HTC Corp. launched a slew of smartphones over the last year, with most
of the products aimed at the budget to mid-range category. Only recently
did its flagship, HTC One X, see the light of day and even that is soon
going to be trumped by the HTC One X+. In the meanwhile, as is the case
with every other smartphone manufacturer, HTC is trying to pack in as
much as it can in a smartphone while still retaining a mid-range price
on its handsets. After all, not everyone is gonna go for the Rs
40,000-plus handset every time it’s upgraded! One of the most recent
‘budget’ launches from the Taiwanese company was the HTC Desire X, an
upgrade to the very popular Desire, which was released a couple of years
ago. Here’s a look at how worthy an upgrade it is!
Display
It seems as if in under a year, 4-inch displays adorning smartphones
have become the norm. Hence, the screen on the HTC Desire X doesn’t seem
massive; it’s just the new ‘normal’. The screen is big enough for you
to have your favourite, most-used apps in a 4x4 matrix. Virtual buttons
that take you directly to Calls, Emails, Messages and Camera are
accessible at the bottom of any homescreen. As is the launch button for
all the applications that you have stored or downloaded on to the
smartphone. The screen is a Super LCD with a resolution of 480x800
pixels; hence it’s definitely not the most stunning display you would
have set eyes on. However, it doesn’t take away from the quintessential
smartphone experience at all.
HTC continues its habit of designing distinctive back panels with the
Desire X as well. A blue round-edged rim runs around the camera lodged
at the back of the smartphone. Against the white soft plastic body, the
design is understated yet unique.
Pulling the back panel out was a little more complicated than we’d
expect from a seemingly well-designed phone. An awkward wedge-and-pull
yanks the panel off to reveal the rather weirdly placed SIM card slot
(It is lodged under the camera panel, so you slot it in from one side
and push it out of the other to remove it.) You also have a microSD
memory card slot next to this, which is thankfully a lot less
complicated to manoeuvre.
Messages
The messaging client on the HTC Desire X is pretty intuitive. Well, more
than intuitive, it’s a good, quick learner. While at first go, it may
not exactly suggest the word you want to type in, once you do, however,
it saves your SMS vocabulary and has no trouble predicting it the next
time. The keyboard wasn’t cramped either, although personally it’s just
so much simpler to type messages in the landscape mode.
HTC Desire X also comes with a ‘Trace keyboard’ option, which has the
potential to offer stiff competition to SWYPE. As the name suggests,
this virtual keyboard lets you trace your finger across letters to form
words, which the handset itself predicts, and quite accurately at that.
You can swipe to your left or right across the entire keyboard to access
numbers, symbols or special characters.
Camera
As far as pre-shoot settings go, the Camera app on the HTC Desire X
offers quite a few. You can tweak the exposure levels, contrast,
saturation as well as the sharpness of the image before you click it.
Now, these options are accessed through a drop-down menu which takes up a
lot of screen space. So, even though HTC offers a live-view of the
frame while you adjust the settings, most of my subject was just masked
by the in-app menu. Tweaking contrast and saturation levels made the
images a little blurry as well as grainy. Without any cosmetic tweaks,
the images were better than you’d expect of a regular 5-meg camera.
HTC has thrown in a couple of scene modes that includes an HDR option.
The shots taken with the HDF filter on weren’t dramatically different
from the ones taken without the filter. The Macro mode seems to work
well too except the camera overall results in slightly noisy images.
Whenever I happened to take more than a shot or two of the same subject
(with the Continuous Shooting mode on), the camera app automatically
prompted me to choose the ‘Best Shot’ after I was done. I could browse
through the series of pictures and choose the best one and the
smartphone will ask you if it can just delete the rest. I think it’s a
smart move, saving a lot of memory space and time which I would have
spent later trying to sort through multiples of the same shot.
One feature conspicuous by its absence is a front camera on the HTC
Desire X, something that most people have started to take for granted in
even lower-end smartphones. The rear camera gives decent results when
you capture a video. However, it does not offer high-definition results.
Considering most mid-range smartphones now offer 720p recording, I
wonder why the HTC Desire X didn’t come with similar capabilities. One
good thing about the video recorder is the fact that it starts recording
as soon as you click on the video icon (it’s not a camera swap followed
by another press to start recording), which saves you from a lot of
time fumbling around before you can start shooting. The downside is that
you can only adjust one setting during the video shoot; you can choose
between having the flash on or off depending on the ambient light. The
only other video settings - video quality and record with audio options –
have to be chosen before you switch to the video mode.
UI, HTC Sense and Apps
HTC Desire X runs on Android 4.0 and features an HTC Sense 4.1 overlay.
HTC Sense retains some of the direct-access icons from the lock screen.
So you can drag any of these four icons – Phone, Mail, Messages and
Camera – on to HTC’s trademark lock ring and it’ll take you directly to
the desired application. Also, HTC still leverages its motion sensor to
quieten the volume once you pick the phone off your table, or switch on
the speakerphone if you keep it upside down while on a call.
You’ll also find the same ol’ Friend Stream, a social media widget as
well as Friend Channel which lets you follow the virtual updates of just
one person (stalker much?). SoundHound is packed in to make the most of
the stereo powered by Beats Audio. Polaris Office, TuneIn Radio,
Teeter, Google Chrome and Adobe Reader are pre-loaded to take care of
your productivity and entertainment needs. During the setup, the handset
prompts you to log in to your Dropbox account as well. The Dropbox
integration gives you about 25GB of free online storage for two years.
One problem with a series of HTC smartphones that we’ve used over time
is that you are using an app, and then receive a call and eventually
want to end it, the screen doesn’t take you to the in-call menu. You’ll
have to swipe it down from the notification bar to end the call.
Battery and performance
The HTC Desire X is powered by a dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4
processor, the first one to be featured in HTC phones. Some new launches
such as the new Windows phone by HTC are also going to be shipped with
the same processor. The handset didn’t give me reason to think it was
struggling to execute applications or multitask. I switched between
playing ‘Bottle Shoot’ when bored and browsing the latest stories on
‘Pulse’, while streaming music from the 8tracks app and the smartphone
handled it all quite well.
On our regular Quadrant Standard benchmarking test, the HTC Desire X
scored about 2769 points – not a stellar performance – but managed to
shoot above the likes of Motorola Atrix 4G and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.
The HTC Desire X comes with a 1,650 mAh battery and although the screen
is not much of a burner, the handset did manage to last just for more
than a working day. I alternated between Wi-Fi and mobile GPRS
connectivity and attended to about 10 voice calls, some occasional
browsing, gaming and messaging and the indicator was yet to turn red
before the end of the day.
Rs 23,499
Love – Feature-packed smartphone, nice gesture-based tweaks, decent battery life
Hate – Average build quality and camera
No comments:
Post a Comment