There’s been a lot of Android phones out there in the market, but nothing has been so gorgeous as the new HTC One X. This is the perception you would get when you look at it for the first time. And guess what? This is true. HTC One series are the feature phones that HTC would be betting on, this year to regain its market share in the US and across the world. So this critical factor has very well been reflected in this cute product that the company has come out and with real innovation, without copying the iPhone.

The phone we are about to review is the global version of the new HTC One X, which belongs to the HTC One series of phones that were announced back at Mobile World Conference 2012 in Barcelona. This 130g device sports a very powerful and competitive configuration that would make it the best Android phone ever in the market and also the best Android phone, that doesn’t make you feel like you are on Android.

The HTC One X comes with a powerful 1.5GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, an 8-megapixel camera, a 32GB built-in storage and a 4.7-inch 720p display. These are pretty good and competitive configurations. But lets just take this phone for a test in our labs and analyze if this would really change HTC’s current market share and make it the best Android phone ever.

The Hardware: Build, Speed and Design

The HTC One X is probably the best gorgeous looking Android smartphone available in the market. Whatsoever, the White color of this device shows off its class. The phone is definitely a winner in the design and the looks. And looks like HTC has started adopting Apple’s Principle of marrying technology, with liberal arts and humanity. iPhones have always felt good in the hands of the customer and HTC One X doesn’t fail to do this. You hold this device in hand, and you’ll unintentionally fall in love with it.

On the other hand, if you think this is a flat, straight device, you’re probably wrong. Both the top and the bottom of the device are slightly curved and lifted up and the entire device is covered by a matte plastic giving it a richer look than other plastic made devices. But there’s a problem with this white matte finish. It is highly vulnerable to strains and the love having them on the surface. Make sure you carry a wet cloth with you to wipe away these strains. Overall, the design is awesome, before you switch the device on. One look, you would fall in love with it. But wait, there’s more than just the looks in this device, that we need to look into.

You hold this device in hand, and you’ll unintentionally fall in love with it.

Let’s talk about the specs now. Before we could go ahead and hit the test button, you might want to look at the specs first. The entire specification (Most of them were not briefed on the HTC Website) are below:

Processor & On-board memory

By this time, you might have realized that the specs are top notch. The HTC One X has got one of the best specs when compared to any Android device and it keeps the promise of performing good with the new HTC Sense 4.0 UI. For the first time, on an Android device, both the specs and the software are tied tightly with one another. The processor is damn fast and the graphics are pretty awesome. It did not let us down at any point of time while testing it.

We put the device under test and found that the HTC One X performs in par with the ASUS Transformer Prime. The One X scored a whooping 10143, which is the highest of all the best CPU performances in the Android devices, and it kicked off the so-called powerful tablets in the market like Samsung Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S II very easily. The device’s Tegra 3 processor clearly shows how a quad-core CPU can perform on a mobile device with a very well written Operating System.

The device has been well equipped with a 1GB DDR3 RAM, a 32GB ROM with 27GB of actual usage space, and we think this is a pretty large space, and even if you find this to be a hurdle for you to store some files, Dropbox is giving a 23GB free online storage space for the owners. Just like how the iPhone works, the HTC One X does not want the users to mess up with the device by inserting a micro-SD card into it. So you purchase a 32GB model, and you’re stuck with it.

Radios & Data Speed

The One X comes with a NFC radio built in and we did not get a chance to test it, since we rarely found a NFC enabled vendor to test it in real-time. But, remember, there are actually two versions of the same HTC One X that would ship across the world. One with the AT&T’s LTE enabled phone and the other would be a world phone. The one we tested was the world phone.

The data speeds were varying depending on the network coverage, which felt obvious. But surprisingly, the phone was able to download at speeds of 19Mbps even with just one bar of signal reception, which made us believe that the device has got a highly sophisticated antenna built-into it.

The Bluetooth 4.0 adoption was pretty fast and it outperformed other devices in transferring data another Bluetooth 4.0 device. We also noticed that they have adopted a new technology called aptX™, which is HD audio streaming from your Bluetooth 4.0 device.

Bottomline: A device that showcases the power of Tegra 3 with a design that looks gorgeous.

Display

We just took a tour of the hardware and specs. Now, after we unpacked the device, and when we switched the device on, we were just amazed and awestruck. The display is just brilliant and so is the UI. We were able to view the device’s display even at 180-degrees and there were no glossy-ish feeling while doing that.

Amazing display with wider viewing angle

The display supports a 720p HD display which is pretty much equal to the iPhone and iPad’s Retina display and the pixels are invisible to the naked eye. But one things the phone’s display is missing out is the pentile subpixel arrangement, that are deployed in most of the smartphone with AMOLED displays in them. Playing HD videos were a bliss on this phone.

The text and the images on the websites were crisp and sharp with the HTC One X’s display and we think this consumes a much lesser battery life since they use self-illuminated AMOLEDs in them.

Bottomline: A smartphone display in par with Apple’s Retina display technology.

Camera

HTC has been marketing the One X with the tagline: “Amazing Camera, Authentic Sound” and this seems to be true for the camera. The new UI that HTC has bought to these devices, called the HTC imageSense is pretty impressive and stands out of other Android devices’ camera UI. The UI has got two buttons, one for the still camera and the other for the video camera. You don’t have to keep switching between these two modes (Still and Video). If you want to shoot a video, just tap on the video button and in a snap, it would start shooting the video. The same process goes for the still photo also.

They are not game changers. But imageSense is amazing

The shutter speed is pretty slow compared to its competitors. This might be because of the imageSense UI that is being used for the camera. The auto-focus is accurate and is fast, may be because it uses the Tegra 3 processor to process the image. Even though the shutter speed is a bit slow, it is still bearable and the devices’ camera does not compromise on the image quality.

The images were brilliant when we had the HDR On, and there was super huge difference when compared to the image taken with HDR Off. The images can definitely be identified that they have been taken with a cameraphone. And it kind-of gives a retro feeling to the images, since it crops some portions off, just like the older generation smartphones do.

Bottomline: Good attempt with imageSense. But the camera fell short of our expectations.

Audio Playback (Beats Audio)

Beats audio pulls it off.  

As mentioned earlier, HTC was betting on its camera and audio capabilities for the One X device and the camera failed to meet our expectation during the test. But the company seems to have met the expectation with the audio quality, which they have equipped with Beats Audio.

Both the ear piece and the loudspeaker excelled in our tests and they were able to manage a decent playback with full volume. We tried playing Linkin Park’s Bleed it out on both ear piece and the loudspeaker with full volume and the device was able to stay clear even at those frequencies.

The speakers performed very well even while playing low frequency tracks from the internet and the in-ear headphones provided a pretty good noise cancellation, making sure we heard a clear and loud sound. Enabling the Beat option in the device boost the bass pretty much to a higher level and the audio system is definitely worth the money. We realized that there were considerable amount of battery drain with Beat enabled and we turned it off for the rest of our testing.

Battery Life

The battery life was one factor that we wanted to concentrate on throughout our testing process. Initially, we wanted to put the battery to some stress test and so, we had almost every feature of the device switched on. We were streaming a online video at full resolution with maximum brightness and connected to WiFi and 3G networks to push the devices’ capability on the edge and noticed that the battery stood upto 4hours and 30mins  until it switched itself off. This is not a bad battery life though. The Tegra 3 was the main battery consumption factor here.

The device’s 1,800 mAh battery performed well for what its made for. But we thought HTC could have put some more power into these to take full advantage of this beautiful device. We then went on to the regular battery test, spending almost a day with the device for normal tweeting, checking and replying to emails, and making and attending phone calls. The battery outperformed when compared to its competitors. The battery went low only after a whooping 13hours and 10mins until it switched itself off.

Gaming was another factor that we looked at. We were messing up with Asphalt 6: Adrenaline continuously for over an hour and the device started to heat up. Tegra 3 seems to be the culprit here. But the hotspot was not unbearable and We did not feel any major change since we were already used to these hotspots on smartphone.

Call Quality & Reception

The call quality is almost equal to that of the iPhone 4S. There isn’t much difference in this section of the phone and the voices are crystal clear when in a nominal background with medium noise levels. The other party was able to hear the voice much clearer even when in noisy background and the noise cancellation has really worked out for the HTC One X.

The phone does heat up when speaking over it for more than an hour, but we are still unclear about the reason behind this heating up. But the loudness was a bit less when compared to the iPhone 4S. The battery life was normal and performed as expected while on calls. Well, there isn’t much to comment about the battery life while on call at this point of time, we have reached out to HTC to know how the battery would perform when on the calls.

Sense 4.0 UI

The HTC’s new Sense 4.0 makes the device feel that it is not cooked with the regular Android ROM. The HTC Sense 4.0 has been completely revamped and the entire device looks simple, clean and neat. This was what we were looking for in many smartphone. HTC has written almost all the stock apps that come with the Sense 4.0 from the scratch. The Sense UI has been written on top of Ice Cream Sandwich and when you boot the device for the first time and after you take your eyes off the gorgeous display, you’ll be greeted with a small tutorial screen, which teaches you how to use the Sense UI.

The UI is completely optimizable with loads of options that the user can configure. Right from the color, to the notification center, the configurations are in the hands of the user. The notifications dropdown got more powerful with this new update and you can do a lot more than you have imagined with notifications screen now. But if you have used the iPhone running iOS 5, you’ll feel that there’s a strong influence from the iOS in Sense 4.0.

Used to iOS & WebOS? You’ll see all of em’ here

HTC has removed the old 3D transition between the pages and has replaced with something new. But one thing that you’ll notice is that, the multi-tasking UI has been inspired from webOS. Next thing we wanted to talk to is the new Browser on the Sense 4.0. The new ROM sports a completely re-written Browser, which performs very beautifully on highly polished HTML5 and CSS3 websites (Like ours). We hardly found any lag in the browser and it was pretty fast.

There’s still the Swype keyboard and a new UI for the NFC/Android Beam feature. You just have to touch something to share it using the Android beam. The phone app, the widgets and many other features of the device are pretty much the same and there are some minor tweaks here and there in the UI.

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Bottomline: The HTC Sense 4.0 was what everyone needed. Its a huge break from the stock Android ROMs.

Wrap-up:

It was a complete new experience with the HTC One X, and we think this would set the mark for other Android Smartphones that would come up in the market. The One X performed well in the regions we expected, like the battery life, audio, call quality and browsing speeds, but it was a bit of let down when we looked into the camera.

HTC has set the mark for new Android phones

The cutting edge hardware is a definite advantage for this device and HTC did not let us down in satisfying us on speeds and benchmarks. People are already talking about this device as a potential competitor for the iPhone. But we still think there’s a lot more that this device should do to get there. The real competition is between the HTC One X and HTC One S itself. Both seems to be running on a race to perform better with every tests that we have made.

If HTC concentrates more on the Sense 4.0 UI, which we’re sure it will, and if the company improves the camera, there’s no reason this phone shouldn’t become the best Android device on the planet. The adoption rates will also be high from the iPhone and BB users, since the Sense UI has inspired most of the feature from them.

 

The 4Cast Score: 9.7