HTC One X review: Complete features, hardware, interface, price and verdict

Display

The incredible display is an advance super LCD 2 screen with an HD resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. You might be apprehensive of an LCD screen in the age of AMOLEDs, but if you think so you can’t be more wrong! This is no ordinary LCD and you will know it the instance you pick up and look at the screen. It has some of the brightest colors we have seen on a phone as well among darkest blacks. The sides are not fuzzy at all even under macro. The icons appear as if they are printed on the gorilla glass.

The viewing angles are superb, we mean even if you go till under 30% of viewing it horizontally to your eyes, you can clearly read the icon names, even webpages with moderately large fonts – incredible! The screen in non-Pentile so all the RGBG color pixels are of the same size – reducing the fuzziness when zoomed in really large.

The sunlight readability is amazing too. You can read stuffs with black background fairly well under direct sunlight. Atleast it’s better than the Nexus, S2 and the Note. We are yet to review the S III.

Interface

Sense 4.0

The One X is one of the first mobiles in the world to carry Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and Sense 4.0. Ice Cream Sandwich bring in lot of new features that are either present on Android 2.x or on 3.x and ofcourse a few new features. What Sense 4.0 does is that the UI doesnot customize the stock ICS heavily. Instead it tries to gel with the stock features so that you can benefit from ICS as well as get the goodies of Sense that you’ve come to love over the years. This means that Sense is much lighter than the previous versions, and also probably the smoothest of them all. There is absolutely no lag while scrolling though the UI whatsoever.

The lock screen is familiar with the notification of the hot app buttons. You can customize the same in settings to have notifications showing on the lock screen, and other templates as well. Once unlocked, you will see the familiar clock and live weather widget. You can ofcourse add or remove any of the widgets by long-pressing and bringing up the relevant menu. You can also add or remove homescreen like you could always in Android. You can also create folders.

The app-dock below holds a maximum of four of your favorite apps. You can customize these. These are the icons that appear on your lock-screen remember. You won’t see the carousel rotation of the homepages where they look as if rotating in a continuous cylinder. We liked it really but afraid might have been memory intensive.

The main app menu also doesnot customize much. You can edit the tabs in the main menu to hide or rearrange the frequent and downloads tabs – something new in Sense 4.0. There is no widget tab in the main menu like in case of stock ICS.

Phone, mail and messaging

There’s nothing much to talk about in the phone menu; they are mostly familiar as far as HTC handsets are concerned. Phone, people, groups and call history tabs allow you to quickly browse through the same. It’s deeply social media integrated to keep you updated on your contacts’ statuses.

Mail app is also not much different from the previous versions of Sense. You can configure Microsoft exchange, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail and manual setup.

Messaging app supports threaded display. You can chose to display one, two or three lines of the message in the message list. Rest mostly stays same.

Browser

HTC doesnot deviate too much from the stock ICS browser, instead focusses on its performance. The browser menu and address bar goes out of your way immediately to leave you all to the webpage. It by default loads the mobile version of a site, but selecting the desktop mode will refresh the page to load the desktop version. There is also a one-touch flash support button enabling which will refresh the page to start playing your flash content. The browser has full flash support and videos and games play like butter.

Camera and video

It is no longer a traditional smartphone quality camera. The 8mp back camera can click amazing photos with deep RGB distribution as well as utilizes every bit of light even in low light with the F/2 aperture. The photo burst mode will click multiple photos while you keep pressing the shutter release and can automatically give you the best among them. There are also a zillion special effects and filters to keep you entertained. The continuous autofocus is very fast and focuses immediately.

There are panorama, HDR, white-board, group portrait, landscape, low-light etc. special modes.

The back camera can record full HD 1080p videos @24fps. You can also slow down the frame-rate to create beautiful creative slow-motion videos. The front camera can record 720p videos as well. You can also click snaps while recording. In fact this functionality extends to video player as well.

The camera clicks amazing photos in broad daylight, with nice greens. Low-light performance is also very good thanks to the F/2.0 lens.

The video clicks very crisp videos at full HD. You can see the drops crystal clear in the following test videos.

It has very fast autofocus. You can see it instantly autofocuses on the flower the moment I made it steady.