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Hey guys, this is Austin and today I’m here with a review of the HTC One X+
for AT&T. With a more powerful processor, 64GB of storage and a bigger
battery let’s see how it stacks up. First the bad news, this is only a slightly
tweaked upgrade from the standard One X. The good news is that the original
One X was and still is an excellent phone and this brings some nice
improvements on top of that. Build quality is still very good as the phone is
made out of a single piece of polycarbonate coated in a soft touch finish. Up
front you’ll find the 1.6 megapixel front facing camera along with the speaker
grille and hidden notification LED. Below are your capacitive back, home and
multitasking buttons and finally there’s the 4.7” display. This is unchanged
from the One X and it’s still among the best screens out there, only passed up
by the HTC Droid DNA. Viewing angles are excellent, saturation is right on and
it gets reasonably bright. From the side you can see the phone is slightly
tapered which gives it a nice look and feel in the hand. I’m not a big fan of the
placement of the MicroUSB port however as it’s a bit awkward but not a big
deal. Around back you’ll see the 8 megapixel camera with LED flash along
with Beats Audio branding and the speaker. It’s reasonably loud but it’s very
easy to cover up with a single misplaced finger when you’re using the phone.
Overall besides a couple small nitpicks the hardware gets a thumbs up from
me, it’s still one of the nicest Android phones out there to use. The HTC One
X+ is running Android 4.1 Jellybean with the HTC Sense 4+ skin. There are
several improvements including the addition of Google Now which continues
to get better and better. It’s a step up from the One X and in general quite
fast but it does tend to drop frames occasionally, making it not quite as
smooth as some of the latest Android phones. Sense itself isn’t bad but it still
strikes me as being a lot heavier than it needs to be. The UI tends to be a bit
bigger and display a lot more chrome than is necessary and then some
changes like the app switcher are just flat out slower and less intuitive to use
than stock Android or even TouchWiz on the Galaxy S3 or Note 2. It’s certainly
not all bad but I really do think Sense is in need of a redesign. The camera is
unchanged and it remains a solid performer. Images often look like they’re
oversharp with jagged edges visible in areas of fine detail but it does pull in a
very nicely saturated and contrasty image. It’s got a decent macro mode and
it’s also quite quick at taking a shot which I really appreciate as it allows me to
get interesting shots I might miss otherwise. Powering the HTC One X+ is an
Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor clocked at 1.7GHz along with 1GB of RAM
and 64GB of storage. This is a moderate bump in speed from the One X and it
does deliver solid performance but it is starting to fall off compared to the
latest crop of Android devices. Call quality is quite good on the AT&T network
and it does have 4G LTE on board although it hasn’t rolled out in my area yet
so I did all of my testing on the still relatively fast HSPA+ network.
Unfortunately the slightly larger battery doesn’t deliver great battery life, like
the original One X it will be be enough to get you through a day of moderate
use but don’t expect much more than that. The HTC One X+ has a lot of things
going for it. It’s got a fantastic screen, good build quality, Android 4.1 and a
relatively powerful quad core processor. With solid options like the Galaxy S3
and even the original One X to compete with, the One X+ is definitely worth a
look but it really isn’t able to stand out. If you enjoyed feel free to check out
more reviews of great high end smartphones here and don’t forget to hit up
that Like button and Subscribe! Anyway I will catch you guys in the next one.
With a screen approaching the size of 7 inch tablets this really feels as big as a
phone can get while still being pocketable. I never thought I would say this
but after using the Note 2 the Galaxy S3 seems tiny.