Can a single phone really turn a struggling brand around, or just buy it some time?
The HTC One X arrived as exactly that kind of attempt: a course correction wrapped in polycarbonate. After a messy period of too many similar phones with weak identities, HTC tried to reboot its Android story around a few clear flagships. On paper, the One X looks like a confident reset. In practice, it feels like a phone that got a lot right, while still showing how hard a true rebound really is.
A Bold Hardware Reset: Polycarbonate, 4.7″ LCD, Tegra 3
HTC didn’t just tweak the Sensation formula, it ditched it. The One X jumps to a 4.7-inch HD Super LCD2 panel at around 312 ppi, driven by NVIDIA’s 4‑PLUS‑1 Tegra 3 chipset and wrapped in a polycarbonate unibody.
The design shift matters. Older metal HTC flagships looked premium but came with antenna “death grip” complaints. The One X’s non‑painted polycarbonate shell cuts weight to 130g, avoids those signal issues, and hides scratches more gracefully. The profile is 8.9mm, and despite the 4.7-inch screen, the footprint is only marginally larger than the 4.3-inch Galaxy S II. That’s smart spatial engineering, not just spec bumping.
The screen is the star. Super LCD2 here is extremely sharp, bright, with excellent viewing angles and solid contrast for LCD. Colors are nicely saturated without going full neon, and sunlight legibility is just behind the best in the market. Blacks still can’t match AMOLED, but there are very few LCDs from that era that can touch this panel.
Under the hood, Tegra 3 brings four Cortex‑A9 cores plus a low-power companion core and NVIDIA’s ULP GeForce GPU. It’s not architecturally ahead of the newer dual‑core Krait chips, but benchmarks put the One X among the two fastest phones around at the time. Browser tests like SunSpider show it beating even the One S, and the GPU pushes 56+ fps at 720p, which is competitively strong given the pixel load.
The catch? Raw numbers don’t magically erase the fact that Krait can sometimes outdo Tegra 3 in multi-threaded tests like Linpack, despite having fewer cores. In real use though, the One X feels very fast, and Nvidia’s TegraZone ecosystem gives it a small edge in exclusive game titles.
Sense 4 on Android 4.0: Slimmer, Still Not Light
On the software side, HTC tried to show it was listening. The One X ships with Android 4.0.3 ICS plus Sense 4.0, and the skin is notably less heavy-handed than older versions. It’s still deeply customized, but the company trimmed a lot of bloat and visual clutter.
The lockscreen is genuinely useful instead of just pretty. You get four configurable shortcuts and a ring gesture that can either unlock or jump straight into an app. There are eight lockscreen styles, including Productivity (missed calls, texts, email, calendar) and People, which lets you pull contact info from a grid of favorites. Media controls plug into this as well. It’s one of the rare OEM lockscreens that actually improves day-to-day use.
Homescreens are more streamlined. The awkward old dock is gone, replaced with a five-icon dock where four slots are customizable and the middle opens the app drawer. Leap View (pinch-out to see all seven panes) is still there and as practical as ever for widget-heavy setups. Personalize has been moved out of the dock but still handles Scenes (work, travel, social, etc.) and Skins, so you can effectively run multiple profiles on one device.
Not every change lands. The new widget adding UI, which borrows from Honeycomb, feels like extra taps compared to the old method. The task switcher, with its horizontal stack of live cards, looks slick but only shows three apps at a time, which wastes a lot of the 4.7-inch canvas. Notifications are cleaner, but HTC removed quick toggles entirely, pushing users into Settings for basic switches.
Still, for a company known for overdoing UI chrome, Sense 4.0 on the One X is a cautious step in the right direction. The experience is smoother than the One S thanks to Tegra 3 and the 720p panel makes everything from text to icons look that much sharper.
Camera and Media: Ambitious Features, Mixed Execution
HTC hyped the One X camera hard: 8MP sensor, f/2.0 lens, a dedicated image processing chip, and a unified interface for photo and video. You get stills up to 3264×2448 and 1080p video at 24fps, with the headline trick being the ability to capture full‑res photos while recording video.
The camera UI is thoughtfully designed. The shutter and record buttons sit side by side, and burst mode is just a long press away. Effects are live, including shallow depth-of-field style filters that blur outside a circular focus zone. Shot modes range from HDR and Panorama to Group Portrait (picking the best face from multiple frames) and low-light presets.
The problem is in the output. The dedicated ISP delivers very fast captures, and detail levels are generally good, but noise is higher than top-tier 8MP shooters. Colors lean toward oversaturation, and sharpening is heavy enough to introduce visible artifacts. HDR helps in high-contrast scenes but leans into that slightly exaggerated HDR look.
Video isn’t a slam dunk either. 1080p clips are limited to around 10Mbps, which chokes detail even though colors look decent and noise is controlled. 720p video with a narrower field of view uses about half that bitrate. Stereo audio is a positive, and the ability to toggle the video light and use touch focus during recording is welcome, but anyone expecting the best mobile camcorder around will walk away underwhelmed.
Media playback is stronger. The gallery app is flexible, handling local, DLNA, and cloud sources (Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa, SkyDrive) in a single UI. Burst shots are managed intelligently, and full‑resolution viewing on that 720p panel looks excellent.
Video support is broad: MP4, MKV, and many AVI files at up to 1080p, though some older XviD AVIs fail, and audio tracks in AAC or DTS aren’t handled — an issue shared by most competitors. Subtitles work if filenames match. DLNA streaming and MHL output give you two paths to the TV without needing a separate media box.
On the audio side, Beats branding mostly means software. You get multiple sound profiles for different Beats models plus generic presets, and you can finally disable the processing entirely. The built-in music player ties into SoundHound, 7digital, TuneIn Radio, and offers DLNA playback. However, lab tests show the One X trailing the One S in output quality, with higher distortion and just average volume both with an amp and headphones.
Connectivity, Battery, and Daily Use Trade-Offs
Connectivity ticks most boxes: quad-band GSM, quad-band 3G with HSDPA up to 21Mbps and HSUPA up to 5.76Mbps, Wi‑Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, DLNA, MHL over microUSB, and a personal hotspot for up to eight devices. HTC’s USB options screen keeps things practical with charge-only, mass storage, HTC Sync, USB tethering, and Internet pass-through.
Radio performance is solid. The shift from metal to polycarbonate pays off in more consistent reception for both cellular and Wi‑Fi. The portable hotspot feature is configurable and can auto-disable after inactivity to spare the battery.
Speaking of battery, the One X uses a non‑removable 1800mAh Li‑Ion pack. HTC didn’t publish official endurance numbers, but internal testing shows it surviving a full day of heavy use and sometimes up to a day and a half. That’s decent for a quad‑core phone with a 4.7-inch HD panel, but the sealed design removes a long‑standing HTC advantage: no quick battery swap when it inevitably ages or when you’re traveling.
Storage is also fixed: there’s no microSD slot, and the retail box is barebones — basic earbuds, charger/data cable, SIM pin, and that’s it. Beats hardware is a software-only story here, and for a device pitched as a flagship rebound, the package feels a step down from something like the Sensation XE’s more generous bundle.
In day-to-day comms, the One X behaves well. Call quality is clear and loud enough, with smart-dialing baked into the dialer and a tabbed People app that merges contacts, histories, and social feeds. The usual accelerometer tricks (auto-speakerphone on flip, pocket ring boost, quiet on pickup) are present, and email is handled by both the Gmail app and HTC’s own Mail client with combined inbox, filters, and proper POP/IMAP/Exchange support.
Browser, Apps, and Navigation: Strong Foundation, Some Quirks
The ICS browser on the One X, paired with Tegra 3 and the HD display, is fast and pleasant. Most UI elements stay out of the way, leaving pages plenty of room. A Reader mode helps strip clutter from text-heavy sites, and you can request desktop versions, toggle Flash, and use Incognito tabs.
Flash playback and browser games work smoothly, which, combined with the high-res panel, makes this a solid pocket browsing machine for its time. Quick Controls are available as an advanced option, letting you slide in from the edges to access actions without hunting for buttons.
On the productivity side, Polaris Office handles viewing and editing for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (with some function support in Excel), and there’s PDF viewing and cloud integration with Dropbox and SkyDrive. Calendar syncing covers multiple online sources, including Facebook, and integrates weather into day view. The basics — calculator, world clock, alarms, stopwatch, timer, voice recorder, stocks app — are all there.
Navigation gets interesting. Beyond Google Maps with its hybrid online/offline caching and Street View, HTC bundles Locations, developed with TomTom and Route66. Locations allows full offline routing if you’ve downloaded country maps, which is a meaningful advantage over Google Maps’ limited offline rerouting behavior.
You get a 30-day worldwide navigation trial, after which licenses for regions like Western Europe or the US cost extra. Traffic and speed camera alerts are paid add-ons as well. The 3D map view and building models help visibility at a glance, and pinch/rotate gestures behave as you’d expect.
Did HTC’s One X Strategy Shift Work?
Looked at in isolation, the One X is a strong device. It’s compact for a 4.7-inch phone, the display is among the best LCDs of its era, performance is top-tier even if not unassailable, and the design finally gives HTC a clear visual identity again. Sense 4 trims some of the bloat, the lockscreen is actually useful, and the phone covers nearly every feature box Android power users cared about at the time.
The weak spots are less about headline specs and more about execution details. The camera is serious on paper but just good rather than class-leading in practice. Video bitrate holds it back, sharpening and noise reduction are a bit too aggressive, and the clever UI can’t completely paper over that. Audio output is competent but not class-leading, Beats is more branding than breakthrough, and the sealed 1800mAh battery plus missing microSD will bother anyone planning to keep the phone beyond a typical 2-year cycle.
Within HTC’s own lineup, it clearly outmuscles the One S if you want screen real estate and Tegra gaming, while the One XL promises a best-of-both-worlds mix of LTE and Snapdragon S4. Against rivals like the Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, or Sony Xperia S, it trades on that display quality, compact design for its size, and horsepower — but each competitor counters with its own hook, from bigger AMOLED and stylus to quicker platform updates or a higher-res camera.
So did HTC’s “fewer, better phones” reset work with the One X? It’s a meaningful step in the right direction. The hardware and software both show more focus than the company’s previous scattershot strategy. But it also underlines a hard truth: it’s not enough to be near the top in every category. To truly bounce back, a flagship needs a few clear, unquestionable wins that no one else can match.
The One X comes close in display and feel in hand, and it’s competitive almost everywhere else — just not undeniably dominant. For HTC, that’s a promising foundation, not a guaranteed comeback.
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