The most powerful phone on the planet: The HTC One X

The most powerful phone on the planet: The HTC One X

Recently I wrote an article on the iPad 2 that I was testing and at the end I said that I would be obtaining the new iPad next month. Now, I am a seventeen year old boy who loves everything technical and so when I realised I had the option of a new mobile phone handset, I instantly sprung at the chance to find the most powerful phone that I could find and that would be out in time. The phone that I set my eyes on had to be the HTC One X which is quite simply a beast of a phone. The good thing about this phone was that it was released on the 5^th April and if I were to order it now, it'd be out in time for my Birthday and I'd get a free HTC MediaLink too, which would be cool.

The HTC One X was announced at Mobile World Congress 2012 as HTC's flagship phone. There are quite a few notable specifications that will make this the best phone in the market when it is announced, but we'll go into the those later on. It was announced alongside the HTC One S which is the middle-range phone with current high-gen specs and then the HTC One V which people would say is the low-end device, however it is more like a mid-range device of today.

Now, I’m guessing you want to know what it was about this phone that caught my eye? Well, seeing as we're talking about “catching my eye” let's talk about the display that the HTC One X is rocking. It has a 4.7” Super LCD2 IPS display with a resolution of 1280x720; now if those acronyms and the big numbers don't impress you, I don't know what would. Would it help if I told you the device has a PPI of around 312 which is only 10 pixels less than the iPhone 4/4S but on a screen over an inch bigger. Pretty impressive, huh?

Okay, so now we have an impressive display, what are we going to have running behind the display, well the phone rocks Android 4.0 with HTC's brand new HTC Sense 4.0 overlay on top. Android 4.0 is Android's Ice Cream Sandwich and with the One X being released with it built in, it will be the first phone on the market released with a skinned version of the software.

In addition to the great display and the awesome new Software HTC have implemented into the One X, they have also given the camera a really nice boost from previous HTC handsets. HTC have never been known for producing great camera, in fact some may say that their one downfall (and the reason Samsung appeared to come out on top) was due to the fact their cameras seemed very last-gen and never really lived up to the rest of the phone. They've obviously taken this constructive criticism on board and built in an 8mp camera with f2.0 lens and a separate chip called ImageSense to work with just the camera. When you open up the camera, you can do three different forms of production without changing any settings, you can take a picture (which it does in 0.7 seconds mind), you can record a video (which is does in 1080p at 30fps) and finally, you can hold the picture taking button to record a whole loads of pictures with the in-built burst mode. The ImageSense chip built in is meant to enable clearer photos in lower light as well as enable smoother video shooting. I've never heard of a phone having it's own chip dedicated to the camera, so we can presume the camera is going to be very impressive.

Another nice addition that the HTC One X supports is Beats Audio built in. 


The phone comes with Beats headphones so that your Music experience is meant to be better and what the Beats Audio technology does is make the bass deeper and the voices clearer and in general give off better audio. One thing I was interested to know was how good the external speaker is if they're pushing quality audio on the device. I personally do own a pair of Beats headphones and am really looking forward to testing this feature out and see if it's worth the name.

If you're interested, the phone is made out of a uni-body polycarbonate design. I watched a video on the process that it takes to create the externals of the phone and it all looked very technical, there were electrical shocks and a very hot melting process which all looked truly impressive.

Oh and by the way, the phone is running a 1.5 Ghz quad-core processor, in case you care. I'm kidding! This is definitely going to be the main selling point of this phone and it makes it the most powerful phone to be released in the world right now. I have watched videos on it and the phone absolutely flies with this processor, the internet loads in no time at all and applications instantly load and for the first time in a while, there appeared to be no lag within Android and no stuttering. The processor and display will result in brilliant Games on the phone and hopefully, developers will begin to bring out powerful new games for the new quad-core phones this year.

Okay, so if you still don't get why I'm excited about this phone, well this phone is a guaranteed future-proof phone, let me explain why. The phone runs Android 4.0 and is the first phone to run it out of the box and anything that comes out this year will surely be Android 4.0 or variations on that number too. The phone also has a quad-core processor which is very advanced and in addition, this is the first phone to run this and so any phones to come out this year will be surely be running quad-core processors too. And finally, the phone uses space-age technology in the polycarbonate casing and the second gen Gorilla Glass it's screen is rocking so it sounds like it'll be able to last a good couple of years on your contract. What also excites me about this phone is the potential of apps, over the next year or so we should start to see more iOS applications coming over the Android and with the new HD screen and quad-core processor, these should look and run beautfully.

Other little important bits of information are that this phone has a new accesory that you can buy for it (or comes free with it if you pre-order from phones4u.co.uk) that allows you to put mirror your phone on your television by connecting this little device up to your TV through a HDMI port and then simply swiping with three fingers up on your phone. This sends whatever you are viewing to your TV and mirrors your phone's screen. A little feature I like about this is that if you're watching a movie in HTC Watch then you can still use your phone as normal whilst viewing the movie on your TV. Now, I don't know if this will work with normal videos in the video app, your the YouTube app or stuff like this, but if they could enable these features, it would be very nice! (See image below)

So as you can tell, this phone is going to be a whopper in terms of hardware and hopefully it will truly deliver on a daily basis too. For a full list of specifications, click here. Thank you for reading, below is a list of places you can follow me or ask me questions at:

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