Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is our full review of the quad-core Tegra 3 powered HTC One X let's get to it so before getting started a little bit of background in 2011 HTC messed up they've released far too many phones and even their top-of-the-line devices weren't that great while Samsung was killing it with the Galaxy S 2 selling millions and millions of units in 2012 HTC has a renewed focus on getting back to its roots of innovation they're focusing on making sense a lot more useful and less fluffy they're focusing on attention to detail in their hardware design because you might remember that last year most of their phones looked exactly the same so finally we're seeing some creativity from HTC so let's get started with the unboxing HTC is using this new kind of box the material is kind of like a recycled paper which actually feels a little cheap but it's kind of a unique design it's white it's got a 1.5 gigahertz Tegra 3 quad-core 4+1 chip as they call it which means that there are four cores to do all the heavy lifting and then there's one core to do background tasks it's also got a full gig of ram 32 gigabytes of storage and you get an extra 25 gigs of Dropbox storage which is super cool for two years it's also got an 8 megapixel camera with f 2.0 aperture allowing for a lot of light into the lens 1080p HD video reporting and it's got a pretty large 1800 million power battery it's not listed here so you open up the cover and we can see that HTC has a new slogan I'm the one you've been waiting for kind of provocative so inside the box we have a little device that helps you cut your SIM to a micro SIM shape kind of a template there and it'll also help you pop out the so tray and underneath all of this we have just some headphones not Beats Audio headphones and a charger so some first impressions of this device the screen is expansive they call this the infinity display because kind of like an infinity pool where it looks like there's no edge and it's a different HTC design than we're used to we've got a new kind of speaker up here which is nice kind of like little dots very precise manufacturing went into making this phone and we've got the poly car minute backing so it has a really nice in hand feel so very nice build quality one more thing to mention is that we've dual microphones one on the top and one on the bottom to help with noise cancellation always a great feature to have okay let's turn on the phone and talk about software first of all the screen on this phone is fantastic it's got the widest viewing angles of any phone I've ever seen the display looks literally painted on it's an effect that I've never seen on any other display it's just that good so let's talk about Sense 4.0 Sense 4.0 is based on Ice Cream Sandwich so I've got a lot of the functionality of Ice Cream Sandwich the dock has been redesigned no longer is there the permanent phone and personalize button down there which is great another thing HTC has improved is the way you add things to the homescreen I don't really like the way that this this works actually it's just very convoluted you have so many widgets to choose from and it gets overwhelming I like that they added the search bar to be able to search for widgets but there are just dozens and dozens of widgets now just like HTC Android devices from the very beginning we've got leaf and people like to show leaf because it's so fast and fluid something new with Sense 4.0 is that we can finally finally delete home screen so we can tap and drag we can have one home screen if we want we can have up to seven or eight it's great that we can finally customize the number of home screens so I mentioned some areas where the One X lags and and let me show you some of those for example if I tap on a folder it opens pretty quickly right but did you see how that stuttered but if I go back and click on the same folder a second time it will be smooth illness as if it needs to go into memory first and it's having trouble doing them another place that the operating system lags and I think this is the Tegra 3 chip all the way if I go into settings here and I tap on any setting there's a one second sometimes two second lag watch and that's kind of ridiculous we're running on four cores here with a gig of ram and as i bounced around sense you're going to see some more lag for example if we go to the program tray and we open that up you see how long that took there was that animation that probably slowed it down a little bit but it's just not as fast as it should and something new if it's talked about some of the positive thing something new to HTC Sense are these tabs along the bottom that can actually be changed so you what you see a lot in the operating system these three dots up here and we can go to edit tabs and we can customize the tabs you can do this previously in HTC Sense but it wasn't very intuitive now one place that HTC Sense has always excelled as the email application you can do a unified inbox which will show you a different color for every different account we've got these new checkboxes which actually could use a little bit more contrast but when you tap on them you get these items along the bottom you can mark as red delete or move to there's a really cool function in HTC Sense email with threaded conversations take a look at this if you have a threaded conversation you get a counter here and a down arrow here it allows you to see in different levels of depth where your conversations are I think that's just super cool another thing you can do here like you could do in the program list is go to edit tabs again and customize the tabs that you have because an HTC Sense of previous phones you had a bunch of tabs at the bottom and you had to have at least three well if you leave one down there there are no tabs at all you get to maximize the viewing space but let's say we want to go in there we want to have favorites then we go back then we'll have two tabs along the bottom we get this really cool animation back and forth row in the email client let's make a new message and take a look at the keyboard HTC has made some pretty big improvements of the keyboard it just looks really crisp and sharp on this 720p display it has the built-in swipe like interface so you can swipe along the screen - if that's your preferred method of endpoint takes a little bit of practice overall a really good keyboard okay so let's talk about this multitask UI at first I really didn't like it but it's actually pretty smart what's annoying about this multitask UI is that it doesn't give you a high-level view of all of your apps now something that you can do is flick programs off the screen which will actually close them another thing that has been cleaned up is the notification shade so we can go up here and no longer do we have the list of programs there which was kind of redundant and you can swipe items off the screen just like you can in stock Ice Cream Sandwich something super cool that HTC did just a little touch is they made the top notification bar translucent actually it's kind of transparent I guess so you can see through to your background of course let's take a look at the web browser web presence is extremely important on any mobile device and with a quad-core chip we want awesome web browsing performance and especially with the 720p display so we're going to go into pocket now here and I'm going to select Internet because I've got Chrome Beta also installed and this is HTC's custom browsers so they've done some things to this and let's load the desktop version of Pocket now we'll have browser speed comparisons in future videos I can tell you that it's quite fast it's not the fastest browser but it's definitely very capable so we can pinch to zoom in it takes a little bit too long to clear up that's one of the places where I think that there is a little too much lag in the operating system in the browser things just aren't as fast as they should be so we can go into landscape get a really killer full screen view utilizing all of these pixels on the screen super smooth scrolling and zooming let's jump into a story here so web browsing very fast very proficient and it looks especially killer on this amazing display super LCD to its HTC Show in the world that you don't need an AMOLED screen to create beautiful vibrant colors and awesome contrast it's just a wonderful screen and finally we've got to talk about the camera because one of the main selling points of the HTC One series of devices is the camera in fact their slogan is amazing camera authentic sound or something like that so let's jump into the camera app and talk about why the camera is apparently so amazing so it's eight megapixel shoots 1080p video and one of the really cool things is that you no longer have to switch between photo and video mode it's all here on the same screen another really cool feature is that you can record a video and while doing so you can take a picture while the video is still recording it doesn't produce the best shots in the world and we'll put some samples up in the for review but it's a cool feature to be able to have another super awesome amazing feature is the burst shooting which allows you to hold down the camera shutter button and it will kind of make a interesting ticking sound when you do and what it will do it will bring up this interface that allows you to see all of the pictures and select which one of them is quote the best shot which is so useful because you don't want to sit there with a gallery full of 35 images that look almost exactly the same but what you want to do what you do want to do is look at that special moment flip through all the pictures that you took in the bursts and say this is the one I want to say this is the one that I want to remember so how's the photo quality and how's the video quality again one of some samples in the full PocketNow review as a preview the photos are great they're not amazing in fact the iPhone 4s still kills the HTC One X in terms of low-light performance fast motion capturing when people are moving quickly and in terms a video it does a really good job with the 1080p video I have to say very good exposure again take a look at the samples coming up in the pocket now review and you can tell for yourself before wrapping up this video just want to offer a few test notes those things that you just get by using the phone for a few days those little details that matter a lot like battery life house battery life on the HTC One X it's average you'll get through a day just fine if you're using it heavily you're going to have to charge on the evening but if you're using it kind of on a moderate level with a few costs here some email browsing sessions there you'll be fine to get through the entire day it's got an 1800 million power battery what kills the battery is gaming because all those four cores are kicking on and they are blazing and yes they are actually blazing in terms of heat because they get really really hot the back of the phone gets really warm when playing a game utilizing the Tegra graphics and it's just a true battery life killer so decent battery life another test note how does it fit in your pocket that's always very important the One X is a larger device it's got a pretty big screen does it slide easily into the pocket and yes it does thankfully it's very thin so you can hardly tell that it's there it's not like the Galaxy Note where you can just feel this large brick thing in your pocket and it feels about the same as the Galaxy Nexus if you have experience with that device it's just it's it's thin so it goes in relatively easily into your pocket so in conclusion we give the HTC One X the Tegra 3 international version a four out of five why four out of five enough five the lag enos of the operating system is pretty atrocious it's subtle but for power users is very very noticeable when you tap on a setting when you tap on a folder it stutters it should not do that with a quad-core chip games look really great they definitely look really great in fact the Tegra optimized games look console quality but in day to day use this thing just doesn't feel as rocket fast as it should but of course you can route it and put any ROM you want on it to help fix it another reason we're giving it a four out of five is because the camera while really cool in terms of feature set doesn't take the most amazing pictures as HTC will lead us to believe the iPhone 4s even the galaxy s2 takes slightly better photos than the HTC One X that said the HTC One X Hardware is phenomenal the infinity screen is gorgeous the display itself is unbelievably crisp and clear it gets attention from everyone and the form factor is gorgeous the HTC One X is definitely the best Android phone on the market right now but guess what's coming up next the galaxy s3 unless you really want the One X far you and you're looking at a high-end foam that's this expensive wait to see what Samsung does because it might blow this thing out of the water if you liked this video please give us a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now you