back to article HTC One X Android smartphone

HTC messed up in 2011 by releasing too many similar handsets. There was nothing actually wrong with phones likes the Sensation, Sensation XL, Sensation XE or Incredible S but equally none of them had me itching to upgrade my Desire HD ahead of schedule. HTC One X quad-core Android smartphone The X factor: HTC's One X Now …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Arctic fox
    Unhappy

    When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

    ...........somewhat torn. Yes, this phone is very lovely and yes, the specs are very "drool-worthy" but I cannot get past the fact that all the major OEMs consider, allegedly, that design criteria (thinness and lightness) are of such overwhelming importance that battery life and expandable storage become the victims of collateral damage. The former is still, by any rational standards, poor (regardless of which high-end phone we are talking about, it tends to vary between just about tolerable and downright pony) and expansion is being increasingly thrown out of the lifeboat on the assumption that punters with larger storage needs will use the cloud (the potential costs of such dependence of course could very easily blow a very large hole in your "plan"). Whilst we may not be talking the kind of "lock-in" we associate with a "curated system" such as that practised by A Well Known Major Phone Producer we are none the less on the way to ending up in a hardware-driven usage pattern lock-in where the phone producers are basically telling us how we shall use and manage our smartphones to a degree that we simply did not automatically associate with the Android os as recently as half a year ago. You want/need extra storage - use the cloud. You want a selection of videos on your phone - stream them via the cloud. I do not believe that I am the only one who sees the pattern here. It is not just design issues IMHO that are driving this. The hardware producers are essentially cooperating with the creation of a degree of carrier lock-in and dependence on large amounts of bandwidth and the costs thereof it we are going to be able to use our smartphones as, well, smart-phones. I can foresee a point coming where carriers will no longer offer smartphones on contract that have locally expandable storage and I fear that the OEMs are cooperating with doing their dirty work for them.

    1. Pooka

      Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

      I find myself agreeing with you about storage, which is why I'm actually considering the One S - that one still has a slot for a card. Sure it might not have the power and the look of the One X, but that SD card slight might be enough to make the decision for me....

      1. BXL

        Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

        I don't think the One S has an SD card slot either.

        1. Pooka

          Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

          Rats.

          Why did I get the idea it did? Oh well - that makes looking for a new phone harder again. At least I've got another 3 months left on this contract...

          1. annodomini2

            Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

            US Version of the One X (Evo 4g) has an SD slot, but it's Snapdragon S4 not Tegra 3.

      2. oddie
        Thumb Up

        Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

        I had a blackberry die on me about a year and a half ago.. stone dead; black screen, no reaction when turned on, took it apart and checked all the connections to the mainboard etc. tried a replacement battery. dead as a doorknob (tbf, this was probably my fault more than RIM's, the phone had traveled with me half way across the world at this point, from muddy swamps to the indian ocean and back. Id replaced the trackball and dried saltwater out of it once as well).

        Lost all my numbers that I had stored on it as well as some notes that had been saved to internal storage.

        What I didn't lose was all my photos and videos that I had saved on the microSD card. Birthdays, nights out, holiday photos with the gf, stuff that would at least be annoying to lose.

        I have an HTC now, but I would never consider getting a single point of failure phone like this.

        Evernote for saving notes and an external card for storage FTW.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

      Well, it's either -

      Some vendor/carrier conspiracy to allow only certain types of phone that tend towards being used in a way that maximises bandwidth...

      Or -

      Other types of phone didn't seel so well and this is what the marketplace has shaken out. In other word, they are selling what most people want to buy.

      1. Arctic fox
        Headmaster

        @FatsBrannigan Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones......

        "Other types of phone didn't seel so well and this is what the marketplace has shaken out. In other word, they are selling what most people want to buy."

        "Want to buy"? I would not have expressed that way. I believe that to some extent the producers, the carriers (who have huge market influence within phone retail in the UK and to all intents and purposes own the US market in mobile phones) and increasingly the cloud-service providers see a huge commonality of interest which has not yet quite dawned on the average non-techie and therefore why the punter should regard local expansion as important/desirable. The scale of the kind of service/product/storage provision OTA that this unholy triumvirate are hoping to achieve is way bigger than is currently extant given that this market is still very much in it's infancy. They absolutely do not want any cheap, easy alternative to data transfer and storage for the average member of Joe Public. That commonality of interest I referred to above is all that is needed to ensure that the OTA cartel that would be the logical end-point of this would come into effect. No formal conspiracies, nothing you risk jail-time or fines for, just the good old "nod is as good as a wink" understanding. However, it gets worse. There are huge infrastructure costs associated with all this and that will drive merger/takeover consolidation in the industry within a few years at most. What happens to the market when, perhaps, a major carrier hooks up with a major cloud-service provider and (maybe) a major phone-producer as well? It does not take too much imagination to see (just as an example) Google/Moto hooking up with, say, Verizon or AT&T. Now there you would end up with a truly unholy trinity (by that I mean the combination of carrier, producer and cloud-provider - I am not having a pop at any particular company, they are just real-world examples.). They would own your arse as far as your mobile communications and computing were concerned (assuming the popularity of tablets as pc continue to grow). Restricted and or non-existent local storage expansion is a key building block in the kind of monopoly situation we may, very unfortunately, be seeing the first faint outlines of in the distance.

        1. frank ly

          Re: @Arctic Fox: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones......

          While I agree with the main sentiment of your post; as long as a phone has WiFi then there will be cheap data transfer. (I wonder who'll be the first to get rid of it?)

          1. Gordon 10

            Re: @Frank ly When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones......

            Precisely. Before the cloud there were these things called pc's - and even with my iPhone I can pull files from my home pc either on wifi or 3G.

            I carry 95% of what I need on the phone and the other 5% is in my documents available in most places where I can get 3G or a wifi hotspot.

            Not a cloud in sight and never will be if I have anything to say about it.

          2. Arctic fox
            Thumb Up

            @frank ly RE: "I wonder who'll be the first to get rid of it?"

            "While I agree with the main sentiment of your post; as long as a phone has WiFi then there will be cheap data transfer. (I wonder who'll be the first to get rid of it?)"

            It is indeed WiFi that is and may continue be our saving grace here as far as my somewhat dystopic vision of the future of the smartphone is concerned. It's utility at home is so flaming obvious that even the most techno-illiterate punter would think twice before being willing to buy a phone that lacked that facility - and of course if you can't sell such phones in the first place....? -:). In addition of course the increasing ubiquity of WiFi hotspots (bar, hotels, airports, public building etc etc) does rather limit how far they can go - at least as far as one can see at the moment.

    3. Gordon 10
      WTF?

      Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

      Dear God!

      If you really cannot make do with 32gb of storage you really need to take a long hard look at the dross you are carrying around on your phone.

      It's enough for more music than you can listen to in a week and a couple of good films or a tv series.

      1. Pooka

        Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

        For me it's not the storage space, it's the fact that it's not on a card that I can take out and move to somewhere else, and I sure as hell don't want to be reliant on "Cloud storage" (which I just don't like).

        Hell, I can make do with a tenth of the storage they're offering - I've got an mp3 player for music, and a camera for photos, so I barely use what I have on the Desire HD I'm using now, but I want it to be in a way I can move it around without having to try and find a USB cable every time.

        1. Arctic fox
          Thumb Up

          @Pooka Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

          "For me it's not the storage space, it's the fact that it's not on a card that I can take out and move to somewhere else, and I sure as hell don't want to be reliant on "Cloud storage" (which I just don't like)."

          Precisely one of the points I had in mind. -:)

        2. Chris Thomas Alpha
          Thumb Up

          Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

          There are apps on the market which let you share your sd card through the windows network (using samba, if you know what that is, its the protocol name if you don't)

          You run the app, then it shares your card for a limited timeframe until you close the app.

          I use it sometimes, when I don't have the USB cable with me, but to be honest, the amount of time I go out of the house without the cable is close to zero, as i often run out of battery, so the cable is almost always with me

          1. M Gale
            Headmaster

            Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

            Samba isn't a protocol. Samba is the open source implementation of SMB, also known as NetBIOS, also known as "Windows File and Printer Sharing", also known as "a godawful travesty that people nonetheless have to support because it's popular".

            Well this is The Register. If I can't be pedantic here, where else is there?

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

              Travesty or not, it gets the job done and has done so or decades. Fit for purpose. If it ain't broke...

              1. M Gale

                Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

                It's fit for purpose so long as every single node is running Windows. I wouldn't say it's gotten the job done for decades though, when the earlier incarnations of Windows used to do silly things like turning your entire filesystem and all attached printers into the Internet's playpen.

                FAT has "gotten the job done" for a while too. A long while ago, as a bit of a mental exercise, I decided to try and come up with the most simple, godawful, would-lead-to-a-system-fragmented-as-hell-but-it-would-work filesystem that I could think of. Explained it to a more learned person and they responded with "uhm, have you ever read up on how FAT works?"

                It was then that I fully understood the ire directed at that filesystem. It is truly awful, a travesty of design that belongs in the twisted imagination of geeks who like to torture their computers. Lately it's become a useful means for Microsoft to turn companies who don't use WIndows upside down and shake them to see what comes out.

                It does the job though. Has done for years.

      2. Stuart Halliday
        Thumb Up

        Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

        I use Subsonic on my HTC Desire HD and stream all my music and extensive DVD collection to my phone via my own PC. 3 gives me unlimited data and VM give me 50Mb/5Mb down/upload. So with a decent phone connection I'm laughing...

        With 40 apps running on my phone, it is becoming sluggish.

      3. AdamWill

        Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

        It's still not enough space for _all_ of your music if you have a decent collection, and that's a key barrier. Any amount of storage less than 'enough for everything' is a whole different ball game from 'enough to stick everything on there and never worry about what's on it and what isn't again'.

    4. Stuart Halliday
      Thumb Up

      Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

      Be nice if HTC offered 2 versions. One as is, the other 2-3mm thicker with thicker and therefore higher battery capacity. Could be done with the right design and a swapable back case perhaps?

      Oh and for those interested the HTC Desire HD comes in at a benchmark score of 2596, just below the Samsung Galaxy S.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Stop

      HTC One X?

      ... Just a phone.

      Apple 4S ?

      ... Just a phone

      Although you have a valid point, ultimately, the market moves toward what consumers want, which usually boils down to what sells.

      If, indeed, we see a trend toward cloud based storage at the expense of phone storage, we may just see Joe Public vote with their feet, opting for phone models with physical storage.

      Not only that, but we may see media consumption and purchase actually dwindle on the back of poor 3G (and future 4G) connectivity - the movie you put on the cloud is no bloody good if you can't stream it.

      In other words, whilst your concerns are valid, I don't think it will reach that point.

      Also, I would have to say, 32Gb on a phone is a reasonably hefty amount of storage - add on a sim and well, your laughing.

    6. Hillman_Hunter
      FAIL

      Re: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones I feel myself..........

      I agree, This is a fantastic looking device, but i am frustrated by my iPhone for its endurance, it seriously stops me using the smart features to preserve the phone function should i really need it, I have elderly parents and kids to fret over. other than the battery life, i would already have my order in, I would not mind the additional heft for piece of mind that i could leave it all week on standby or use it solidly for a couple of days mixed calls and data, I agree on the storage as well, conspiratorial. the cloud is a bit of a myth particularly if you start travelling

  2. Dirk Vandenheuvel
    Holmes

    Specs

    And you are going to use this "power" for what exactly?

    Battery life is much more important.

    1. Thesheep
      Coat

      Re: Specs

      >And you are going to use this "power" for what exactly?

      For good, obviously.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Specs

      Hack the planet! ;)

      Runs away!

  3. MuppetHater
    Stop

    Don't do it!!!

    You'll regret it! Any and all advances that HTC make in their phone range is balanced on the other hand with their TERRIBLE customer service. God love anybody who's phone breaks under warranty and they have to deal with HTC support. I'd rather switch back to a Nokia 3110 than to have to deal with those clowns again.

    1. pabc

      Re: Don't do it!!!

      to counter this - the screen on my wildfire S stop responding to touch. A call to customer support went through a soft, then hard reset, then a UPS collection from my work and delivery of the fixed phone 4 days later to my home.

      One of the best customer service departments I've ever dealt with.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Don't do it!!!

      Souds like you're one of the miniscule group that have had a bad experience with HTC. As a 10+ year HTC customer I've always been happy ith both products and service.

    3. DAN*tastik
      Holmes

      Re: Don't do it!!!

      When unsure, try to replace the "hoos" sound with "who is".

      Does it make sense?

      No => then it's "whose"

      Yes => then it's "who's"

  4. DrXym

    I think that camera lens jutting out of the back looks pretty ugly and I'm not sure I like the idea of a phone which has no micro SD slot. I think HTC are being as cynical as Apple by removing it knowing that they can shunt people up to the X who might otherwise have been happy with a cheaper One S and an SD expansion.

    Otherwise it looks pretty nice. Not sure what you need a phone with 4 cores for but I guess some games might make use of the power.

  5. Tony Paulazzo

    RE the battery

    Previously 'Look Ahead' >It’s said that Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor will be five times faster than last year’s dual-core Tegra 2 - and more power efficient too.<

    So what happened? the fifth core was there for when the phone was just doing basic stuff, so what's sucking all the battery life? the screen? and two and a half hours life when playing a game means to all intents and purposes you're never gonna play a 3D game on it without being plugged in.

    I'm guessing the next tech jump will be colour and e-ink screen integration to save the battery.

    And yea, it's just tight not putting a SD slot in there - glad they finally put a decent speaker in their phone (only took, what? fifteen iterations).

    Just started a new 2 year contract so can't wait to see what's out then...

    1. Stuart Halliday
      Happy

      Re: RE the battery

      No, the next step is to offer a OLED screen. That'll save some power. I can see people setting up dark colour themes in order to save more power.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    LOL

    Look at all the Apple fan boys panicking.. Yet another phone that's better than the best apple can offer.

    Worth mentioning there is a firmware update that significantly improves battery life just released.

    Me I'm still really pleased with my Xperia ARC S, and I won't be upgrading for another 12 months. This is just the start of the next round of iPhone killers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LOL

      I don't see any apple fans panicking

      I do see HTC losing 70% profit because of crap phones

      http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-06/htc-profit-declines-70-after-dropping-the-ball-on-phones-1-.html

      They ought to be panicking

      1. Ilgaz

        Profit?

        Why we, customers should care about how much a particular company rips off their users? That is for share owners and market.

        Android is and will always be cut throat market because of its PC like nature.

        If you don't differentiate spending huge money to research and design, people will go buy a generic device. There is a healthy but hard core competition there.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Profit?

          "There is a healthy but hard core competition there."

          Where no one makes any money and companies go out of business. Gateway for example...

          1. M Gale

            Re: Profit?

            Gateway basically sold shite that nobody wanted.

            IBM got out of the PC market that they inadvertently created because they were basically selling under-specced shite in ugly boxes for a huge premium because of the "IBM" tag. Big surprise nobody bought them.

            If nobody is making money from Android, howcomes there are still a ton of new Android phones coming out?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LOL

      > Spins an HTC review to say fanbois are panicking when actually most comments are more along the lines of "nice phone, where's the SD card slot"

      > Uses a Sony device

      Hi Barry.

    3. Sean Timarco Baggaley

      Re: LOL

      "Look at all the Apple fan boys panicking.. Yet another phone that's better than the best apple can offer."

      Really? I don't see a 64GB version of the One X. Do you?

      (Come to that, I don't see Apple selling a phone named after a famously cheesy BBC talk show either.)

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LOL

      Review units should have been updated as per HTC's request to firmware 1.27. Sounds like this one was not updated, as the update significantly improves battery life.

      firmware 1.28 is due V Soon for consumer handsets that includes those fixes plus a couple of others.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No-sd slot = no interest

    For the sake of a few cents manufacturing that's a sale lost. This is meant to be a smartphone right, a converged computing device ? For the same reasons I'll be damned if I buy a desktop or laptop which doesn't have any expandable storage, the same goes for my smartphones.

    Why should I have to depend on a connection (wifi or 3g) and be using my my allowance when I can just use cheap reliable cards I can swap around between devices. I'm also often in areas where there is no coverage, and that's in my own country, let alone out foreign. I have a large music and video collection I want to use - what use is the 'cloud' when I'm sitting up in the Atlas mountains or am out in rural France, or even just camping ten miles away from home at my favourite spot ? I don't want to have to be jiggling around adding and deleting files continuously when I can just put on them on a card once and be done with it.

    1. JDX Gold badge

      Re: No-sd slot = no interest

      It's all about the cloud baby. Fiddling around with bits of plastic is so 2008. Apparently.

      But you're not a typical user so I doubt they'll worry about the lost sale. And I suggest it's not a matter of "a few cents" when every cubic millimeter is precious.

    2. batfastad
      FAIL

      Re: No-sd slot = no interest

      I agree. Yes I could hook it up by USB to get my stuff off. But the reason I want my stuff stored on an SD card is so I don't lose it all when the phone goes south!

      My O2 HTC Desire went bonkers one day and would no longer boot. Sent it off to O2 and it came back with the internal storage wiped and updated firmware. Fortunately I try and keep as much stuff as possible on the SD card and take regular backups of my contacts, it's just a shame all user content isn't stored on the SD card by default.

      It was then that I found the official Twitter app had merged all my Twitter contacts and my Gmail auto-contacts (mainly unsubcribe@ or mailing lists) with my actual phone contacts. Annoying. I knew I should have stuck to using the mobile web versions of both rather than using the apps.

      After that I de-branded, rooted, S-off and installed Cyanogenmod 7 with ClockworkMod Recovery to allow me to make full backups from the recovery console.

      Controversially I'm actually considering a Blackberry as my next phone. E-mailing and messaging on a touchscreen is just a bit annoying compared to using my work Blackberry with a keyboard. There was an HTC Android with a keyboard last year but it took a bit of a panning on here. Plus the battery life of my work Blackberry is immense compared to my HTC Desire, even with the superfluous HTC Sense overlay removed (which did help me get an extra day out of it to last a long weekend). I maybe use the internet on it for 30 mins per day when waiting for trains and an hour of music, the rest of the time it sits in my bag. Battery tech keeps improving but that seems to be outweighed by bloat that I'm not interested in.

      1. DrXym

        Re: No-sd slot = no interest

        SD card is useful in the case of emergency. I had a Nokia symbian phone which ended up in the washing machine by accident. Phone was completely dead but I was able to recover the contents of the SD card. It's also just useful to be able to augment a phone's internal memory with external storage.

  8. Wilhelm Lindt
    FAIL

    "Penta-core"? Come on, El Reg.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Because it has 5 cores

      1. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        I guess we'll be calling the Boeing 747 a "penta-jet" soon because its APU is a gas turbine.

  9. Jonathan White
    FAIL

    'The same daily routine that sees my Desire HD need a top-up every 12 hours saw the One X needing the same,'

    Having to charge every day = fail, regardless of anything else a phone can do or who makes it.

    And, as an observation, if HTC's problem is 2011 was releasing too many phones, I don't see how carrying on doing the same thing in 2012 just this time giving them really really similar names is going to make help.

    1. PaulR79

      I'm happy to be proven wrong but I believe the point of the One series is that this is supposedly the only three handsets they're releasing this year. I don't know where this was said, I'm going by what someone else said so it could easily be wrong. If true though it would point to them taking last year seriously. A high-end, quad-core phone. A middle tier dual-core model. The budget model.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Samsung have always offered a large number of handsets, and been quite successful. However, I think at the top-end it is important to have a clear flagship model. Samsung had that with the S and S2. HTC didn't - it was confusing. Just three handsets for the whole year though? I do like the idea of the "One" name though as it expresses clarity and purpose.

    2. AndrueC Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Agreed. That's why I'm glad I still have my HTC Desire. It might be old and short of onboard RAM but the big thing in its favour is a removal back for the battery. That means you can buy a 3000maH battery that comes with a replacement back cover. Sure it adds 50% to the overall thickness but I actually find that makes it easier to hold plus you can prop the phone up on its side when viewing videos :)

      My Desire usually makes it through 48 hours before it needs a recharge although with light use over the weekend it often makes it from Friday morning to Monday morning albeit showing orange on the battery meter.

      In fact I've just noticed that Amazon are selling a 3500mah batter for the Desire so I might replace my 18 month old batter with that.

  10. JDX Gold badge

    Holy Crap

    A Tegra3 in a phone - that's ridonculous!

  11. PaulR79

    HTC Choices

    I've heard how bad HTC support is (was?) but it isn't really an issue for me. When my Desire HD speaker broke I took it to T-Mobile, they sent it off for repair and it was back in a week. That was at Christmas. The battery size could've been larger but I'm hoping the Companion Core will keep battery drain down even if that screen wants to slurp it down. I think the lack of SD card is down to MS and their FAT tax as much as design limits too.

    Would I like a larger and removable battery? Hell yes. I've been pushing and pleading on an HTC run site for a minimum of 2000mAh battery in future phones, not to mention the return to a multi-colour notification LED, and a lot of others are screaming for more battery over thin phones but we've yet to see anything. Then again this has only been up and running for a few months so even if they take everything we say into account it wouldn't have made it into the One X. I think last years lacklustre phones really hit them hard so they're trying to listen to criticism. You only have to look at the new Sense to see that too.

    Upgrade time for me and as with quite a few around here I'm using the Desire HD so this is going to be a pretty huge upgrade for me. Do I need quad-core? Nope, and I don't play many games on phones, but I do think its best to go for the best available. It means it's more likely to be updated than if I opted for an older dual-core model.

  12. captain veg Silver badge

    How come

    If this thing is called One, how can there be three of them?

    -A.

    1. Sean Timarco Baggaley

      Re: How come

      Fans of the "Final Fantasy" video-game series have been avoiding a similar question for decades now.

      1. Paul Powell
        Joke

        Re: How come

        not to mention Christianity

      2. MrT

        Along with...

        ... the fan of "The Never-Ending Story"... roughly 90 minutes after each iteration started, presumably.

  13. no_RS
    Meh

    My Experience

    Well I bought one of these things from Amazon for delivery on the 5th April.

    First off the packaging was different, all curved edges and looking fairly organic, soft touch plastic bags, the whole 9 yards.

    The phone itself is very nippy and all was looking good, love the screen. So all very pleased showing it off to my colleagues, etc. Playing with it a few hours later I was looking thorugh the browser settings and the context menu would not display correctly, all fuzzing like something was out of synch. Also experiencing something similar on the long edge of the display when using the camera - this is not very impressive. A quick google shows other are finding similar issues with the display.

    The Wi-Fi seems a bit flaky with my Fritz box router but that could be that it is using 802.11n but there is no setting to force it back to b/g mode only. The Wi-Fi also picks up my 5GHz signal as well as 2.4GHz so could be dual band.

    Other changes I have noticed, I cannot set which cellular signal to use, my HTC Desire allows you to force it to GSM only which saves battery power, all these fancy new techs (3G & 4G) require a lot of processing power which is not needed most of the time but now I have no option but to waste it. The pattern finger lock available on the Desire is included in the One X with alternatives like face recognition or the old pin code.

    Currently waiting for Amazon to ship a replacement as screen issues are a major fail in my book but since reporting it is hasn't shown the problem but I did take photos and a video of it behaving badly. There is a thread on XDA-Developers forum showing the display problems, no sign of a OTA update that some people have referred to..

    Overall the packaging has impressed me more than the phone, seriously tempted to get a refund...

    1. Andrew Woodvine

      Re: My Experience

      To force your phone to use GSM/UMTS only try entering *#*#4636#*#* on the dial pad - on my Galaxy Nexus this brings up a menu and gives you the option, amongst other things.

    2. no_RS
      Flame

      Re: My Experience

      Well the replacement has turned up and shown exactly the same symptons, this is piss poor from HTC and no surprise their business has nose dived

  14. Robert Caldecott
    Happy

    I charge my phone at night while I'm sleeping

    As long as the battery on my phone lasts till bedtime then I'm happy!

    1. Andrew Woodvine

      Re: I charge my phone at night while I'm sleeping

      Agreed - as long as my phone doesn't need charging more than I need sleep then that is good enough for me!

  15. pullenuk

    dropbox

    Don't forget it got dropbox with 25gb free for two years. You can have loads of memory using dropbox. Since you have top speed on wifi and most likely the contract you need for this phone should have a decent amount of data.

    1. Gordon 10

      Re: dropbox

      Loadsa memory? What you mean less than the phone actually comes with? That's not loads in my book.

  16. irgxana
    Unhappy

    so close, but misses in some important areas

    I've been interested in what this phone is like, maybe a worthy replacer for my Samsung Galaxy SII, but sadly some things are missing on the One X that sadly has put me off this thing. Firstly, the lack of MicroSD slot. Yes I do need more than 32GB on my phone. On my Galaxy SII I have a 32GB microSD full of music, as I like having access to a lot of my music collection. Cloud storage isn't useful should I be listening to music on the move and the signal drops. Anything else, I store directly on the phone. One final problem is the battery life. It's kind of expected to have such a powerful phone use so much power, but the phones battery is no removable. for such a short battery life, without the ability to replace with a secondry battery for those times you're not able to keep the thing charged is a problem.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Another phone with the Charging socket in the wrong place so no use with a car Dock........

    what is it with Android phones and USB ports located stupidly on the side!

    1. P Zero
      Joke

      That's nothing, my GPS has the charger on the side and it's annoying trying to crane my head to the side just to be able to read the thing. I tried to take it back and told them what I thought about it, but they just laughed at me! Never going back there again!

    2. annodomini2
      Thumb Down

      It actually has a docking port on the back of the phone, those 5 little holes.

  18. Neil Alexander

    The capacitive buttons: I'm curious...

    On the Galaxy Nexus, if you load up an "old" app which still needs the "old" Menu button, a new button appears at the bottom right to open it. However, if the One X's buttons are fixed capacitive ones, how do you access that menu on a One X?

    1. Daf L

      Re: The capacitive buttons: I'm curious...

      You get an on-screen menu button like on the nexus but on its own in the middle.

      1. Neil Alexander

        Re: The capacitive buttons: I'm curious...

        Makes sense I suppose!

  19. Miffo

    Battery life - vote with your cash.

    I can just about cope with the idea of no SD card - I never fill up my 8GB one and USB on the go would provide extra storage if I was on a long trip but I like having a spare battery that I can swap in. I keep a spare in my motorbike jacket so if I get stuck somewhere I know I have a good battery. I don't think the reviewer mentioned this downside.

    I read the comments about why aren't manufacturers making the battery last longer or not providing SD card slots. I guess we have to vote with our feet. Quite tempted by the Motorola Razr with its amazing battery life and I think that has an SD card slot - but you can't replace the battery! (something that killed off my Archos 5). I chose a Motorola Defy because it has better than average battery life (still only about 2 days though) and was fairly cheap. The Motorola's seem good on battery life generally.

    It will be interesting to see what the Galaxy SIII is like.

  20. Jeebus

    First 100% None-Apple review in a very long time here. Well played El Reg.

    The reason for the 100% rating is the El Reg 10% Apple tax, this site was the creator of this. The tax is that any product in a similar category to an Apple product such as the Asus Transformers etcetera will be rated 10% less no matter what, so add 10% and you're fine.

  21. jestersbro
    Thumb Up

    Whose moaning?

    I got this bad boy on Thursday and it's the biz! Frankly all I see on this forum is people that don't have it bitching about it. That's like slagging off sex when you're a virgin. Take your opinions and shove 'em. Up your virgin holes.

    No, really, don't moan about what you don't know about. Don't tell me you don't like blue when you're blind or you don't like Apple when you only use Linux. Frankly you bore me. Grow up.

    This damned beasty simply blows you away! I may be biased, I may be seduced but I don't care. I have spent the last 24 hours awake and thrashing the arse of this, running games, AnTuTu benchmarks, Netflix and radio etc. and it just works so well I can't complain. And the screen and camera!

    Don't worry about not having expansion slots or a replaceable battery, most of us don't need them. Just try it and see what the next generation of mobile phones can do.

    Detractors need not reply. I will ignore you.

  22. Dave Lawton
    FAIL

    Re: so close, but misses in some important areas

    No SD slot, what were they thinking ?

    Apparently they have used the micro-sim, because it has more memory than the standard sim,

    That made me 90% certain that I wouldn't buy one, & the lack of the SD slot has done for the other 10%.

    Any recommendations for a replacement for my Desire, contract renewal is due in a couple of weeks ?

    1. Shuflie
      FAIL

      Re: so close, but misses in some important areas

      Your understanding of a micro-SIM is a little flawed, it is just a regular SIM which has had most of the plastic trimmed away. So unless your remaining 10% objection to having no SD slot available expands to fill the void in your uncertainty I expect you will now buy one.

  23. Nick De Plume
    Joke

    Battery .. again

    I'd love this thing even if it was a bit thicker in the middle.

    What's sexy to the eye can be different from what feels sexy to the hand, after all..

    And lasting through the night (even after a hard day) counts for a lot, in this day and age..

  24. mmm mmm

    "The CPU is a 1.5GHz penta-core Nvidia Tegra 3 unit"

    Penta's five, innit? That would make it one core too many.

    1. brakusmc

      actually.....

      ...4 cores plus an extra one to "aid battery life" = 5

      As an aside, the review mentions Beats branded headphone being supplied. Really?? Mine had standard HTC ones....??

      1. annodomini2

        Re: actually.....

        First 10,000 units get beats headphones.

  25. Anonymous Cowherder
    Gimp

    I've got a SD card in my desire

    I put it in on the day I got the phone and it has stayed there, less than half full ever since.

    I get my One X tomorrow and do not care there isn't a sd card slot, the largest sd card is nowhere near big enough for my needs, I have about 113GB of music that fits on my ipod classic, just. I like having all of this with me as I like choice and have varied music tastes, there isn't a phone on the market that comes close to this storage. Whenever I've wanted to transfer files I've either used dropbox or the old fashioned method of plugging the cable in and using it as a flash drive. I can't believe some people are keeping critical files on a mobile device and relying on sd cards as a backup, crazy?

    As for battery life, I'm currently on my sofa, I've got my desire plugged in as we speak, at work I have another micro-usb cable to charge my phone there and I have a cigarette lighter adapter and 3rd cable in my car. My phone has run out of juice twice in its lifetime since May 2010 and they were both down to me pushing my luck. The reason for less than desirable battery life on these feature rich devices is due to the manufacturers using advances in battery technology to make devices thinner and lighter rather than offering increased battery.

    The device we all want is probably 2 generations away, 250GB storage, large screen, 36hr+ heavy use battery life, reasonable size and customisable.

  26. Steve Oliver

    Re Standby

    The standby on this thing is huge.. while away for easter, with 3g data on, syncing weather, gmail & contacts and a very small amount of use checking email and ocean forecasts (i am only talking about standby time here so minimal use) the battery was at 52% after 3 days, the other one x we have had zero use and was at 72% with data on but no email syncing. This is in Oz with software 1.26. Actual usage is about the same as my htc legend which with standard use requires charging every day now vf aus have sorted out the data / battery drain issue.

    1. Miffo

      Re: Re Standby

      I've got a feeling that if we could resist fiddling with our phones, they would last a long time! My wife isn't using her ZTE Blade at the moment. It's on 3g and syncing mail reading the odd text message. It was down to about 10% after 6.5 days!

      I think the weedy CPU helps.

  27. Andy Watt
    Stop

    Tiny performance gain at a price? X versus S

    Looking at the engadget comparison from http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/05/htc-one-x-vs-one-s/ the One S (the dual core snapdragon powered version) actually has *better* gaming performance than the One X(!) - indeed it won 10 of the 17 performance benchmarks.

    The screen on the X looks much better, though, but the battery life on the S is predictably better (although not by as much as I expected). The sheer amount of juice to run the same benchmark tests on the X compared to the S probably also shows what it'd be like day-to-day.

    On a cost balance, I'd be tempted by the S.

  28. Kyoraki

    No SD card slot? Eh..

    I'm none too bothered with the lack of an SD card slot on my Desire. I always mount my card onto my PC using the phone itself because taking it out means turning the phone off, and those silly little things are just begging to be eaten up by the dog the moment it slips out of my hand. So long as I can mount the thing as a regular disk drive with a usb cable, I'm golden.

    The lack of removable battery however, is a more regrettable loss as it will make hard resetting the device quite a bit harder. I understand why they did this though, (battery cases take up lots of space) and I'm sure HTC have a workaround in place for tinkerers.

  29. Jason Terando
    Facepalm

    "Phone" Review

    As might come to a shock to some, there are a number of people who use their smartphones as, well, a phone....

    In a phone review, such as this one, it would be nice if the ability to make and hold a call were talked about. How good is the speakerphone? The battery may go belly-up after hours of streaming video or playing a FPS, but what about if I just have it polling my email every quarter hour? Will the battery withstand a one-hour conversation (my EVO 4G barely does)?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Phone" Review

      No-one really uses their phones to make calls any more. I would be silly to discuss things like reception and call quality when only 3-5% of the population uses their phone to make calls.

  30. Dave Lawton
    FAIL

    Re: so close, but misses in some important areas

    @ Shuflie

    My understanding isn't flawed, (I think it a stupid move), but HTC's is :-

    > Dear Dave Lawton,

    > Thank you for your email regarding your HTC One X query.

    > My name is David and I am a Technical Support Agent for the HTC Written Team.

    > I understand that you wish to inquire why the HTC One X supports micro-SIM cards.

    >

    > I'm sorry to hear that you are not pleased with the introduction of micro SIMS to HTC phones.

    > I do apologise Dave, but this is just the way this phone has been designed.

    > Furthermore, micro SIM cards have a larger storage space than the standard SIM cards.

    Not impressed with another manufacturers' buy in to Steve Jobs' stupid idea, nor the converters to make them back into standard size, whole idea is just a waste of time.

    @ Kyoraki

    I know that you have to remove the battery to change the card since I do own a Desire.

    The problem with the One series is that it lacks even that internal slot :(

  31. Obvious Robert

    No GSM only mode

    Can this phone seriously not be set to GSM only? My workplace is a massive aircraft hanger sized building with lots of lovely mobile-signal-attenuating metal about. 3G signal in there is very weak, just at the strength where it constantly drops in and out. When I leave my Desire Z on 3G is kills the battery because it's constantly flicking back and forth from 3G to GSM trying to maintain a connection. Leave it on GSM only, the connection is solid and the battery barely gets touched.

    Forget removable SD cards and batteries, I couldn't even begin to consider a phone fixed on 3G only. (Anyway there's the small, and these days probably highly unfashionable matter of hardware keyboards. Previously having a G1 and currently a Desire Z, I want my next phone to follow the same basic side-slider hardware keyboard design, but apparently no one's making them any more.)

  32. Steve Evans

    So...

    So HTC were guilty of flooding the market with too many models in 2011...

    So now they have flooded the 4th months of 2012 with three phones with identical names and only an illogical suffix to distinguish them... How very helpful...

    Why couldn't they have at least called them the bronze, silver and gold so we could guess which was the cheapy and which was the monster?

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like