[HTC Desire S] Deleted member 2496007:
OK I said I would put my [MEGA] review here when I was finished with it. Had the phone for a couple of weeks, so will be posting this on Amazon pretty soon....

My first venture in to the world of Android and HTC was with HTC's flagship device of 2010: The HTC Desire. When it came to upgrade that, going with the next flagship (the Sensation) didn't seem worth-while. I didn't like the larger size, and wasn't convinced the dual core CPU was going to be utilised properly and provide any real advantage. Instead I chose to go with the successor to the Desire, the Desire S and I never regretted it for a minute. A fantastic device despite it's minor flaws.

Time marched on, and it came time to look at the next upgrade. The logical choice for me was the HTC One S. Still a large phone, I loved the aluminium uni-body construction also used in the Desire S. However, HTC (as well as other manufacturers of late) have made the curious design choice of removing the SD card slot. I was disappointed to learn that my planned upgrade device had been hobbled with a mere 16GB internal memory. I knew this wasn't enough for me. I wasn't convinced with the offer of free Dropbox space to appease me either. The extra data allowance I'd need on my contract to use this cloud storage regularly would amount to an extra £210 over 24 months. Plus my carrier's 3G isn't fantastically reliable. Who wants to wait an hour, draining their (non-replaceable) battery for their album to download before they can listen to it?

This forced me to look at the One X, a phone I wrote off initially when I learned of it's dimensions and OTT processing power. Being as the X is only £50 more than the S, it made more sense to me than paying to increase my data allowance. Still not being convinced of the need for a dual core phone (I don't do much gaming on my phone) I was definitely sceptical about all this quad-core business, but hey, I needed 32GB storage and that was that.

So now that you know where I am coming from and after having this phone for a few weeks now, here are my findings.

Note: At the time of writing this I am on firmware release 1.26.401.2 which has the following bugs:

Sense occasionally reloads after exiting an app.

nVidia Power Management put in the wrong part of the ROM by HTC. (Epic Fail HTC)

HTC Agenda Widget causes Sense to reload if scrolled.

OTA updates are expected to fix these soon.

Build Quality.

I decided to break from the norm and go for the white model. The first thing that struck me upon removing from the box for the first time (not surprisingly) was the size. I actually LOL'd. To this day I still think it is a bit too uncomfortable to hold compared to my Desire S, but after a couple of days I got used to it. It is much lighter than it would appear to be, but I suppose this is because I'm used to an aluminium phone, not a polycarbonate one. I find that one handed operation is not quite possible in all circumstances, the most irksome one being the power button. Yes it's where all the others have been, on the top-right edge of the phone. However using one hand I can no longer reach this whilst maintaining a reliable grip on the phone. A two-handed on/off is required. Fitting a case makes it slightly easier to grip, but of course adds more bulk and detracts from the gorgeous aesthetics. I can't help but feel they could have taken a leaf out of Nokia's book, and put it on the side where it's easily reached by the thumb.

Whilst waiting for it to full charge before turning on for the first time (following HTC recommendations as I didn't want to risk damaging a battery you can't replace) I gave it a good look over. All is in line with HTC usual build quality. Some have reported a gap between the top of the screen and the body, but doesn't seem to be a problem on mine. The volume keys however, do not have much tactile feedback when pressed as they have been set flush to the edge of the phone. Possibly to reduce accidental pressing, but only a small gripe there.

The protruding camera lens is a concern. Lying flat, the glass of the camera lens will be in direct contact with the surface it's on. Even some cases don't help here, as the cut-out for the camera lens still lets the lens poke through. At the time of writing this (as is common with a new release) there are no Case-Mate cases available for this phone. I am having to be very careful about putting it down.

Despite all this, I was impressed with the look, feel and weight of the phone. And then I got the green 'Fully Charged' light and I turned it on....

Holy cow. Now this is how you do a screen. I cannot make out a single rough edge or pixel. It is pin sharp. Colours are represented well and it is a joy to look at. I am so glad I did not go with the One S and it's pentile screen. Performance in strong daylight is still not perfect, but at least at full brightness it does much much better than my Desire S did. After a couple of days, my wife (now the proud owner of my Desire S) asked me for assistance with some settings. After two days of looking at the One X, the Desire S screen was like looking at rough, grainy tiny little toy by comparison!

Operation.

Needless to say the CPU power on offer here makes navigating around the phone's menus and apps slicker than a buttered weasel. There is just no waiting, even for a second, for commands to be carried out. No stutter scrolling through lists or panning across full web pages. I tried one of those games optimised for Tegra chip-sets just to see for myself what the phone was capable of. Pinball HD ran without a single stutter or hiccup and looked fantastic.

I am also liking HTC's refined and slimmed down Sense 4.0. I was never a fan of the Sense 3.5 fancy animations. They were cool at first, but quickly became annoying. The home screen carousel effect was just a pointless effect that frequently had me rolling my eyes. I was worried that more CPU power would encourage more fancy fluff. Thankfully HTC appear to have listened to their critics and gone the other way. A lot of the needless animations are gone, scrolling wallpaper is back (thank you), and Sense has returned to being a pretty yet functional UI. It improves on areas of the stock Android 4.0 but doesn't completely smother it. Of course if Sense is not your thing then there are a wide selection of alternative launchers for you to download from the Market, but I have not tried those so I wont go into that here.

HTC were keen to promote the improvements made to the camera on this device, and I can confirm that for the first time since my Sony Ericsson k800i, I have a fantastic camera on my phone! It is not quite good enough yet to get me to forget about my dedicated compact digital camera (we'll need to see the return of xenon flash for that IMO) but this the best camera phone you can get today. Shots in strong light are all but indistinguishable from my compact camera. Shots in low light are vastly better than my Desire S, with much less noise and correction required. I used to regularly have to open up photos in PicSay Pro (a nice photo editing app) on my Desire S and correct the exposure and saturation of low light shots, but I have yet to open that app on my One X. I may not need it at all, as HTC have for the first time included native photo editing that can now do more than just crop and rotate. Despite HTC having added 5 levels of LED flash intensity, I still find that if the flash goes off it still makes photos look a little bleached. It could have done with something like Sony's 'Flash Mode' on the White Balance settings, which amps up the reds to counteract the bleaching effect of the flash. But so far I have left the flash set to 'off' and have yet to be disappointed with low light shots. HDR mode is very good at helping here.

I was a big fan of Swype keyboard. The stock HTC one takes up too much screen space on this phone in my opinion, plus their trace keyboard is still not a match for Swype's. Too many corrections required. However Swype worked well when one thumb could comfortably reach across the screen. I find the far corners of the keyboard too uncomfortable to reach on the One X. To that end I have accepted two handed typing is a must on this phone, so have made the switch to Swiftkey which works very well.

Beats Audio. Gimmick. HTC saw fit to not include official Beats headphones in the box, so it is merely a Bass Boost button that has been around since Walkmans of the eighties. OK if you are listening to bassy music, but make the switch to something else and it sounds terrible. I quickly turned Beats off and returned to my much loved music app PowerAmp. This has a very comprehensive EQ that lets you tune the sound to your liking, and to suit your choice of headphones. To this end the sound I can get from my One X is very good. I also like that it goes slightly louder than my Desire S, which I always found to be a bit too quiet. I can't comment on the quality of included headphones as I've only used my a-Jays.

Battery Life & no SD Card.

Two major concerns of mine were the sealed battery and no SD card slot. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking I wouldn't have mined the phone being slightly thicker and heavier to be able to change the battery and swap SD cards. Also was the concern that with over 4 times the processing clout of my Desire S, with a much larger screen, and only slightly larger battery capacity that battery life would be sacrificed. Relax. So far the battery life is shaping up to be exactly on par with previous HTC phones. Not better, but not worse either. Don't judge the battery life in the first two weeks. You'll only get 6 hours out of the first charge, but 10 hours out of the second charge. 12 hours out of the third charge. After a week I was getting 18 hours which as a heavy user is all I'd expect. Now that I am two weeks in I am getting 24 hours with regular use. Playing HD games of course brings this right down, but that's what you would expect if you want to have this much power at your finger tips.

There is a shade over 25GB available of space on the virtual SD card. I can live with that. The One S has only 11GB out of the 16GB which would definitely be insufficient for my needs. I just have to be a little bit more brutal about which albums I have on my phone, and keep on top of transferring large files like video and backups to my home network. I wont let this phone get as cluttered as my last one! I am not suffering for the loss of 32GB storage capacity.

Conclusion.

I am relieved that my major worries about this phone have turned out to be acceptable. I am very happy with it. Others may find the early bugs unacceptable for HTC to have allowed to be released, but I am a member of XDA. Bugs are there to be conquered!

I have gotten used to the size, and the screen means that any other phone I look at (including the iPhone) causes me to scoff! I can never go back to anything less than 720p now! Anything else just looks rough next to the One X.

If you wait until HTC release an OTA update to squash these silly faults or you'd be happy accepting them to fix yourself using the help of XDA, then it is in my opinion, the best phone I've ever had.