Rogers HTC One X Review

 HTC had no choice but reinvent itself; it was necessary for its survival. After a disappointing year in 2011, the One X is HTC’s most important phone since the Hero, when it introduced Sense to the Android world and cemented itself within the industry as a promulgator of form and function.

At first glance, the One X is barely recognizable as a HTC smartphone. Though its singularly precise bodywork and outstanding balance reminds us in many ways of the Sensation, the move from aluminum to a matte polycarbonate and subtly-curved body speaks to the company’s willingness to experiment.

At the time of writing this review for the One X, it’s currently Canada’s most powerful Android device. On paper the device has it all, both outside and in. Let’s take a ride to the centre of the One X to see if the experience delivers on its promises.

Camera

The excellent performance extends to the camera, too. HTC has embedded an 8MP backside illuminated sensor with a f/2.0 aperture lens, plus a dedicated processing chip dubbed ImageSense. This allows the phone to take shots at speeds of 4fps by holding down the virtual shutter button.

Photo quality is uniformly excellent in well-lit scenes, and mostly good in low-light scenarios. In a future post we’ll take you through comparisons with the iPhone 4S, Sony Xperia S, Galaxy Note and Lumia 900, but for now we’ll show you some sample photos.

The 1MP front-facing camera is good, but no better than the majority of its competition, while 1080p video is of high quality, but lacks effective image stabilization (despite the feature being present). There is plenty of detail in the video, and colours are deep and rich; the sensor also adjusts to light very quickly. But I found there to be a distinct shakiness to whatever I captured, exposing its smartphone roots. Samsung and Apple seem to have done a better job with image stabilization on the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S2 respectively, and I hope HTC figures out a way to improve it, since all the other aspects are there

Software

Sense 4.0 is, simply, a pared-down and de-bloated version of what HTC brought with the Sensation and Amaze. Its customizable dock, 2D floating widgets and vastly improved performance make the experience significantly better, and I have to commend them on creating one of the finest Android user experiences around.

Much of this fette is owed to Android 4.0, which is inherently more beautiful, intuitive and capable than Gingerbread. HTC has adopted the ICS method of creating folders and swiping away individual notifications, along with a horizontal app drawer and improved method of adding widgets to the home screen.

But there are areas within the operating system that they have either changed for change’s sake, or the improvements are so minute as to be inexplicable.

For example, the new multitasking menu, while seemingly more intuitive than the vertically-scrolling default ICS version, is ultimately finicky. Like on Windows Phone, the large 3D snapshots of your previously-used apps are arrayed in order of most- to least-recently used. You can flick upwards to end the process — the same as the horizontal motion in stock ICS — which is quite convenient. But the whole endeavour seems needlessly ostentatious, and is certainly no improvement over the very natural-feeling method in stock ICS. Even the One V, which is HTC’s low-end entry in the One Series, maintains the vertical multitasking menu in Sense 4.0.

Included Apps

HTC has included a fair number of “stock” apps for your perusal, though few of them deserve more than a passing mention. As always, the Clock app, which opens when you touch the gorgeous new clock ticker widget on the main home screen, is a stunning piece of engineering. Now with a manipulable 3D globe looks fantastic on the high res screen, you can add up to 10 cities to your roster, and set alarms, a stopwatch and a timer. The Clock app, along with HTC Watch, is an example of an app that HTC put a lot of care and thought into.

Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the stock Notes, Tasks and Movie Editor which promise great things and greatly underdeliver.

HTC’s Car Mode app is extremely functional and attractive. With the optional car dock, the ability to hook into music, internet radio, navigation or to make a phone call, will be an often-used feature for most drivers.

As usual, Rogers includes its own melange of bloatware, but the One X has the advantage of being able to disable any app from within the App Manager. While this doesn’t actually uninstall the app (if it takes up space, it continues to do so) it does “disappear” the icon and all associated relationships with other apps. This is as good as you’re going to get in this day and age and something we appreciate HTC allowing users to do — we’ll see if Samsung follows suit.

Network Speeds, Audio Quality & Call Quality

The HTC One X boasts some of the fastest overall speeds from any phone we’ve ever used, be it zipping around homescreens or downloading large files. This is owed to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 processor with its integrated LTE baseband. As we showed you during the Hands-On, the One X is capable of some incredibly high speeds on the Rogers network, and it’s the first LTE device I’ve used where I felt like the CPU could finally keep up with the downloads.

We were consistently able to get over 25Mbps both download and upload over the Rogers network, and when falling back to 4G in areas without LTE, the speeds were a very manageable 3-5Mbps down and 1-2Mbps up. As LTE expands across Canada, I’m excited for more Canadians to experience it — the difference is truly astounding, and you won’t want to go back.

Battery Life

For the first smartphone with integrated LTE, I had high hopes for the One X’s battery life, and for the most part it delivers. For the first few days, when I was heavily testing the One X, the battery lasted between seven and nine hours. On one day I turned off LTE and it lasted nearly 15 hours on a single charge.

With “regular” use the One X is going to be fine for battery life. That’s not to say integrated LTE negates the relatively higher battery drain but it certainly improves upon it. With battery tests certain things must be taken into account: the strength of the signal, the brightness of the screen, and most importantly how many things are updating in the background.