I'm going to get started this blog by talking about the HTC One X (North American version), my current phone. Overall, its a pretty nice phone. Everything looks amazing, but is does have some major downfalls.
Design
The HTC One X has a really nice design, and it looks almost like one of those futuristic designs made in the 80's. I really like that. I have the white version, and the black screen completely surrounded by the white case does look great. I'm not a huge fan of the enormous silver ring around the protruding camera though, or the camera's placement in general. Most phones try to hide their camera away in the depths of the phone, but HTC made the camera protrude so that when resting flat, the phone rests on the camera.
It feels good to hold, it is more angular than square-ish meaning that whan you wrap your hand around the back, the tips of your fingers rest almost in a perfectly natural position. The screen is curved slightly on either side giving the screen the effect that it just melts away into the back case.
The design is awesome, and the only gripe I have is with the placement of ports and buttons. I'm not the only one who's had trouble pressing the on button - it's on the down-curved side of the top meaning you have to reach around an edge to press it. The microUSB charging port is oddly on the left side, which is OK if you don't use your phone while charging...but the cord is right where I normally hold the phone in landscape.
Interface
You either love or hate HTC's Sense UI. I've herd it has become much less intrusive than it had been previously, but for me it's still too much. They have altered just about everything they can: the lockscreen, homescreens, menus, app drawer, multitasking panel, notification bar...and mostly not in good ways.
The good: I like the changes to the lockscreen. to unlock, drag the ring up. To quick launch an app (same apps as on your dock), drag that app into the ring. They made the homescreens look nice, with big, beautiful widgets. Finding the right one can be hard though, because there are some 20 pages of pre-installed apps. The app drawer is at least organized alphabetically, and you have access to a 'personalization' option in the settings panel, which is capable to adjust colors and designs on everything made by Sense (the ring on the lockscreen, color of the dock, color of widgets, color of bars on the top and bottom of the app drawer), which is welcomed. The notification bar looks clean, and it's nice always having the 'clear all notifications' button there, even when you don't have any notifications.
The bad: the app drawer seems out of place to me. There are these 2 giant bars going across the top and bottom of the screen - I have never used anything on those bars and I don't know anybody who has. The menus have this weird separating effect when you try scrolling past the end of a menu, where all the individual elements will separate whether they are related or not. I know this is a workaround Apple's bounce-back patent, but now that they've settled I'd much prefer either the bounce-back or stock android glow as opposed to this. HTC completely butchered the multitasking panel. They changed it to scroll horizontally instead of vertically, which I guess is so that you can see the entire rectangular snapshot of your previous screens in apps (apposed to stock android's vertically scrolling square snapshots), but you can see less open apps, they've made it more difficult to close apps (swiping them away Sense-style takes quite a bit to get used to...you have to swipe much further than stock). One last thing about the multitasking: it doesn't even multitask. Everytime you open a previously opened app, it will refresh. That means that if you were in the middle of a game and went to reply to a text, when you switch back to that game it will reload as if it weren't ever open in the first place. Same goes for Facebook and all other apps - go back to it and it refreshes leaving you at the top of whatever you were on.
After about 3 weeks of trying to get used to Sense, I realized it wasn't for me and installed Nova Launcher Prime, a launcher app to make it at least look more like stock android (although this doesn't fix any of the issues).
Usability
In-app performance is great. The dual core 1.5GHz Krait processor really gets the job done. Gaming is fast and fluid, with only the occasional hiccup between frames. Looking at the Google Earth app (which is traditionally extremely laggy), it is much smoother than most devices. There wasn't any checkerboarding, but it did take a second to clear up when scrolling.
Battery life is sub-par. With the screen on minimum brightness reading reddit (mostly text posts) over 4G cellular data and under continuous use, the battery drained 33% in 1.5 hours. I can make it through the typical day without charging, but that's only with about 1 hour of screen on time. The battery is also non-removable, so your stuck with what you got.
Calls sounded good and clear, but a bit quiet. I was herd loud and clear on the other end always, and I didn't have any dropped calls.
Wear and Tear hasn't been an issue for the most part, the colors aren't scratching off at all anywhere, but the screen has managed to pick up a few very small scratches (just from being in the same pocket as other stuff) - nothing you'd notice if you wern't looking for it though. Maybe it's just the white version, but any bits of dust and/or pocket lint really slow up. especially in the indented front camera hole, the tiny space around the edge of the volume rocker, and just a tiny bit of stuff finding it's way in between the screen and the casing.
Overall
It's not quite what I'm looking for in a phone, but by no means is it a bad phone. I've used TouchWiz and stock android as my daily drivers for a wile, and adjusting to Sense wan't happening to me. This is almost the perfect phone hardware-wise, especially because now that it's technically outdated by the One X +, you can snag it for pretty cheap. If I were comfortable putting a custom ROM on it, this would quite possibly be the phone I kept for 2 or 3 years, assuming the battery holds up (it has so far).
Phone rating: 8/10 (+speed, power, design. - battery life, software)
You can find out more about me either on Reddit (username QandAndroid, you can usually find me around the Android related subreddits), or on Twitter (@QandAndroid). Also, feel free to email me at QandAndroid@gmail.com, I would love to hear back from you guys! Thanks for reading, and hopefully you learned a bit :)
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