HTC held its Australian launch for the HTC One X last night. We went along to check out HTC’s newest superphone, and here are our initial impressions.
Alex: The One X is obviously a larger phone, which isn’t to my personal taste, but it’s not a clumsy phone to hold, which is a big plus in my book. The fact that Ice Cream Sandwich is standard is a big plus; unlike many other models released recently where ICS is “coming soon” (read: subject to vendor testing, carrier testing and the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on Mount Everest), this is ICS out of the box.
That camera shutter speed is impressive, but I’ll need some proper hands-on time to work out if it’s actually workable for real-world quality shots. Likewise, Beats Audio is a nice inclusion to have, albeit not an absolute must-have feature. Overall, though, this is an exceptionally nice phone at first glance.
Also, every launch should have a table with massive cheeses on it. Just putting that out there.
Elly: I want one. I don’t care really about Beats Audio, but the HTC One X is the first phone after the Galaxy Nexus to launch in Australia with Android 4.0 out of the box (Ice Cream Sandwich) — this is really important to me.
HTC Sense 4.0 looks very promising, it’s got a zippy 1.5GHz quad-core processor and a beautiful white chassis with a smudge-proof polycarbonate finish. The 8MP camera’s picture quality was a bit ‘meh’ in the low light conditions that I tried it out in, but it has a very cool continuous shooting mode (0.7 seconds for the first shot, 0.2 seconds for subsequent shots), and you can take still shots while recording video. No word on when it’ll be available on Telstra, but so far it gets a thumbs up from me.
We also shot a very brief video hands-on with the phone just outside the launch venue.
We’ll have a full review up when we’ve had proper time to actually test the One X.