Shots
HTC One X: The Best Android Phone Out Now
Simply put, The HTC One X is the best android phone available now. You can tell with the One X that HTC studied their competition and set out to not only match them but to beat them out. The One x has supreme build quality, awesome specs and solid software but there are a few gripes with no removal battery, crappy front-facing camera and, no way to expand storage with a micro SD card. But even with those caveats many users will be happy selecting the HTC One X for AT&T as their next smartphone of choice.
AT&T has been adding a ton of quality phones to their smartphone selection and its going to be hard to go into their stores and not find something you like. The HTC One X is another high-end phone added to the list.
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