[G2 and Desire Z General] magic_android:
Hey there everyone, so i mentioned in another post that i'd do a review of the One X and so here it is! I'll be comparing my experience so far with the One X with the experience i had with my good old Desire Z.

Some background info, i was actually quite happy with my Desire Z, except someone in my immediate family desperately needed a new phone so i gave them my Desire Z and got a One X for myself.

I had tried pretty much every ROM for the Desire Z and G2, i actually counted one day and i had tried about 30 or more ROMs and that wasn't even including updates haha! I had my Desire Z for nearly a year so i got quite familiar with it and i'd call myself something of an experienced android user.

One more important note, this review is for the international version of the One X.

Anyway, enough background info, it's review time now!

Design and Construction

The One X is built like a champion. It feels really solid and sleek in the hand and even though it is quite a large phone, you can get used to the big size quite quickly. In fact, after using the One X for just a few days, it felt so strange to go back to the now "small" (by today's standards) screen on my Desire Z. I would say that it feels as solid as the Desire Z, but not as hefty, since it doesn't weigh as much (130g vs 180g). The white casing of the One X is somewhat prone to smudges, but they're not even noticeable unless you pay close attention. The screen itself feels very nice to touch and the curved edges make it feel like a more premium quality device without making it any more difficult to use.

Those are the positives of the design and construction for me so far. The only negatives i have come across are that there is no easy way to protect the huge camera lens from being scratched and that all screen protectors for the phone will not cover the whole screen area. I was surprised that this latter issue wasn't mentioned anywhere before. What I am referring to is the fact that even after placing a screen protector on the screen, there are at least 2mm of uncovered glass on either side of the screen protector. This is apparently an issue with all screen protectors for the phone and it is due to the curved nature of the glass. Otherwise, this device feels so fantastic to hold and use. It may feel a bit slippery at first, but once you get used to the size of it, it feels really good in your hands.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the speaker on the rear side of the phone is actually quite good. I found it to sound quite punchy and loud, without sounding tinny at all and without distorting either.

The gorgeous 720p S-LCD 2 screen

This screen really speaks for itself. I have no complaints about it in any way. I thought at first that it was having issues with responsiveness on the stock ROM, but then when i flashed an optimised stock ROM, all those issues went away. The screen is incredibly responsive and accurate and even though colours are quite saturated, the display still has a very natural feel to it. Watching movies and TV shows on this screen is just such a pleasure. The screen is also very bright, i keep it at the lowest brightness setting all the time when i'm inside because i simply don't need it to be any brighter, whereas i'd need to keep my Desire Z at about 25% for it to be at a similar level of brightness. Sunlight legibility is also outstanding. I no longer need to worry if there is sun outside now, even at 40% brightness, the screen is quite readable in bright sunlight. However, if the screen is directly facing the sun, you just end up with a reflection of the sun in your eyes haha, but this would happen with any phone. Any other time when the sun isn't reflecting off the screen, the screen will still be perfectly legible.

Also, apps and webpages look really great on this screen. In particular, i can now read webpages on xda while fully zoomed out because the screen is so crisp with its pixel density of 312dpi. The screen on the Desire Z and G2 is still quite good and i still like it quite a bit, but the screen of the One X is really a class above it.

Performance with Nvidia's Tegra 3 beast

This is yet another area where this phone excels. With the stock ROM, performance was really quite impressive. Now, i'm running a very stable and optimised stock ROM and it is just incredible to use. Where the stock ROM would randomly hang and stutter at times, this ROM just constantly flies. There will be more on dev support and ROMs later in the review though! Back on topic, after de-bloating Sense 4 (which there still is a LOT of bloat), i'm getting a lot more free RAM and multitasking is as good as i could ever want it to be on this phone. Simply put, it never seems to run out of CPU or memory resources, even when apps are kicked out of memory, they open up so fast that you can't even tell if they were closed beforehand. The phone has not lagged not even once now despite all the things i've thrown at it. Want to play 1080p flash videos within the browser and still browse smoothly? Sure, it'll do it. Want to switch between several apps at a time while listening to music? It'll do that without any hesitation either. The One X is at the point of performance where the fact that the Galaxy SIII is faster in some tasks is negligible because no one will ever really need a smartphone to do things faster than this phone does. Also, I got 5326 on quadrant, and 300 something on benchmarkpi for those that are interested in pure synthetic benchmarks results. I could go on and on about how fast the phone is but what matters is that in real-world use, it will not ever let you down.

The Desire Z and G2 just cannot compare in the performance department, especially when running Sense ROMs. However, i did find that performance was really good on a few ROMs like G2 Slim, G-lite and the Andromadus variants. The HTC Vision can't keep up when it comes to multitasking though, swap and supercharger seem to help a bit, but it still can't compare. I'm not bashing the Vision by any means though because it's still a great phone in its own regard.

Perfect Call Quality

Call quality seems to hardly be mentioned enough during phone reviews and yet it's one of the most vital things that factor into the functioning of a phone! That said, call quality on the One X is the best I have ever heard. People sound so loud and crisp through the earpiece and even when using speakerphone. I rarely used the speakerphone on my Desire Z because people would always distort when i talked to them through the speakerphone. On the One X, people sound loud and clear on the speakerphone. I haven't tried using it in noisy environments yet but I imagine that there wouldn't be too many issues since it produces very clear and loud sounds. The earpiece of the Desire Z was also often not loud enough and I couldn't understand people, but now it's so much easier for me to speak to people with the One X in my house which has such terrible reception.

HTC's new "Amazing Camera"

I am not a photographer by any means but I do take a lot of photos with my phones. I always found the camera on my Desire Z to be good enough as long as there was enough light. With the One X, it's good enough in every situation pretty much regardless of the lighting, and when there is good lighting, it takes some really really great pictures.

Here are the best photos i took with my Desire Z using the HTC Amaze Cam Mod:

taken in broad daylight at a river

again taken in broad daylight

And here are the best photos i have taken so far with my HTC One X. It's hard to see, given that i've had to upload downsized images, but the photos from the One X have a lot less noise in them and they're softer too, they're not oversharpened like most of the photos from my Desire Z were. I have to note that I was never again able to take photos that looked that good with my Desire Z when using anything other than the Amaze Cam Mod. Note that these photos from my One X were just snapped yesterday on a whim without using any mods or special settings. So here they are :

taken outside on a cloudy Melbourne day

taken indoors near a window

taken with low amounts of artificial lighting indoors at night

I think the results speak for themselves, especially the indoors photo of all those tasty mandarins! Also, the zero lag shutter is definitely real and it's such a pleasure to use. The burst mode also works quite well in broad daylight, where each photo comes out crisp, but in low lighting, you won't get as many good photos with the burst mode, but you will still get good photos anyway.

Here is a 1080p video sample i took. I'm not quite sure why YouTube chose to compress it to 720p, but keep in mind that there was a lot more detail in the original video. Please read the description as it has relevant information to this review.

Overall, i'm quite happy with the camera quality of the One X. It is important to note though that camera quality is quite subjective with this phone. I was using Krarvind's Slim ICS for a while and all photos and videos came out terrible on that ROM. They were so bad that I was shocked when I came back to Sense and realised how great the camera is on the One X. So this might be part of the issue why some people on xda say that the One X has terrible camera quality.

Software and ROMs

I'm not going to go very in-depth here as the One X is an android phone, meaning that you can make it whatever you want to be. Sense 4 is fantastic and I don't think there's anything more that I can add than what endgadget has already covered here. Simply put, Sense 4 is light and fast and it doesn't kill your battery this time around. Currently, there are MANY ROMs for the One X already. They come in all forms, Sense 4, CM9, AOKP, MIUI. There's not much else that you could ask for. The CM9 and AOKP ROMs are gradually getting more and more stable and some of them are definitely suitable for daily use if you do some reading first. Right now, i've been using a simple optimised Sense 4 ROM with the stock kernel for the last few days. Everything is working and it's updated to the latest HTC base each time a new one is released. Other Sense ROMs are not updated as frequently but the MIUI, CM9 and AOKP ROMs are updated very frequently and there are many many highly skilled (real) devs (blk_jack would know what I mean) that are bringing their best to the One X. For this section, you guys can ask me questions and I can add more info if you want me to.

Edit: I forgot to add one of the most important things! The transition from using a qwerty hardware keyboard to a software keyboard hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be. The screen of the One X is very big and spacious and with the stock ICS keyboard and typing is a real breeze. That said, the One X is still at a disadvantage here though because a hardware qwerty keyboard will always be more comfortable and easy to type on, especially a keyboard as good as the one on the Vision. What I am happy about though is that the One X makes typing on a software keyboard as easy and painless as possible. When I picked up my Desire Z again the other day to show my mum how to type on it, I realised how great the hardware keyboard was haha! I couldn't go back to my Desire Z now though, downgrading screen size would probably be the most difficult part.

*cue drum roll* BATTERY LIFE!

Here it is at last, my take on the battery life of the One X. I got the phone expecting to be disappointed from the beginning, but I have actually been quite pleasantly surprised. The phone uses very very little amounts of battery charge when idling. In fact, with my current ROM, it is rarely every awake (partial wakelock) when it's meant to be sleeping. I haven't run into any battery drain and i'm getting quite decent amounts of screen on time.

Here are some more relevant figures, right now i'm sitting at 21% with 3 hours and 35 minutes of screen on time, with 1 day and 16 hours of battery life. This is in fact very similar to what I was getting with my Desire Z. I think this is only the 5th charge I have put my phone through but results are already promising. So far on this battery charge, i've watched a 50 minute tv show episode, listened to music for half an hour, texted a lot (at least 100 texts), no calls, taken about 60 photos and 5 short videos, done some light web browsing and reading, uploaded a bunch of stuff with dropbox and used airdroid a bit too. That given, each person's usage will vary but with my usage, i'm getting good battery life. I keep all radios off when not needed, so wifi, gps, bluetooth are nearly always off unless i need them and I put my phone on airplane mode at night just to save battery too and to stop people from waking me up haha.

Another thing to note is the excellent use of the 5th power saving core in the One X. When it comes to music playback, I played music for about 40 minutes the other day (on a different charge) and only 1% of the battery was consumed. Today, I played music for half an hour and the battery percentage did not change. Impressed? Well I am.

Conclusion

To wrap things up, I'll be scoring each of the areas mentioned above out of 10 and adding relevant comments where needed. This section is basically is a tl;dr version of my review.

Design and Construction - 9/10. This area would be a 10 if the screen was better made for screen protectors. No easy way to protect the gorgeous lens on the back *sadface*

Display - 10/10. This is the best display I have ever seen or had on any smartphone. It will not disappoint you in any way.

Nvidia Tegra 3 Performance - 10/10. The beast running inside this phone will also not let you down unless you're running the stock ROM. Anything you throw at it will be eaten up immediately by the vast processing hunger of the tegra 3!

Camera - 9/10. This would also be a 10 if videos were recorded at 30fps. I'm not too fussy about camera quality otherwise so this phone is far above average for me.

Call Quality - 10/10. No issues at all on either end of the line and people sound so perfectly loud and clear even when on speakerphone. This is how earpieces should be made. The Desire Z earpiece always was too quiet and scratchy sounding in comparison.

Software and dev support - 10/10. The One X has a bustling community full of very smart devs and useful people who make xda the fantastic place it is. There is no lack of custom ROMs and new projects seem to come up every few days. There are many big name devs like mike1986, lord clockan, mdeejay, tbalden, tripnraver, krarvind, leedroid and many others who I am still getting to know.

Battery life - 8/10. With custom ROMs, it's definitely above average and I could hardly call it poor by any means. If I use the phone heavily, it lasts for about 20 hours, which is the same as what I would get from my Desire Z, except the One X just does everything better.

Overall - 9/10. This is not an average, this is what I feel is the appropriate score for this fantastic phone. I will update this review if I feel I have missed anything or could add information. This is by far the best phone I have ever had and I'd say it is definitely one of the best phones there are right now.

Please feel free to ask me questions too. I hope this review helps any other Vision users considering this great phone as an upgrade.

I'll still be around on these forums though as I do like to help whenever I can. Sadly, I can't test any more amazing ROMs for the Vision like i used to :(.

Last of all, please give me a thanks if you found this useful.