Review: HTC One X

UPDATE, Saturday Nov 3, 2012: Review now reflects new on-contract pricing.

The HTC One X is one of the best smartphones on the market, and the best Android phone you can buy right now, period.

It's fast, it's gorgeous, it's lightweight and it has a stellar battery that lasts all day. The camera is also outstanding. It's the best I've seen on an Android phone, though it falls just short of the camera on the iPhone.

It's not just the hardware – the One X runs version 4.0 of Android, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, which is overlaid by HTC's own Sense skin. It's fast and easy to use. Combine that with the excellent hardware and you've got a handset worthy of being a flagship device for both HTC and AT&T. This fall, the carrier even dropped the price. Introduced at $200, it's now only $100 on-contract.

It's fast, it's gorgeous, it's lightweight and it has a stellar battery that lasts all day. The camera is also outstanding.In fact, the one thing I really don't like about the One X is its exclusivity to AT&T, the only carrier that sells the phone in the U.S. It's a shame this phone isn't available on T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.

Android handset makers don't have the same leverage as Apple when it comes to dealing with telecommunications companies, so they continue to pump out a few slightly different versions of every phone, each one exclusive to a different carrier. It's unnecessary and insane – HTC produced more than 50 different handsets last year alone.

The One X, being a stellar phone, serves as a testament that Android handset makers should go the iPhone route and make fewer phones of higher quality available through multiple carriers. The hardware companies would of course gain from this, but the payoff for the consumer would be huge as well.

To wit: Nearly every quibble I had with the T-Mobile-exclusive One S – a fine mid-range handset being sold at a flagship price – was fixed in the One X.

My biggest complaint with the One S was its display, and the feature I enjoyed most on the One X was – you guessed it – the display.

The One X has a 4.7-inch, 1280x720 IPS LCD touchscreen, covered in Corning's durable, crystal-clear Gorilla Glass. The viewing angles on the screen are some of the best I've seen on a smartphone. Colors are bright and accurate, producing consistently true-to-life images across websites and apps. Pixel edges are indistinguishable with the display's density of 316 pixels per inch.

Let me put it this way: The One X's screen is on the same level as the iPhone's Retina display. I love looking at it, and it blows away the PenTile displays found on the One S and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (my former favorite Android handset).

Beneath the fantastic touchscreen, the One X is a beast, with a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage (the same set-up found in the One S). Performance is blazing-fast, and though the AT&T handset doesn't pack the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor found in Europe and Asia's One X, it doesn't feel any less capable. The U.S. model is just as good and just as impressive as what HTC is offering overseas.

The U.S. version of the One X, unlike its overseas counterpart, runs on AT&T's 4G LTE network, which is only available in a small number of cities right now. In San Francisco, the One X downloaded and uploaded data quickly, whether connected to AT&T's 4G LTE, 4G HSPA+ or 3G service.

But despite performing like a beast, the One X is also a beauty.

The 0.36-inch chassis is made of a single piece of polycarbonate, giving the handset a sophisticated look free of seams or gaps, as seen on past HTC hardware. Given its size, the phone is also surprisingly light, weighing in at 4.6 ounces.

The One X comes in white or a near-black shade of grey, each sporting a matte finish with rounded edges that feels almost like a soft, finely sanded stone. The shape even helps the phone feel less massive than it actually is – remember, 4.7 inches is very large for a display, even by today's standards.

There's also very little external clutter: a charging microUSB port on the left side, a volume rocker on the right, and the headphone jack and power button up top. Above the touchscreen are two lines of pinholes for the phone's earpiece, with a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera beside that. I also love the absence of AT&T or "4G LTE" logos on the back. All you get is a silver HTC logo centered near the top and a Beats Audio logo near the bottom just above the pinholes for the phone's speaker. It's clean and mature, though I could do without the AT&T logo above the display.

The One X is the new king of Android.The One X's rear camera is surrounded by a handsome aluminum bezel. It looks fantastic, but I worry the protruding lens and bezel will get scratched up over the life of a two-year contract as the phone is laid down on desks and table tops.

The One X uses the same 8-megapixel camera with an f/2.0 lens and single LED flash also found in the HTC One S and the upcoming HTC Evo 4G LTE (exclusive to Sprint). It's a fantastic camera package that captures high-resolution, detailed photos quickly and beautifully, though the results are a bit on the cool side.

HTC's ImageSense photo-taking software only adds to the experience, with an HDR mode that amps up colors a bit, a slick panorama feature, a low-light mode and a close-up setting for taking macro shots. There are also a number of Instagram-esque filters that alter the color saturation and depth of field.

The one downside with the camera is that sometimes, I feel like it takes a photo too fast. This, however, isn't so much HTC's fault as it is a part of Google's Android OS, which touts blindingly fast camera performance as a feature. The more I shoot photos with ICS phones, the better I'm getting at capturing the shot I want. But I still find myself shooting a half-dozen photos of the same shot before I find what I'm looking for.

The software skin on this phone, HTC's Sense 4, is one of the better manufacturer-created user interfaces for Android. It's uncluttered, and actually the only Android skin I like. I still very much prefer stock ICS as Google designed it. But if you're looking for a smartphone with Android 4 in its pure, unaltered state, your best choice is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

And actually, before we tested the One X, the Android champ was the Galaxy Nexus. But with the One X outmatching the Galaxy Nexus it in every aspect (design, processor, display, battery life, camera) outside of its operating system, we're declaring a technical knockout. The One X is the new king of Android.

The question at this point is how long the One X can remain in the top spot. The Samsung Galaxy S III is set to arrive on multiple carriers later this summer, and as many as five new Nexus phones are expected to debut this fall.

WIRED A beautiful, powerful phone. Fantastic camera. One of the best displays on the market. AT&T's network is fast in 4G or 3G speeds. Sense 4 isn't as good as stock Android 4, but it's the best alternative out there.

TIRED HTC's signature protruding camera lens will get scuffed and scratched over the life of a two-year contract. Beats Audio makes music sounds louder, but not better. AT&T exclusivity is a shame.