Hardware
It takes more than a casual glance to tell AT&T's One X apart from its matte white foreign twin.
It takes more than a casual glance to tell AT&T's One X apart from its matte white foreign twin. The only telltale sign is HTC's logo giving way to the carrier's brand on the glass between the earpiece and the display. While both are striking handsets carefully crafted from the same thin (8.9mm), machined polycarbonate unibody, AT&T's version is perhaps a smidgen taller and heavier despite the official numbers (134.36mm and 130g). There are other subtle changes: the camera pod contains a slightly larger plastic (not aluminum) piece, and the five contacts on the back don't line up, leading us to believe these devices use incompatible docks.
The
phone retains the same gorgeous 4.7-inch HD (1280 x 720) Super LCD 2
(non-PenTile) screen protected by Gorilla glass, but the innards have
changed significantly. NVIDIA's quad-core 1.5GHzTegra
3 chip's
been replaced with Qualcomm's dual-core 1.5GHz MSM8960 Snapdragon
S4 processor,
which is similar to the MSM8260A found in the One S but adds that
important dual-band (1700 / 700MHz) LTE radio.
While the 1GB of RAM carries over, built-in storage is down to 16GB
from 32GB (with 12GB available to the user). This is particularly
vexing since there's no microSD card slot on the One X.
Performance and battery life
Comparing
a carrier-sanctioned device to its SIM-free counterpart often results
in disappointment. Processor swaps and operator-imposed software
tweaks don't usually mix well when it comes to performance (AT&T's
Galaxy Note comes
to mind). Well, you can rest easy: AT&T's One X bucks this trend
and feels just as blazingly fast as the global model, if not brisker.
In our benchmarks it beat the Tegra 3 variant in almost every test,
with scores matching the Snapdragon S4-equipped One S in each
category. All told, it's quite possibly the speediest handset we've
ever played with.
|
HTC
One X (AT&T)
|
HTC
One X (global)
|
HTC
One S (global)
|
Samsung
Galaxy Note (global)
|
|
|
Quadrant
(v2)
|
5183
|
4,906
|
5,053
|
3,854
|
|
Linpack
single-thread (MFLOPS)
|
103.77
|
48.54
|
103.88
|
64.3
|
|
Linpack
multi-thread (MFLOPS)
|
214.53
|
150.54
|
222.22
|
95.66
|
|
NenaMark2
(fps)
|
58.7
|
47.6
|
61.0
|
32.8
|
|
NenaMark1
(fps)
|
58.6
|
59.5
|
60.8
|
56.6
|
|
Vellamo
|
2350
|
1,617
|
2,452
|
901
|
|
SunSpider
9.1 (ms, lower numbers are better)
|
1709
|
1,772.5
|
1,742.5
|
2,902
|
Even
with LTE enabled, battery life is noticeably better on AT&T's One
X than on the foreign version. This was a sticking point in our
original review, so we're extremely pleased with the improvement. We
recorded eight hours and 55 minutes in our video loop rundown test
with the screen set to 50 percent brightness -- most folks will have
little trouble getting a full day's use from the 1,800mAh cell. Call
quality was decent, but LTE performance exceeded our expectations
with peak speeds of 35.7Mbps down and 23.5Mbps up (!) -- the fastest
results we've ever recorded on an LTE device.
Camera
On
the camera front, AT&T's One X follows in the footsteps of its
global stablemate (and the One S) with the same impressive
8-megapixel shooter. The wide aperture f/2.0 autofocus lens,
high-quality BSI sensor and super-fast processing combined with
features like HDR, panorama and real-time filters provide an
unrivaled imaging experience -- it even captures photos and 1080p /
30fps video simultaneously (with full AF and stereo audio). The lack
of a proper dual-detent shutter button is the only blatant omission.
Since there's no difference in picture quality, we've re-posted our
existing samples.
Software
Both
AT&T's One X and its unlocked cousin run Ice
Cream Sandwich (Android
4.0.3, in fact) along with HTC's new streamlined Sense 4 UI. We're
happy to report the carrier's managed to avoid diluting HTC's vision
by keeping customizations to a minimum. AT&T's start-up animation
is far less tacky and annoying than what we saw on T-Mobile's One S,
but here again the network status indicator's been adjusted to
display 4G LTE for LTE, 4G (instead of H) for HSPA+ and E for EDGE.
The word AT&T always appears in the left of the notification bar,
wasting valuable space.
In
addition to Google and HTC's usual software, you'll find a dozen or
so pre-installed apps on the phone. The good news is that half of
them are removable. The bad news is that several useful apps that
exist on the foreign version -- such as Voice Recorder, Polaris
Office, FM Radio, Flashlight and Dropbox --
are missing from AT&T's One X. The operator-specific crapware
includes AT&T Code scanner, AT&T FamilyMap, AT&T
Navigator (why?), AT&T Ready2Go, Device Help, Live TV and myAT&T.
Amazon Kindle, MOG Music, Top HD Games, and YPMobile complete the
package.
As
with other AT&T devices, the hotspot functionality is crippled
and will "call home" to check for a tethering plan before
turning on -- this even after unlocking the handset and inserting a
SIM from another carrier. There's also no AWS support for HSPA+ in
the baseband out of the box. On the plus side, NFC was
left untouched and Android
Beam works
as expected.
Wrap-up
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