| Review of the HTC One X (LTE) |
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There are actually two completely different versions of the HTC One X released at the same time. They carry the same name and they look more-or-less identical, but their guts are quite different. One is a quad-core Tegra-3 device that supports HSPA+, but not LTE. The second, which is the subject of this review, uses a Qualcomm dual-core processor and supports LTE. Last Updated: 01-May-2012 |
Before reading this review, please read Some Thoughts on Phone Reviewing.
I’ve learned my lesson from my previous experience with the Sony Xperia S and I made sure I had a SIM for this one. The One X uses a Micro-SIM, as will many newer phones as time goes on. For that reason I bought a Micro-SIM and an adapter so that I could use it in my Galaxy S2 LTE and in any new phones that needed a Micro-SIM. As it turned out however, the phone I borrowed from Howard Chui came with a demo line SIM, but it was just as well I’d gone to the trouble of getting my own Micro-SIM for future reviews.
Also see Howard Chui's review of the
One X at Howard Forums.
Audio
Click on this link for a full description of
Audio Performance, an how to interpret it.
Overall the sound quality during
incoming calls is quite pleasant, but not especially stellar. The phone seems to
exhibit more background noise and harmonic distortion than the direct
competition over at Samsung. The tonal quality is a bit on the tinny side with a
certain degree of harshness that is quite evident in some male voices in
particular.
The volume of incoming calls however is very good, and is louder than my Samsung
Galaxy S II LTE by a notch or two. The volume is more than adequate to make up
for faint callers, or for using the phone in a noisy environment.
The quality of your voice is about average, but like many phones that attempt to
mask background noise using dual microphones it introduces some very
odd-sounding damage to your voice to achieve its goal.
The speaker in a smartphone serves multiple purposes. It can be used during a
phone call to turn the device into a speakerphone, it plays the audio for
various multimedia applications, and it provides the phone’s ringer. In the case
of the One X, the speaker has a fairly nice tonal quality, though it’s still far
from the tinny end of the spectrum. Maximum volume is a bit disappointing,
ranking well below that of my S2 LTE. As always, the maximum volume of a speaker
directly affects the maximum volume of the ringer, and so the One X rates only
average when it comes to the audibility of ringtones when the phone is used in a
noisy environment.
The One X includes a tie-in with headset manufactured by
Monster (under the names
Beats Audio). This means the phone includes a pre-configured audio equalizer
that is custom-designed for specific models of Beats headsets. I don’t own a
Beats headset, and so I can’t comment on how well it works with one. They do
offer a setting for any other headset, but the effect is not particularly
pleasing. For the most part it just makes the music sound boomy.
I don’t know which audio chipset the phone uses, but it’s certainly better than
the Yamaha chip in the recent Samsung Galaxy S offerings or than the Texas
Instruments chip in the Galaxy Nexus.
I compared it to an
X-Fi
Xtreme sound card in my desktop computer (using identical MP3 files) and it
came out sounding very close to this one.
Display
Without a doubt, the screen on the One X (or more specifically on the dual-core
version) is probably the best out there. It measures 4.7 inches diagonally and
sports a resolution of 1280 x 720. This resolution is no longer anything
special, as a number of phones support it, including the Galaxy Nexus and Sony
Xperia S, both of which I have reviewed. Like the Sony it used an LCD display,
but in terms of quality it blows the Sony completely out of the game.
Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the display (seeing as it’s an LCD type and
not an AMOLED type) is that it doesn’t matter what angle you view the screen,
the colors and contrast remain consistent. Because of this you’d swear that it
was an AMOLED display, but it’s not. I had a chance to quickly compare this to
the quad-core version of One X and that phone’s screen suffers from fading and
contrast issues as the viewing angle is increased, suggesting that HTC does not
use the same screen technology on the both versions of the phone.
It’s really bright, so you won’t have any trouble seeing it in directly
sunlight. Like the Sony Xperia S it is noticeably brighter than the Super AMOLED
Plus display of the S2 LTE.
Curiously, one of the complaints concerning Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays is
that they look over-saturated. If that’s your opinion however, then you may find
the display on the One X a bit of a shock, because it over-saturates the colors
even more. This makes pictures “pop”, but if you compare them to the real colors
of the objects in the photographs they don’t look especially natural. Grass in
particular looks lime green, rather than the darker green that it actually is.
To power its graphics, the One X uses the Adreno 225 GPU, which is a step up
from the Adreno 220 in the S2 LTE. However, the One X has 2.4 times more pixels
to manipulate than the S2 LTE and the extra performance of the 225 over the 220
just about makes up for this. You can see it in the
GLBenchmark test results, in which the
One X scores approximately the same number of frames-per-second on the tests as
the S2 LTE.
The Sony Xperia S, which I recently reviewed, uses the Adreno 220 on a display
that’s 1280 x 720 and it suffers accordingly. As I noted in the review of the
Sony, they cheat in some places by limiting the number of colors displayed. The
One X doesn’t need to stoop to this, and so it always used full 32-bit color.
See my review of the Sony Xperia S to find out what kind of trouble limiting the
colors can generate.
So the over-saturated colors aside, the display on the One X is about as
gorgeous as you’re going to get in the current crop of smartphones (circa May
2012). It’s big, bright, super-sharp, and everything looks so wonderful on it.
Without a doubt this is one the biggest selling points of this model.
Processor and
Chipset
The LTE version of the One X (as sold by Rogers here in Canada) comes with the
Qualcomm MSM8960 dual-core process clocked at 1.5 GHz. This particular processor
is a Snapdragon S4 chip, whereas the MSM8260 in the S2 LTE is a Snapdragon S3.
Now I’ve read a number of reviews by perfectly sane people who seem to think
that S4 is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I can’t say I’ve seen any
evidence to back up these claims.
In various synthetic benchmark tests the One X doesn’t seem to fair any better
than the S2 LTE, and in particular the Antutu
results were better on the S2 LTE than on the One X. The scores were fairly
close (6498 on my S2 LTE and 6210 on the One X). A quick analysis of the
breakdown in the scores shows that the LTE S2 got markedly better scores on
integer math, 2D graphics, and RAM. Whereas the One X picked up a win was in the
access speeds for the internal Flash memory. The One X got better scores (albeit
only slightly) on database access and floating point math.
But synthetic benchmarks don’t always tell the true story, and so I ran
countless apps on both phones to look for smoother or faster operation on the
One X vs the S2 LTE. In some situations I MIGHT have seen SLIGHTLY smooth
performance from the One X, but I had to stare might hard to see it and the
differences were so small that they weren’t really significant (same as the
slight differences in benchmark numbers).
Now interestingly the One X runs Ice Cream Sandwich, while my S2 LTE only runs
Gingerbread. If you’ve read any of the fanboy stuff concerning ICS you’d think
that it alone would result in a buttery-smooth phone compared to one running
Gingerbread. If that were the case I should have seen a huge improvement in the
smoothness of the One X simply because it ran ICS, but I didn’t. I also talked
with a friend who owns both a Galaxy Nexus and the dual-core One X and he admits
that his Nexus seems slightly smoother than the One X.
The bottom line is that come the end of the day the slight differences in
performance between the One X and other dual-core phones on the market today are
mostly imaginary. That doesn’t mean that the One X isn’t a fantastic performer,
but at the same time it can’t walk on water and it puts its pants on one leg at
a time just like other smartphones (okay, that’s a weird analogy).
As for RAM, the One X comes with 1 GB, just like virtually every other high-end
smartphone on the market. It has been adequately demonstrated that 1 GB is an
excellent amount of RAM for an Android phone. Any more would be virtually
pointless, and any less would begin to cause performance issues. When it comes
to Flash storage however, the One X may be a bit disappointing to some. It comes
with 16 GB of build-in Flash, but that’s it. There is no MicroSD slot, and so
the memory cannot be expanded. Oddly the quad-core version, which also doesn’t
have a MicroSD slot, comes with 32 GB.
Data Speeds
The One X supports LTE, and so if you have LTE in your neck of the woods you’re
in for a treat. The newest generation of LTE support (courtesy of the Qualcomm
MSM8960) provides a number of clearly demonstrable benefits over the chipset in
the S2 LTE. One of them appears to be an astounding increase in upload speed.
The fastest upload speed I’ve clocked with the S2 LTE is 19.5 Mbps, though on
average it tends to be more around 11 Mbps. On the One X however, I usually saw
at least TWICE the speed during any given test and I observed many upload tests
that were in the 25 to 30 Mbps range.
Download speeds on the other hand were a rather puzzling mixed bag. Whenever I
was quite close to a site (and thus the LTE signal was super-strong and
super-clean) I would always get slightly better speeds from the S2 LTE than from
the One X (to the tune of 5 to 10 percent). However, as the signal became weaker
the One X would manage to provide speeds that were usually 10 to 20 percent
better than the S2 LTE (sometimes even more if the conditions were right).
Ping times were fairly similar on both phones, regardless of the conditions.
HSPA+ transfer rates and ping times were pretty much the same on both phones
(under all conditions).
However, if there is a fly in the ointment, it came in the form a rather nasty
issue that I experienced frequently with my test phone. I have no way to know
for certain if this is a flaw in the phone I tested, or a bug in all One Xs, but
my guess is that it’s a universal issue. About once every hour or so I’d loose
data connectivity, even though the status bar continued to show that I had an
active LTE or WiFi connection.
Most often the problem would occur while I was doing the upload portion of a
speed test, though it also occurred a couple of times during a talk session on
Zello. The data flow would suddenly stop and
I couldn’t do anything with the phone that required an internet connection.
Background apps that maintained a connection to a server would suddenly report a
loss of connection and it would stay this way for 20 or 30 seconds, at which
time everything mysteriously went back to normal.
The fact that it occurs on WiFi as well as LTE suggests that it’s an issue with
the TCP/IP stack somewhere above the transport layer. I’ve never seen this
happen on a phone before, including the Galaxy Nexus, which also uses Ice Cream
Sandwich.
GPS
Like the Sony Xperia S, I tested the accuracy of the GPS chip by installing
SportsTracker Pro on the One X and I used it to track a bike ride (as I do
all the time with my S2 LTE). When I played back the track of the ride it
initially looked good, but then things went bad quickly. The overall accuracy
was at least as poor as the Xperia S, and buildings had a much more profound
affect on the positioning than in the S2 LTE (or even with my old Captivate). It
often suffered from long-running offset errors of as much as 5 to 8 meters off
of the true course.
For use in car navigation it is questionable whether the inaccuracy of the GPS
will be of much concern, but if you use your phone to track your rides, runs, or
other fitness stuff you will find the accuracy of the One X rather
disappointing.
Camera
Spec-wise the camera on the One X is extremely close to the camera on the S2
LTE. They both shoot 8 megapixel stills and can take 1080p 30-frame-per-second
video. The quality of their still images is very close. In fact, it comes down
to a similar situation as we have with the processor performance. You can find
differences if you look hard, with some aspects being better on the One X and
others being better on the S2 LTE. The bottom line is that neither phone wins
hands down
When it comes to videos that same is true, though in one respect the One X does
win out over the S2 LTE, while in another the S2 LTE wins out over the One X.
The S2 LTE (when shooting in 1080p only) uses only the center portion of the
sensor and looks “zoomed”, while the One X uses the entire sensor so that the
shots do not look zoomed. Oddly the S2 LTE uses the full sensor for 720p videos,
but nonetheless a win for the One X. However, the auto-focus on the One X is
hideous in video mode. In fast pans the camera will lose the focus, and then it
takes an agonizingly long time to recover, leaving you with out-of-focus
subjects. The S2 LTE has been criticized for the auto-focus on its videos, but
it’s nowhere near as bad as this, and so we have a clear win for the S2 LTE.
Both phones shoot great-looking stills and take pretty good videos (for the most
part). However, neither of them can hold a candle to a video from a dedicated
camera or camcorder, so don’t expect to replace yours with either phone.
The One X does benefit from running ICS, which means it snaps photographs very
quickly. Unfortunately this can sometimes result in poor focus (as has been
pointed by others in reviews of the Galaxy Nexus).
Conclusions
While the One X is certainly NOT the greatest thing since sliced bread, it’s a
fairly serious competitor to the high-end Samsung models, which is exactly what
HTC needs at this point. It has an exceptional screen, great multimedia audio,
terrifically fast LTE speeds, and a pretty good camera. Beyond that however,
nothing about the phone really stands out. If the Snapdragon S4 really is faster
or more power-efficient than the Snapdragon S3 (used in the S2 LTE), then I
certainly couldn’t detect it in real-world situations. Contrary to other
reviewers, the phone IS NOT noticeably faster or smoother than the Galaxy Nexus
(which also runs Ice Cream Sandwich), nor than the Galaxy S2 LTE (which still
runs Gingerbread at the time of this writing, on a Snapdragon S3 processor).
There’s no question that this is a worthy high-end phone and if you happen to be
a big supporter of HTC then you’re going to be extremely happy with this
offering. I can’t comment on whether the quad-core
Tegra 3 version of this phone would be any
better (except perhaps as a gaming device), but I did get a chance to play with
the quad-core version for a short period of time and I couldn’t find any
evidence to suggest it was any faster than the dual-core version reviewed here.
