Introduction
About four or five years ago HTC and Google started a collaboration that at the time few seemed to believed in, but that some years later would prove to be a huge success. The phone they released towards the end of 2008 was the HTC Dream, also known as the T-Mobile G1 and a couple of months later as the ADP1 — Android Dev Phone 1. The phone itself was never a smash hit in terms of sales, software or hardware, but it did not have to be. It was the spark that would slowly spread and eventually start a wildfire.

During 2009 and the first half of 2010 HTC capitalized on the head start their collaboration with Google had provided, and they more or less dominated the competitors who were only just taking their first shaky steps in the Android segment. The competitors, however, did not give up, and during the latter part of 2010 and onwards it was the opinion of many that HTC had lost its head start and was even lagging behind. HTC were still making lots of money on their Android devices, but had the tide turned?

When they finally launched their first dual core device, the HTC Sensation, they were already months behind the competitors, and even though the Sensation was a good phone we never felt that HTC caught up. Until now. Enter the HTC One X.

With the One X HTC shows the world that they both want to and can deliver phones with cutting edge hardware. We already knew they can build phones with great materials and high build quality, but with the One X they’re also pushing the boundaries in terms of what’s under the bonnet. HTC is the first manufacturer to bring a quad core Android smartphone to the end users.

HTC, however, does not settle for relying on the quad core platform alone to “sell” the device. They have also equipped the One X with a magnificent 720p resolution HD screen, a camera sensor that at least according to HTC is something out of the ordinary, and “Beats by Dr. Dre” audio which at least on paper promises excellent quality for the music lovers. And, as usual with HTC, the build quality — even though they’ve opted for polycarbonate/plastic instead of the usual metal casing — is top notch.

It seems then that the HTC One X cannot be anything but a great success, but everyone knows that appearances can sometimes be deceptive. In this review we will, as always, do our utmost to find the devices’ strengths and its weaknesses and to try to define the personality of the phone. In addition to the usual synthetic benchmarks and the slight orgy of stats, facts and data we will also use the device as one normally uses a smartphone in real life, only far more intensively, so that by the end of the review we will hopefully be able to answer the question on everyone’s lips; is HTC back as top dog?

In the box


As usual HTC deliver their sample devices in all white boxes without a print, patterns, colors or text. These plain white boxes are sample units for reviewers only and does of course not represent what you, the end user, can expect if or when you buy the phone.

The content of our box was apart from the phone itself nothing but a wall charger, a USB cable and a key like metal pin for ejecting the Micro-SIM slot. The retail box will most likely contain the following, with slight variations depending on region and retailer/carrier:

* HTC One X
* Wall charger with a USB port (5V, 1A)
* Micro-USB cable (about 1 meter/3 ft)
* Earphones (“in ear”) with reply/hang up button
* Metal key for ejecting the Micro-SIM holder/slot
* Quick start guide and warranty information

Design, build quality and construction


What is pleasing to the eye is of course nothing but a matter of taste, so we won’t address this issue in great length, but we can say that most people we show the One X to thinks it’s a fairly good looking device, but no one appears to be stunned by the looks. On the back, around the camera lens near the top end of the back, there’s a round piece of what appears to be aluminium, and centered on the back we find a chromed HTC logo.

As usual the front is dominated by the large screen and its outer glass, which is the popular so called “Gorilla Glass” from Corning. The glass itself is tapered around the phone’s right and left edges where it softly meets the polycarbonate unibody chassis. Viewed from the side, because of the design of the unibody polycarbonate chassis and the tapered screen glass, the phone looks slightly curved, like the Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus, but in reality the surface is completely flat.

As mentioned the phone is, with exception of the screen glass and the innards, completely made out of polycarbonate plastic. This might make some HTC fans frown, but the fact is that the quality of the material and the build quality is very high — even better than some phones with a metal casing. The polycarbonate unibody feels more like a very fine matte ceramic surface than regular plastic and the design with the softly rounded edges makes the One X feels better to hold than any other 4.3 inch or larger class phone, unless of course if you have small hands.

Because of the built-in and non removable battery HTC has been able to skip the usual battery hatch and instead build the chassis from one solid piece of polycarbonate plastic — a so called unibody design. This means no sharp edges where the back meets the front, where the battery hatch meets the chassis. Nothing to leave gaps, nothing to flex, crack or creak.

The One X is as stiff as a board, with the exception of a slight flex in the screen glass when pressure is applied near the center of the glass. The only removable part is the tiny Micro-SIM holder on the top of the phone, which fits snugly in the chassis itself. The material, the build quality and the general feel of quality of the phone is quite simply top notch, with a slight exception for the flexing screen and a spongy volume rocker which you will read more about a few chapters down.

Gallery – The One X next to other Android phones

Buttons, connectors, slots and sensors



On the front of the phone we find three capacitive buttons; “Back”, “Home” and “Recent apps”. We are a bit puzzled as to why HTC would launch an Android 4.0 class phone with capacitive buttons when Google with Android 3.0+ has moved these buttons to the user interface of the operating system itself. Moving the buttons to the operating system UI means that the buttons, unlike external buttons, can rotate with the screen and be redesigned, modified and added to via simple software updates. There is in our opinion simply no need for external buttons anymore, and it only serves to make the phone taller than it needs to be.

The left side of the phone is completely smooth apart from the MHL compatible Micro-USB port located in the middle of the top half of the device. On the right side, on the top half and perpendicular to the Micro-USB port, we find the volume rocker (+/-) which like the phone itself is made from white plastic. The volume rocker sits almost flush with the chassis which makes it a bit tricky to find by feel alone and it lacks the distinct “click” feedback that lets our fingertips know that “yup, you just pressed me”. This is by all means not a big problem, but it is still worth mentioning as it does irk us a bit in our day to day usage of the phone.

On the top end of the phone, to the far left, we find a small perforation in the chassis for the secondary microphone and next to that the 3.5 mm audio jack. On the right side of the top end we find the power button, just where we like it. The power button of course doubles as the screen lock button. Unlike the flush and spongy volume rocker the power button protrudes half a millimeter more and delivers a distinct feedback when pressed, which makes us think that maybe the spongy volume rocker is a flaw in the unit we were sent.

Below the power button, towards the tapered back of the phone, sits the Micro-SIM holder with an almost perfect fit. We can’t detect even a slight gap between the holder and the chassis, apart from the deliberately beveled edges. It’s small details like these, the manufacturers obvious attention to quality and detail, that separates some phones from others. A small metal key with a sharp pin, which of course is bundled with the One X, is used to eject the Micro-SIM holder.

The bottom end of the device lacks both buttons and connectors, but we do find a small perforation for the primary microphone which in combination with the secondary microphone on the top of the phone is used both as the microphone for phone calls and for recording audio and filtering out background noise. On the back, near the bottom right, we find five copper dots in a line, for docking the phone. Centered by the bottom end of the back we find a rectangle shaped pattern of fine perforations behind which the external loudspeaker sits.

Centered on the front of the phone, in the white polycarbonate frame/chassis above the screen, we of course find the speaker for phone calls. To the right of the speaker sits the front mounted camera lens. Just below the speaker, hidden from view behind the black screen glass, we find the proximity sensor which automatically shuts the screen and touchscreen off when you hold the phone against your ear or keep the phone in your pocked during phone calls, and the light sensor which automatically regulates the screen brightness, should we want it to.

Reception and data speeds
The reception via the mobile network (2G/3G/3.5G) is always difficult to review because of the ever changing conditions, which on the exact same location can shift drastically from one minute to the next because of weather/atmospheric conditions and radio interference and so on. After a few weeks with the phone we do however feel comfortable in concluding that the mobile network reception in the One X is good, bordering on very good. HTC’s decision to go with a polycarbonate/plastic chassis instead of the usual metal chassis has most likely helped a lot as far as reception goes, since metal tends to block radio signals far more than plastic.

When compared to our reference devices Galaxy Note and Galaxy Nexus we give the HTC One X a slight edge, but compared to Sony’s Xperia S and its unique antenna design it falls short, though it is not far behind. As far as maximum transfer rates via HSxPA goes the One X is on paper good for 21 Mbit/s down and 5.76 Mbit/s up, but because the maximum transfer rate of our 3.5G network is far lower than 21/5.76 we can only conclude that the One X as expected easily handles the max speeds of our 3.5G network, at about 6 Mbit/s down and 2.5 Mbit/s up.

Via WiFi we once again compared the One X reception against the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Nexus and found that after having slowly distanced ourselves from the wireless router by about 20 meters (~65 ft), which includes three fairly thick concrete walls/closed doors, all three devices lost the link to the router almost simultaneously, barely a meter (3 ft) apart. Just to be sure we repeated the test two times more with near identical results. We know from experience that both the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Nexus performs fairly well as far as WiFi reception goes, and the HTC One X is definitely on par with the two Samsung devices.

The maximum transfer rates via WiFi (802.11/n) through our local network and over the FTP protocol ended up being barely average at best; 30 Mbit/s download (from server to phone) and 20 Mbit/s upload (from phone to server). To reach a fair average transfer speed we transfer a file of at least 500 MB, time the transfer and calculate an average, and we do this in both directions — but never simultaneously.

30 Mbit/s (~3.7 MB/s) download (from server to phone) is roughly on par with most competitors, but the upload speed of a mere 18 – 20 Mbit/s (2.3 – 2.5 MB/s) is well below average and a bit of a disappointment, especially considering that the radio in yesteryear’s Tegra 2 (T20) tablets was good for 40 Mbit/s in both directions. We know that high transfer speeds via WiFi generates a lot of heat, and phones, because of their smaller size, cannot dissipate the heat as well as tablets, which could be why Nvidia seems to have restricted the maximum transfer rate in the AP30 (smartphone) version of the Tegra 3 — to avoid overheating.

Audio and sound quality
The front speaker for phone calls is very loud and other than in unusually noisy surroundings we never need to set it to 100% — something that cannot be said of all phones. During calls the sound is clear and crisp and we have no problems hearing the other party, and the other party has no problems hearing us. The secondary microphone seems to be doing its job as intended; to record and cancel out background noise.

HTC One X front phone speaker – microphone recording from a distance of 1 centimeter (Skype call)

Sony Xperia S front phone speaker – microphone recording from a distance of 1 centimeter (Skype call)

The external speaker on the back of the One X delivers a wider range than we’re used to from HTC phones, but unfortunately the volume is not quite as good as we had hoped it would be, being a Beats by Dr. Dre phone and all. In noisy surroundings with the phone in a pocket we sometimes have difficulty hearing the phone ring, especially if we instead of a traditional “beep-beep” ringtone use a song/piece of a set as our incoming call ringtone. Unlike the Xperia S (XLOUD enabled) the One X speaker never reaches a volume where the sound starts cracking and gets distorted, which might protect it from breaking.

HTC One X back speaker – microphone recording from a distance of 40 centimeters

Sony Xperia S (XLOUD enabled) – microphone recording from a distance of 40 centimeters

Just like the HTC Sensation XL the One X is designed and tuned to work extra well with Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. In cooperation with Beats Audio HTC has developed and fine tuned special sound profiles for both Beats Solo and Beats iBeats/urBeats that are supposed to bring out the best sound possible from each earphone/headphone. When we connect a pair of Bests Solo we find that the sound quality indeed does improve with the Beats Solo profile active, but we can’t say it’s quite worth the current €179.99 the Beats Solo on-ear headphones are listed for at the Beats by Dr. Dre website.

HTC Sound Enhancer

Naturally the One X works well with earphones and headphones from other manufacturers too, and we’re given the following sound profiles to choose from: Beats Audio, Dance, Live, Treble Boost, Warmth, Sweetener, Classical and finally our personal favorite “No effects”. The default music player unfortunately lacks a traditional equalizer, but there is a plethora of competent music players available on the Google Play Store.

When we connect a pair of Sennheiser HD25-1 II we can immediately tell that we are not able to crank the volume up as far as with our reference audio device, the SanDisk Sansa Clip+, and we also miss the power and sound dynamic of the SanDisk. The end result is not bad, far from it, but the One X — like all other Android phones we have tested — simply cannot compete with a dedicated audio player like the Sansa Clip+. For a phone the One X is a decent music player, but if you know that you are a bit of an audio connoisseur (or an audiophile) you might want to bring your favorite headphones with you to your local retailer and have a listen before buying.

HTC has equipped the One X with the new Bluetooth profile Apt-X which promises better sound through the A2DP protocol, but for this to work it also requires earphones/headphones with Apt-X support. When we pair a pair of Sennheiser PX210BT headphones with the One X we are fairly sure we can tell the difference — though the power of placebo is often a factor when it comes to all things audio. The output simply sounds crisper and more distinct all the way from the low bass frequencies up to the high treble, and we also detect less background noise and hissing.

Frequency response

In this benchmark we connect the devices (one at a time) to a 3.5 mm Y splitter which in one end is connected to the Line In port of our Audigy XiFy sound card in our computer (which sits behind an UPS) and in the other end a pair of AKG K 420 headphones (32 ohm, 125 dB/mW). We then play a RightMark Audio Analyzer generated test clip on the device (with all sound profiles/enhancers disabled) and then let RightMark Audio Analyzer record and analyze the output from the 3.5 mm jack.

In the line graph above the frequency response of the output from each tested device is illustrated and we’re focusing on the 20Hz to 20kHz span since that is the typical frequency range that the human ear can hear.

Ideally the curve seen in the graph above would not be a curve at all, but rather a completely flat line at +/- 0 dB, but few if any portable devices are capable of a completely flat “curve”. Simplified: the flatter the curve, at +/- 0 dB, the better. The HTC One X produces a fairly nice and even curve, except for a +4 db hump at 50-100Hz and then a +3 dB hump at 16-18kHz. The One X outperforms both the Sensation XL and Sony Xperia S, but cannot, as we concluded a few paragraphs up, compete with our dedicated music player reference unit, the SanDisk Sansa Clip+.

[Full RMAA analysis]

GPS and positioning

Show HTC One X (Red) vs Sony Xperia S (Green) on a larger map.
In this test we take the test device and a reference unit with us on a stroll in the neighborhood, which is an urban setting with buildings and parks with trees obscuring the view to the sky and therefore the satellites.

We record the route with Google’s app My Tracks and before we start we make sure to disable positioning via the mobile network and WiFi. Doing this allows us to isolate the satellite positioning performance of the device, meaning the GPS (and sometimes GLONASS) only.

When we compare the recorded HTC One X route to the Sony Xperia S route we immediately see that the One X can’t hang with the Xperia S. [Note: Due to a software bug in the HTC One X a calibration of the G Sensor and/or magnetic compass sensor (usually done by downloading a compass app from the Play Store and moving the phone in a figure 8 for a few seconds) will often help if you are having issues with GPS accuracy]. In the One X route we see a few fairly large anomalies/inaccuracies, especially when the sky is obscured by buildings, and overall the Xperia S delivers a route that matches the actual route with more accuracy — largely thanks to the Xperia S’ GLONASS support, which on top of the regular GPS provides a notably higher accuracy in the northern hemisphere by roughly doubling the total amount of satellite locks.

The GPS of the One X is very quick to achieve satellite lock, often taking no more than 5 seconds, which makes it a good companion when you need a quick positioning fix like when you are in a hurry and you pull the phone out of your pocket and quickly need to find the nearest subway station or bus stop. Some phones can take upwards of one minute to achieve a reliable GPS lock, which makes it more or less useless when you’re in a rush and the mobile network positioning is not accurate enough.

Using the app GPS Test we usually lock on to 11-12 satellites with the One X, while the GPS + GLONASS enabled Xperia S locks on to 21-23 satellites from the exact same location, simultaneously.

Screen and digitizer
The 4.7 inch screen (120 mm) with a 720p resolution (720×1280 pixels) is an IPS LCD2 type panel and is possibly the best TFT/LCD screen we have ever seen on a portable device. The “LCD2″ branding, however, seems to be little more than a sales gimmick, a brand name, rather than a new revolutionary LCD technology as the marketing people would like to have us believe.

Even so, the screen is magnificent and even though the Xperia S has a higher pixel density thanks to the same amount of pixels on a smaller screen, the HTC One X screen is our favorite of the two, largely thanks to better color reproduction and contrasts without having to crank the backlight up to 70% or more. While having a slight edge as far as pixel density and sharpness goes the Xperia S colors are a little bit bit too matte and murky for our liking — at least compared next to the One X.

However truth be told we are talking about the two best LCD screens we have ever come across on portable devices, and even though we prefer the One X screen the fact is that both screens are absolutely brilliant, and in the end it’s not a factual matter but rather a matter of personal preference.

The One X viewing angles are very good and the colors/nuances shift very little when viewed even from sharp angles, almost as little as on Super AMOLED Plus screens, but we do note that the brightness of the screen drops far more rapidly when viewed from angles than the Super AMOLED Plus counterparts, but compared to the limited viewing angles of the Xperia S the One X is noticeably better.

Despite a color depth of over 16 million nuances we somewhat surprisingly find so called color banding in some places in the graphical user interface. A screen capable of 16 million nuances should not have banding problems, so we are fairly sure that this is not because of limitations in the screen itself, but rather because of lacking color depth in some of the gradients within either Android 4.0 or HTC Sense 4.0.

Despite the occasional color banding the color reproduction is probably what we like best about the screen, apart from the 720p resolution, and thanks to the RGB subpixel matrix the screen is far sharper than competitors such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, also 720p, and its slightly fuzzy PenTile subpixel matrix.

As far as readability in full daylight goes the HTC One X performs on par with the Sony Xperia S, the Samsung Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II. Even though it might not be evident in the video above the Super AMOLED screens give off slightly less reflection than the One X’ LCD screen, which under some conditions make them slightly easier to view/read. Compared to the Sensation XL the difference in readability is huge, and the One X is far better.

The digitizer, the touch sensitive surface layer of the screen, is one of the best and most precise we’ve ever used. During our time with the review unit the screen rarely, if ever, missed a tap, swipe or pinch, other than when we deliberately were far too imprecise and “sloppy” with our taps and swipes just too see what we could get away with.

We know that some One X owners have had touchscreen issues, especially while holding the phone in a (too) firm grip, most likely either by making the screen flex and bend which might have an impact on the response of the screen or “shorting out” the touch screen by touching the sides of the tapered touchscreen when the fingertips wrap around the edges of the phone.

Using the app Input Benchmark we measure a digitizer/touchscreen refresh rate of 65Hz, which means the digitizer will read and trace our taps, swipes and pinches 65 times every second. Even though some screens offer a higher Hz we find that anything from 60Hz and up is than enough to make the screen as responsive as it needs to be and we can’t tell the difference between a 65Hz and an 80Hz digitizer. On some older phones with digitizers hovering between high 20′s and mid 40′s the touchscreen lag is noticeable which in the end leads to far more missed taps and swipes.

With the app Android System Info we then measured the multitouch capabilities and our jaws dropped in bewilderment when the screen maxed out at two (2) simultaneous touch points, also known as dual touch — a term rarely used or even heard since 2010. Even though few applications use more than two finger gestures there are some and there will be more in the future, so why on earth had HTC opted for dual touch only?

Turns out they had not. In HTC Sense 4.0, under the Android display settings, we soon found a feature called “HTC gestures”, which when checked (as it is out of the box) enables a three finger gesture feature to perform certain tasks. For this three finger gesture to work and not end up in conflict with other multitouch apps the screen is restricted to two touch points for third party apps. As soon as we disabled “HTC gestures” we got the full ten (10) point multitouch and the screen traced the movement of every fingertip with ease.

The capacitive menu buttons below the screen, which in all honesty are not needed anymore and should probably have been left out, are despite their questionable existence very responsive, just like the rest of the touchscreen.

Compared to the unresponsive, or at least frustrating to use, capacitive buttons of the Sony Xperia S the One X is the exact opposite. Where the capacitive button area of the Xperia S is only a few millimeters in height, and demand that you hit them exactly spot on for them to respond, the One X offers a far more fluent experience where you tap the capacitive menu buttons the exact same way you would tap a button or an icon on the screen — no need to be over-explicitly precise which only serves to make it a less fluid experience.

All in all, despite some color banding and not being of the Super AMOLED Plus type (which by some might be considered a plus) this is probably the best smartphone screen/touchscreen/capacitive button combination we have ever had the pleasure of using.

A slight reservation for possible quality control issues/issues when holding the phone too firmly. We want to hear what you, owners of the One X, have to say about this — so speak up in the comments.

Operating system and software
Our review unit of the HTC One X came preloaded with Android 4.0.3/Ice Cream Sandwich, and on top of that HTC’s brand new Sense 4.0 interface. The Sense UI quickly became one of, if not the most popular, manufacturer interface on the market. As time passed and new versions of HTC Sense came and went we noticed how the interface got heavier and more bloated with more features, more animations, more transition effects and as a result the phones felt sluggish despite having far more powerful hardware than before.

With version 4.0 of the Sense UI HTC has taken a few steps back in order to move forward – they have put HTC Sense through a diet and the weight loss in combination with the raw power the Tegra 3 has worked wonders. This is by far the fastest HTC Android phone we have ever used, and in all likelihood also the fastest Android phone, period. With version 4.0 of the Sense UI and the One X it seems that HTC has finally found a near perfect balance between eye candy, features and hardware. This is by far our favorite version of Sense UI — so far.

The very same day that our review unit arrived in our office HTC pushed out a 21MB FOTA (“Firmware Over The Air”) update. We don’t know what the update was for, if it addressed bugs or if it contained optimizations, but since HTC pushed the embargo of the publishing date ahead a few days we suspect they wanted to make sure that all reviewers had received the latest version — which tells us it might have been an important update.

Home screen/Launcher

To the left we see the home screen as it looks straight out of the box, with the exception of the Settings icon that we put there. Just like stock Android 4.0, HTC Sense offers an easy way of creating folders — simply drag and drop one icon on top of another and you’re done. Exactly like in Android 4.0, but with HTC’s own look and feel. Unlike stock Android 4.0 you can easily rearrange the icons on the home screen by simply dragging one icon in between two other icons — they will slide out of the way automatically.

To the right we see the notification pull down which is a good example of how HTC has shed some weight in Sense 4.0 — the “Recent apps” icon list that used to be on the top of the notifications pull down is now gone and so are the tabs near the bottom of the pull down where in Sense 3.0 you could access quick toggles for WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS among other things.

We are somewhat annoyed that the home screen does not rotate between portrait and landscape mode when we tilt the phone — no matter if you like this feature or not, it should be up to the end user to enable/disable in the settings.

Note: The battery indicator in the notification list is part of neither Android 4.0 nor Sense 4.0. It’s a third party app (Battery Monitor) that we had installed prior to taking the screenshot. On the One X you can easily take screenshots by pressing and holding the power button and then immediately tapping the Home button.

Left to right: The “People” widget, your favorite contacts, quite simply. The stock music player widget — good looking, easy to use and offers all the basic music widget features we look for. Finally HTC’s take on Android 4.0′s “Recent apps”. The function is basically the same, but it looks different and holds fewer recent apps in view (two at a time) which in fact makes it more tedious to use since you have to swipe more to find the app/process you’re looking for. Compared to the same function in the Galaxy Nexus, HTC’s is a lot more fluid and responsive. If this is down to hardware or software we don’t know.

Above we see how HTC in Sense 4.0 has put their own touch on the home screen management of widgets, shortcuts and apps. We definitely prefer this over the stock Android 4.0 version. Nice layout and design and you reach the home screen management mode by simply long pressing the screen.

If you want to change the look and feel of your phone HTC offers, as before, several different skins, scenes, wallpapers and lock screens via the Personalize app. We do miss some features from older versions of HTC Sense, like the ability to change the look of the status bar when you switch skin. A handful of skins, wallpapers and lock screens are bundled with the phone and more are supposed to be available online, via the HTC Hub app, but at the time of this review apart from a few notification ringtone packs HTC Hub held no content at all.

List of installed apps in three different tabs; “All”, “Frequent” and “Downloads”.

We can choose sorting order for our installed apps; “Alphabetical”, “Date (Most recent)” and “Date (oldest)” and the order of the three tabs can be changed. Finally we find the “Share app” feature which is good for sending app tips to your friends, posting them on Facebook or Tweeting them. The feature does not share the actual app, but rather a link to the app on Google Play Store.

Phone and calendar

The phone app and its contacts (“People”) and features is as far as functionality goes more or less the same as in stock Android 4.0, but as usual HTC has changed the look and the feel and made it a bit more pleasing to the eye.

The Calendar is just like the phone app fairly basic, but offers all the features most of us will ever need in terms of syncing with your Google Calendar, offering views for days, weeks and months, an interface that is easy to understand and use and a nice-looking home screen widget.

Web browser

At first glance the HTC One X web browser does not appear to be very different from the stock Android 4.0 web browser, but when we look more closely we can see that HTC has changed and added a few things here and there, making some things more accessible. To the left the Swedroid.se website loaded, full version of the site. In the middle we see the extended HTC menu with more options than stock Android 4.0, like the Flash player toggle and the Print feature. To the right the smart inverted browser mode, which is a stock Android 4.0 feature and very useful for night browsing/reading and saving battery on devices with AMOLED screens which while showing white/bright pixels consumes several times more energy than while showing black/dark pixels.

When we compare the web browser performance of the quad core One X with Sony’s dual core Xperia S it’s evident that the web browser is unable to take full advantage of the available processing power. We don’t know if this is by design to stop the battery from draining in two shakes of a lamb’s tail or if the Android browser simply can’t handle quad core processors yet.

Performance wise it’s more or less a wash, though the One X usually renders the websites a few seconds faster, and it’s difficult to pick a winner. But because of fairly frequent browser crashes in the HTC One X (usually related to Adobe Flash player) we give a slight edge to the Xperia S right now. Things can change quickly though — one single update from either HTC or Adobe and the crash bug might be gone and we’re right back at square one.

Left: open tabs/windows. Once again basically the same feature as in stock Android 4.0, but with HTC’s own design and layout. In the middle the “Downloads” app which in reality is a separate app and not just a part of the web browser. It’s also identical to the stock Android version. To the right the simple “Find on page” feature for searching for keywords on a web page.

Once again we see a new layout and design on a stock Android 4.0 feature – bookmarks and browsing history.

At first glance the available browser settings looks to be fairly few, but when we enter the sub menus we find a fair share of features, options and settings — mostly things we recognize from Android 4.0 but also new features added by HTC.

Among other things we find the Android 4.0 option of preloading search results in the background, immediately instead of waiting for you to click the link, which while consuming more bandwidth offers a much faster search and browse experience. Yet another Android 4.0 feature is that we can tell the browser to ignore web sites that tries to control the zoom level of mobile devices. An HTC specific feature is the option to dim the screen browser while web sites are loading — a useful feature for extending battery life, slight as it might be. Finally the Android 4.0 feature with a slider for increasing or decreasing the font size.

Under Accessibility we find the toggle for “Inverted rendering” which we mention and you can see in action a few paragraphs up in the web browser chapter. Apart from the option of disabling GIF animations (*fist pump*), the rest of the settings are identical to stock Android 4.0.

Gallery and media players

The Gallery app is fairly simple, as in it does not have many bells and whistles, and it’s easy to use. It’s also very quick both in terms of rendering images/thumbnails, even when there are hundreds of them, and when we are swiping through the images in full screen mode. If you want or need more features there are plenty of third party alternatives on the Google Play Store.

The One X music player is a bit tricky to find since it lacks an app/icon of its own. You reach the music app by either tapping the music widget or opening the “Music” app which is a hub containing four different music related apps/services; “SoundHound”, “TuneIn Radio”, “7digital” and “My Phone”, the latter of which starts the stock music player.

The player itself is decent, it plays the most common audio formats and offers all the basic features most people need, with the possible exception of an equalizer. Instead of an equalizer there are several different presets and sound effects, plus our favorite setting “No effects”. To gain access to these presets you have to have earphones or headphones plugged in.

The app of course supports “Album art”, where the cover art for the album/song you’re playing is displayed. If you don’t have the album art image files you can easily, with a few taps, have the music player automatically search for and download missing album art — provided that the song/album is correctly named and of course that the album art is available in the extensive online archive used. Thanks to SoundHound being integrated into the music player you can search for the name of unknown songs currently playing, or simply search your favorite artist to find information such as the official website, tour dates and merchandise.

As previously mentioned; “Music” – a hub for four different music related apps: “SoundHound”, “TuneIn Radio”, “7digital” and “My Phone”. As explained in the paragraph above SoundHound lets you search for artists and music, either by analyzing what’s playing on the phone, by listening what’s playing near you or by you making a manual search. TuneIn Radio is an online radio app that gathers online radio stations from around the world into one simple interface; search globally or locally, browse by category or get suggestions. 7digital is an online music store, much like iTunes, that lets you buy and download music straight to your phone. My Phone, as explained above, opens the default music player and plays music you have stored on the phone.

The video player is not a separate application but rather a part of the Gallery app. If you, like us, prefer to use a file manager to browse your files and open/start videos from there you know that when you tap the video you get a list menu with all your installed video players — except the stock player does not show up, since it is not an app of its own. This is kind of a shame because the player itself, basic as it is, is fairly competent and offers a far better interface than most third party video players and easy access to features like serving/streaming via WiFi/DLNA and access to one tap video screenshots.

The video support is good and the One X stock video player will play almost anything you can throw at it, but unfortunately the audio support in videos is severely lacking and neither AC3 nor DTS, the two most common audio formats used in HD movies that you find online, will play. Fortunately many third party video players will play both AC3 and DTS, making this a non issue.

Clip	Resolution	Codec / Profile / Container	Bitrate	Audio	Results Primary player: MX Video Player Secondary player: Dice Player
#1	640x352	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK
#2	576x320	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1,4 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK (video: S/W only)
#3	720p	h.264 / High@L3.1 / MKV	3 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#4	720p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	9 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#5	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	14 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#6	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	19,2 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#7	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	22,8 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#8	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	25 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	Fail (video OK, no sound in H/W nor S/W mode) (OK using Dice Player)
#9	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	30 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK
#10	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	42 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK, one or two dropped frames

In the table above we can conclude that the One X will play anything we can throw at it, as long as we’re using the right video player. Our usual go-to video player MX Video Player unfortunately proved to not be fully compatible with the One X, which explains why audio is missing in all clips using AC3 or DTS. Usually the solution is to simply ask MX Video Player to software decode the audio stream, but for unknown reasons this was not possible on the One X.

Because of this incompatibility we decided to try the free (ad supported) video player Dice Player, and this proved to be a winning combination. The Tegra 3 equipped One X plays every single video file we throw at i and is, alongside the ASUS Transformer Prime Tegra 3 tablet, the most competent video player we have ever tested — as long as we pick the right video player.

The One X does not have a Micro-HDMI port, but offers HDMI output via the MHL compatible Micro-USB port instead.

Via HTC Watch we can buy or rent both old and current movies with a few simple taps of the screen. The movies can either be downloaded to watch later or streamed if you want to start watching immediately. Unfortunately the file format of the downloaded files is proprietary and the clips will only play via HTC Watch, which means you cannot transfer downloaded movies to your media tank or computer and watch them from there — you have to use your HTC Watch equipped phone or tablet.

Settings
Below you are presented with a selection of screenshots of system settings that Android 4.0 and HTC Sense has to offer. Most of the screenshots are self-explanatory, so we will keep the commenting of them to a minimum.

Accounts & sync, Location settings and finally Privacy settings. More or less the same as in stock Android 4.0, but HTC has added a few extra bells and whistles here and there, particularly for the lock screen privacy settings.

Other than removing the option to increase or decrease the system font size everything looks like stock Android 4.0 under “Accessibility”. In the Display & gestures sub-menu we find a few new features added by HTC, like extended notification options for incoming messages, the three finger “HTC gestures” feature and calibration of the G Sensor.

Under the Sound sub-menu we find a few HTC specific additions, like different sound profiles; Normal, Vibrate and Silent, a pocket mode to increase the ringtone volume when the phone “feels” it’s in a pocket or a handbag, and a setting for enabling the external speaker on the back if you turn the phone over (screen down) and put it on a flat surface during a call.

Storage overview. Internal storage is the space available for app installations, Phone storage is available space for storing files such as images, music and videos. The battery use information and docking options are self-explanatory.

Even though looking fairly different than in Android 4.0 the Language & keyboard settings are in essence as far as features and options goes identical. We count a total of 26 different languages and several hundred Language/Location combinations, including a whopping 59 different English/*Location* combinations.

Google Voice Search is more or less the exact same app as in stock Android 4.0, which means that just like in previous versions of Google Voice Search you can have a lot of fun with the misinterpretations and search suggestions offered by Google. The available settings are few and solely handles censorship and language options. 21 different Voice Search languages are currently available, including English, “pig latin” and isiZulu.

The brilliant HTC dialogue when connecting the device to a computer, Time & date settings which basically have been the same since Android 1.0, and to the right the app manager which is identical with the one in stock Android 2.3 and 4.0.

Other applications worth mentioning
Once again we let the screenshots do most of the talking.

7digital is an online music store which lets you purchase and download music straight to your phone. The calculator is self-explanatory and finally HTC Friend Stream which is a hub that gathers a number of social network feeds, like Facebook and Twitter, in one simple app.

The Facebook app is identical with the one in Google Play Store which means it gets regular updates that does not have to be pushed out via HTC. The bundled flashlight app with three brightness levels and finally the stock SMS/text app.

The FM Radio app is simple but functional and offers the basic features such as automatic scanning and storing of radio stations and RDS support. As a bonus SoundHound has been integrated, which with one tap lets you search for the name of the artist and song that is currently playing, a very nifty feature for when you hear a song you like but does not recognize. The sound quality of course depends on the reception, and to even be able to start the app and get reception you need to have earphones/headphones plugged in. With good reception the sound quality is as good as it gets via the FM band — meaning not great, but good enough for most.

HTC Car - control panel for the motorist

The stock HTC Sense email client. Does what it should and is easy to set up and use, but there are more powerful options on Google Play Store for hardcore email juggernauts.

The GMail app is the stock Android 4.0 version and is as such very good and far far better than the Android 2.3/Gingerbread (and older) versions.

HTC Hub is sort of a miniature version of Google Play Store and provides an easy way for the end user to download customizations (skins, wallpapers, ringtones and such) for their HTC device as well as installing certain apps as well. Currently the content is more than a little lacking, but we expect this to change as Sense 4.0 matures and gets a wider user base.

Notes, a simple notepad app, HTC Files which is a hub for Polaris Office, which handles Office documents, and cloud storage integration via Dropbox and Microsoft’s online document storage service SkyDrive. Stocks app to the right.

Pulse is a third party news feed reader (RSS). This is not an HTC specific app and as such, just like the Facebook app, it can continuously be updated to the latest version via the Google Play Store without having to rely on HTC to push out updates. Middle screenshot shows the HTC task manager which is simple yet effective for monitoring and managing running services and memory usage.

To the right we see HTC’s Tasks app which is sort of like a location based calendar where you can add reminders and such based on location and time, like getting a reminder of the shopping list when you are on your way home from work and is getting close to the local grocery store.

Voice Recorder, self-explanatory. Twitter app, same as the one on Google Play Store which means you can update it as a normal pp without having to rely on HTC. HTC’s exemplary WiFi Hotspot app, for sharing the phone’s mobile data connection with other WiFi capable devices via so called “tethering”. This app might be disabled in some regions and/or from some carriers.

The HTC Clock app: World clock with weather info. HTC has shoehorned in too much info on very limited screen estate which makes it difficult to read and use. Alarm, Stopwatch and Timer speaks for themselves.

HTC Sync

Camera

The One X has been equipped with a primary back-illuminated 8 megapixel camera sensor (f2.0) capable of Full HD 1080p video recording at 30 FPS, and a secondary 1.3 megapixel camera on the front, for video calls, self portraits and video recordings with up to a 720p resolution.

The rear camera has also been equipped with a processing chip of its own which allows it to record slow motion videos, still photography at 4 images per second in series of up to 99 at a time and the possibility to take photos while recording video, albeit “only” at 6 megapixels instead of the maximum 8.

The camera software is easy to use and offers lots of options, settings and modes. The camera software usually starts in a second and thanks to the dedicated camera processing chip taking photos and starting recordings is near instant.

Via the A icon on the screen we can choose between a number of Camera scenes like Auto, HDR, Panorama, Portrait, Group portrait, Landscape, Whiteboard, Close-up and Low light. Here we also find the Slow motion video setting.

The cogwheel icon takes us to the camera settings for both video and still photography. Here we can manage settings like resolution, picture format (16:9 or 4:3), ISO (100-800), white balance, contrast and sharpness.

Above the on screen shutter button we find a blue button which opens a menu where we can apply different filters to the images and videos. Some of the available filters are Distortion, Vignette, Depth of field, Dots, Mono, Sepia and Black and white. As soon as we select a filter the output and effect of the filter is shown on the screen, updated in real-time.

In the camera overview gallery HTC lets us apply filters and effects to existing photos, and of course the usual basic features such as resize, rotate and crop. Even though there is a plethora of apps that lets you edit and apply filters and effects to images on the Google Play Store we like that HTC has made this part of the stock camera app since far from all Android users are likely to go look for apps like that on their own.

Close-up image comparison

Summary – still photography
Macro (close-up) photography is probably to be considered something of a Sony Xperia S specialty and here the One X can’t compete. In regular photography in full daylight the One X surprises us and shows off a few very sharp and crisp shots with far more detail than the Xperia S, despite a clear disadvantage in terms of megapixels. An excellent example of how the amount of megapixels says very little about the image quality.

The color reproduction and saturation tends to be more of a question of taste than right or wrong, but because of warmer colors with a bit more saturation we feel that the Xperia S shots are a little bit closer to real life. In any case both cameras are about as good as it gets in the Android world, as far as colors, sharpness and detail during daylight photography.

The only real weak point of the One X camera somewhat surprisingly proves to be photography in dark/murky settings (as can be seen in the close-up comparison shot above). Because of the highly-touted back-illuminated (BSI) sensor, which on paper should offer great low light performance, our expectations were high… and then thoroughly dashed. Despite trying over and over again we could not get the One X camera to perform anywhere near the Xperia S in low light conditions.

Just like the Xperia S the One X’ auto focus is very rapid and rarely has trouble finding focus, at least not in good light conditions — as the light gets weaker Xperia S pulls out an ever increasing lead and both finds focus faster and more accurately.

As far as speed goes none of the cameras can match the “Zero Shutter Lag” from the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but both manage at least one or two shots per second in good lighting conditions when tapping the shutter button, but if instead we use the One X photo sequence feature, where we press and hold the shutter button, the One X demolishes the Xperia S and takes a whopping four (4) photos per second for up to 25 seconds straight (max 99 images per sequence).

HTC One X – more camera samples

A very usable panorama feature almost seamlessly joins a sequence of images together for a panorama shot.

To achieve this greater dynamic range the camera, in the case of the HTC One X, takes a sequence of three images as fast as possible; one underexposed, one normal and one overexposed. These three images are then joined together in such a way that the darkest of darks from the underexposed image and the brightest of bright from the overexposed image are layered on top of the normal image to create a new image that offers the best of all three images — at least in theory.

The HDR mode works best in settings where the natural contrasts are fairly low, or the effect tends to be exaggerated with dark objects that appear to glow against a bright background, as can be seen in the top HDR image above. Where the sky and land meets, over the bridge and to the left, the sky appears to be glowing. In the bottom two samples the HDR effect is much better and more natural, bringing out far more detail without creating unrealistic contrasts.

Another disadvantage of the HDR mode is that both the camera and the scene needs to be as static as possible. Even the slightest movement will result in odd ghost-like shapes, as the image below clearly demonstrates.

[Read more about HDR on Wikipedia]

HDR photography of moving objects can create weird ghost-like effects.

HTC One X 1080p @ 23.717 fps (10.5 Mbps) AVC Baseline@L4.2, stereo AAC @ 96kbps

Xperia S 1080p @ 29.692 fps (13.9Mbps) AVC Baseline@L4.0, stereo AAC @ 96Kbps

Despite a lower bitrate we find that the One X video seems to be crisper and offer more detail than the Xperia S, and we also feel the color reproduction and saturation to be more neutral. Unfortunately the One X delivers a lower average FPS (~24) than the Xperia S (~30), which makes the video slightly less fluid.

HTC One X Slow Motion 768×432 @ 23.398fps 8057 kbps, baseline@L3.0

A sample of the slow motion video recording feature. The slow motion feature means that the camera records video at a very high FPS, several times the normal rate, but at a far lower resolution (768×432 pixels). Even though the video output does not end up 100% fluid — we notice quite a few freeze frames — it’s a fun feature to play around with as long as the light is good.

HTC One X front camera

For being a front mounted camera, which at least on Android phones are notoriously bad, the One X front camera manages to impress us. It is by no means a good camera, and you won’t use it for much more than video calls and self portraits/videos, but compared to the front cameras of most competitors it stands out as one of the better ones. For once we find that it is possible to use the front camera in low light conditions – this is a first for us.

Bugs and problems
As mentioned in the web browser chapter we have experienced a few web browser crashes while playing/rendering Flash content, and in addition to this we have had minor issues with a small number of incompatible or only partially compatible apps, like the MX Video Player which could not software decode audio streams in our video files and with the Electopia game/benchmark where the touchscreen and the menu buttons within the app ended up out of sync — we had to press a point below and to the right to make the buttons react.

The above could be considered mere trifles, especially considering that the app incompatibility might not even be the One X’ “fault”, but it is still worth mentioning and people should be aware that with a bit of bad luck their favorite apps might initially not work as intended, or at all.

Unlike the above the extreme heat generation has to be considered a real problem, and it’s a problem that can’t be solved via software updates — unless they decide to underclock the device and thereby restrict the performance.

When the phone is pushed to its limits for a while the chip gets so hot that it actually underclocks itself to avoid overheating, and we have measured up to a 25% decrease in performance when this happens. Luckily the Tegra 3 AP30 is so powerful that a 25% decrease is barely even noticeable under normal usage, but in some games we noticed a slight stutter every once in a while.

Battery performance

In our battery test the HTC One X behaves and performs similar to the Sony Xperia S that we recently tested, and like the Galaxy Nexus before it. The battery life while playing video is mediocre at best, which in combination with a non replaceable battery means that you have to make sure to always have a charger with you and that you have access to charging stations, if you like to watch movies or TV shows while commuting by train or plane for example.

Just like the Xperia S and the Galaxy Nexus the One X consumes very little power in stand by and as long as the screen is off. When we leave the phone on over night we typically see a drop of 5-7% in eight hours, with 3G (no 2G) and full sync against our Google account.

Under normal usage, meaning phone calls, some texting, listening to music and browsing the web the battery performs better than what our video test would suggest, but everyone has to be aware that the monster quad core power plus a powerful GPU does not come cheaply. Under full load this beast will go from 100% to 0% in less than three hours.

System information

A few hours after our review unit was delivered to the office a 21MB firmware update arrived via FOTA (“Firmware Over The Air”). We assume that this update is the reason HTC moved the embargo (when we were first allowed to publish the review) up a few days — they simply wanted all reviewers to have the latest firmware which most likely contained important bug fixes and/or optimizations.

As the above screenshots reveal our review unit came with Android 4.0.3, and after the small firmware update it’s still 4.0.3.

HTC One X comes with 1024MB of RAM, of which a whopping 976MB is left for the operating system and its apps to distribute as it sees fit. Plenty of available RAM provides lots of headroom and ought to be enough even for the most hardcore multitaskers out there.

The One X comes with a total of 32GB of storage space, out of which roughly 26GB is available for storage of things like music, videos and images and 1.7GB for app installations. The rest of the 32GB, about 4-5GB, is reserved for Android itself.

Unlike the Galaxy Nexus, where Android lets us decide how to use the available space, HTC has decided that 1.8GB is all we need for our apps. We much prefer the Galaxy Nexus approach with one single partition for both apps and storage. Please, HTC, let us decide in the future.

Gaming, performance and graphs

With the quad core AP30 version of Tegra 3 under the bonnet, which includes the latest GeForce ULP graphics chip, playing even the most demanding games is not a problem. There are a few games that are incompatible and stutters because of this, but other than that the One X just chews game after game up with ease. For the gamers out there the One X with its powerful innards and brilliant screen/touchscreen and HDMI output via Micro-USB/MHL is a wise choice, but make sure to keep a charger nearby.

Benchmark Pi measures the calculation capacity of the device, which gives us a score that reflects the capacity of the processor(s). Lower is better.

Linpack measures the floating point capacity of the processor and the result is shown as MFLOPS. Higher is better.

CF-Bench measures both the processor and the memory performance and adds the two for a total score. Higher is better.

Rightware’s BrowserMark is a platform independent benchmark performed in the web browser. In this test a number of short tests are undertaken and the result is shown as a total score where higher is better. Since this is a test independent of the platform we have also included a few benchmarks from a couple other mobile platforms than Android.

Sunspider measures the processor’s and the default browser’s combined JavaScript performance. A lower time in ms (“milliseconds”) is better.

Just like Sunspider above, Vellamo measures the JavaScript performance of the processor and default web browser, but unlike Sunspider the Vellamo app consists of several different JavaScript benchmarks which are added as a total score, where higher is better. Note that one or two of the tests within Vellamo are affected by the resolution of the screen, which means a low resolution screen will have a slight advantage, and vice versa. An example of this is the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II which both have the same hardware (Exynos 4210) and that the Note while slightly over clocked still gets a lower score than the Galaxy S II.

Monjori Shader Benchmark measures the fragment shader capacity of the graphics chip. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Once again this is a benchmark where the resolution of the device is of huge importance, and devices with a high resolution will get a lower score than devices with a lower resolution screen – provided the hardware (processor, GPU) is the same. Because of this we have decided to only compare the One X to other devices with the same, or a similar, screen resolution.

Electopia is a 3D benchmark based on the OpenGL ES 1.1 framework and is designed to put the graphics chip to the test. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Note that phones with a screen resolution of less than WVGA (800×480 pixels) gets and unfair advantage since they give the graphics chip far fewer pixels to shuffle, resulting in a higher FPS.

Nenamark 2 is just like Electopia above a 3D benchmark designed to put the graphics chip to the test, but unlike Electopia this one is based on the newer OpenGL ES 2.0 framework. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames per Second”) and higher is better.

Name	Sequential read (MB/s)	Sequential write (MB/s)	Random read (MB/s)	Random write (MB/s)	IOPS/s read (4K)	IOPS/s write (4K)
HTC One X	28.05	12.14	8.02	0.59	2055	153
Sony Xperia S	35.74	6.63	7.03	0.18	1800	48
Samsung Galaxy Note	43.04	5.26	3.43	0.2	881	52.5
Samsung Galaxy S II (2.3.5)	45.6	5.17	4.54	0.24	1164	64
Samsung Galaxy S Plus (2.3.5)	30.57	5.69	4.87	0.17	1250	44
Samsung Galaxy Gio (2.3.5)	6.19	4.03	2.18	1.65	560	424
SE xperia arc (2.3.4)	7.9	5.48	4.36	5.71	1117	1462
LG Optimus 3D (2.2)	18.59	2.12	0.47	0.1	121	27
HTC Evo 3D (2.3.4)	24.41	1.56	2.66	0.18	681	48
Motorola RAZR (2.3.5)	34.03	6.56	4.34	0.37	1113	95
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	26.71	5.08	5.28	0.21	1351	54

With Androbench 3.0 we measure the performance of the internal flash memory — not the external SD card. A higher score is always better, both for read, write and IOPS.

Heat generation

The Samsung Galaxy S II has in the One X finally met its match in the battle for the title “hottest Android phone on the market” — it its most literal sense. The One X gets scorching hot, just like the Galaxy S II, when stressed to its limits. Even though the Galaxy S II peaks slightly higher than the One X the difference is so small we can’t tell a difference when holding the two devices in our hands.

Just from charging the One X we notice the heat increasing rapidly, which is by no means unique to the One X, but few phones gets this hot while charging. If you then decide to use the phone for heavy tasks while charging, like playing games, watching HD video or transferring large files via WiFi, the phone soon gets so hot we prefer not to even hold it in our hands.

The first time we picked the phone up while charging and performing an automatic backup of about 40 apps via the Google Play Store we immediately dropped it again because the heat took us by surprise. Once we knew what to expect we had no problems picking the phone up and holding it in our hands, but at close to 60 degrees it just feels wrong and we can’t help but to think that heat like that can’t be good for a phone.

Note that the heat readings in the graph above were not performed while the phone was charging, but given how hot the phone got while charging and performing heavy tasks we performed the test once more, while charging. The temperature did increase slightly when we did that, but “only” to a peak of just over 57 degrees.

When the phone gets this hot the Tegra 3 chip seems to underclock itself to generate less heat and protect itself from overheating, and as a result we measured a performance drop of about 25%. An example is the BrowserMark benchmark in which we came close to a score of 110 000 while the phone was fairly cool and then topped out at about 82 000 points once it got scorching hot.

Conclusion
Because of a so called unibody design the HTC One X is as stiff as a board. The build quality and the general feel of quality of the phone is quite simply top notch, with a slight exception for a flexing screen and a spongy volume rocker. The unibody design also means no sharp edges where the back meets the front, where the battery hatch meets the chassis; there’s nothing to leave gaps, nothing to flex, crack or creak.

Under the bonnet we find a quad core processor from Nvidia, the Tegra 3 AP30, and HTC is the first manufacturer to bring the Tegra 3 AP30 SoC to its end users. In combination with plenty of RAM, 1024MB, a fast GeForce ULP graphics chip, Android 4.0 and the new HTC Sense 4.0 what we end up with is the fastest Android phone ever — so far. 32GB of storage space ought to be enough for most people, but we desperately do miss a Micro-SD slot.

The quad core power comes as a price though; heat. Lots of heat. Ever since we started measuring the how hot the devices get when we stress them to their limits the Samsung Galaxy S II has by far been the hottest device we have come across — until now. The HTC One X falls less than one degree (Celsius) short of eclipsing the Galaxy S II on the hottest spot of the back of the phone, during full load. When we make an internal battery temp reading the One X proves to be far hotter than the Galaxy S II battery.

With version 4.0 of their Sense UI HTC has taken a few steps back in terms of features, bling and bloat, and it has paid off big time. Unlike previous versions of Sense that only felt more and more sluggish and bloated as the version number ticked up, Sense 4.0 feels light on its feet, feels responsive, but without being stripped down to its bones. HTC has finally found a near perfect balance between looks, bling, features and hardware.

The IPS LCD2 720p (720×1280 pixel) 4.7 inch screen is nothing short of brilliant. Next to the Sony Xperia S screen this is the best one we have ever seen on a smartphone, and we’re even inclined to give the One X screen the nod over the Xperia S because even though the Xperia S has the higher pixel density and therefore is slightly sharper the One X offers better viewing angles and a far livelier color reproduction without having to crank the screen brightness up.

The touchscreen is almost as good as the screen itself, and it rarely, if ever, misses a tap, swipe or pinch. The touchscreen refresh rate is 65Hz, which means the digitizer reads our taps and swipes 65 times every second, which more or less guarantees that it won’t mist even the slightest of touches. Furthermore the screen can handle up to ten simultaneous touch points — true multitouch — should one ever need more than two or three, but to enable all ten touch points we must first disable “HTC gestures” in the display settings. The capacitive buttons below the screen are just as responsive as the rest of the screen, which oddly enough is rare.

The 8 megapixel back-illuminated sensor (BSI) camera is very good, and in full daylight the One X and its 8 megapixels actually outperforms the Xperia S’ 12 megapixels with noticeably more image detail and sharpness. The Xperia S in turn wins the macro (close-up) battle and demolishes the One X in low light conditions. On the other hand when it comes to shooting video we one again feel inclined to give the One X the nod because of more detail in the video. It’s as you can tell a close battle, but because of the far better low light performance we give the overall camera win to the Xperia S.

The battery performance is kind of a mixed bag. As far as continuous video playback goes it’s not great, quite the opposite, and considering the battery is not swappable you better make sure you bring your charger with you wherever you go if you are the type to look at videos (TV shows, movies, YouTube and so on) a lot. Standby performance is on the other hand very good, and if you generally use your phone without lighting the screen all that often (phone calls – screen off, music playback – screen off, standby – screen off) the battery performance is more than a little impressive.

The average user probably falls somewhere in the middle, between the YouTube nut and the Yoda of standby, and when we use the phone like we believe most people do our experience is that it is very much average, and just like with most Android phones you’re doing yourself a huge favor if you make sure to charge it every night. Be well aware though; if you push this beast to its limits you will empty a full charge in less than three hours.

The GPS performance is good, but because of an unfortunate lack of GLONASS support it can’t quite compete with the best Android phones out there as far as positioning goes. Achieving a satellite lock and a fairly accurate location fix rarely takes more than 5 seconds, which is quick enough for it to be very useful as a guide in a city you are not familiar with and need to find public transport, the nearest hospital or simply a good place to eat.

In conclusion we can without any hesitation at all declare that HTC is indeed back in the game, and leading the pack, with the One X. The hardware, the software, the materials and the unibody construction are all top notch, and despite a few weaknesses — no phone is ever perfect — the HTC One X is overall, by far, in our opinion the best Android phone on the market.

***

HTC One X is suitable for you if you:
* Want the currently fastest Android phone on the market
* Want a world class HD LCD screen
* Want one of the best cameras ever on an Android phone
* Want a solid build quality and nice materials
* Want a good music player – especially combined with Beats by Dr. Dre headphones

HTC One X might be suitable for you if you:
* Want a fair compromise between screen size, performance and battery life
* Is a fan of HTC Sense — Version 4.0 is in our opinion the best one yet

HTC One X is not suitable for you if you:
* Are unwilling to spend a small fortune on a phone
* Need a batter life out of the ordinary or want to be able to swap the battery on the go
* Watch a lot of video on the phone in places with limited or no charging opportunities
* Need a Micro-SD slot for storage expansion

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Introduction
Samsung showed us back in 2011 that they are serious about their commitment to keep moving forward with smartphones and tablets running Android. Their first Honeycomb and Tegra 2 powered device – the Sasmung Galaxy Tab 10.1 – was a a promising first step towards a usable Android tablet aimed at the mass market. Although initially plagued with some teething and quality problems such as the newton’s ring issue, most of those problems came to be resolved as the slightly smaller Galaxy Tab 8.9, also running Tegra 2, made its way to the consumers.

It’s now time for their third Honeycomb device; Galaxy Tab 7.7 — a smaller, lighter and slimmer version of the previous two tablets. The difference this time goes far deeper than just the size of the screen, since this is the first Samsung tablet running Samsung’s own dual core Exynos 4210 platform under the bonnet, and as if that was not enough they’ve also fitted it with a Super AMOLED Plus screen – the first ever tablet with and AMOLED screen.

Samsung’s Exynos 4210 is the processor platform also found in the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Note, and is just like in the Note slightly overclocked from 2×1.2GHz to 2×1.4GHz. As usual with Honeycomb class tablets the Tab 7.7 has been equipped with 1GB of RAM, and as part of the Exynos 4210 platform we find the graphics chip Mali 400 which despite its age still keeps up with the competition.

In this review we will take a closer look at both the hardware and the software in an attempt to give you – our readers – a fair and unbiased view of how well — or how poorly — this latest tablet from Samsung performs.

Specifications	Galaxy Tab 7.7
Dimensions (H x B x D)	196.7 × 133 × 7.9 mm (7.7 x 5.2 x 0.31 inches)
Weight	335 grams (11.8 ounces)
Screen and resolution	7.67", 1280x800 pixels (WXGA), 16,7 million nuances, 196 PPI
Panel type	HD Super AMOLED>/a>
Digitizer	Capacitive, supports up to 10 simultaneous touch points at 60Hz
System-on-a-chip	Samsung Exynos 4210
CPU	2x1,4GHz ARM Cortex A9 (40nm)
GPU	ARM Mali-400 MP
RAM	1024MB
Internal storage (NAND)	16GB total, about 12GB free
Battery / Battery time	5 100 mAh / up to 9 hours of continuous video playback
Rear camera	3 MP, LED, AF
Front camera	2MP
Connectors	Proprietary Samsunf 30 pin contact, USB-host via adapter, MHL for HDMI output (requires adapter)
Network and wireless	HSDPA+ 21.1 Mbit/s, HSDPA 14.4 Mbit/s, HSUPA 5.76 Mbit/s, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, A-GPS
Sensores	Accelerometer, Gyros
OS / Interface	Android 3.2/Honeycomb with Samsung TouchWiz UI
Codec annd container support	MPEG2, MPEG4, h264, MOV, WMV, 3GP/3GPP, MP3, WAV (PCM), AAC+, OGG, WMA - xvid, divx, MKV/h.264/High Profile 4.1+
Available in stores	Feb 2012
Other / Miscellaneous	-

In the box



The Galaxy Tab 7.7 comes in a white box with, given the size of the tablet itself, minimal dimensions. This is of course good from an environmental point of view, as less empty air will have to be transported from the manufacturing plant to the retailers and end users. The quality of the box itself is good, which means you get a fairly nice unboxing experience, though the box of our review unit was unfortunately a little banged up.

When we lift the outer lid of the box off we are of course presented with the tablet itself in a compartment in the very top of the box. The screen and back is protected by a thin plastic film. When we remove the upper shelf with the tablet we find the rest of the box contents in their own little molded plastic compartments.

The contents in our (Euro retail) box is as follows:

* Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 GT-P6810 (“Light Silver”, WiFi only, 16GB)
* Wall charger including a 1 meter (about 3 ft) cable (5V, 2A)
* USB cable (1 meter, ~3 ft) with the proprietary Samsung connector in one end
* White headset, in ear (3 pairs of ear plugs, answer/end call button – no media controls)
* Miscellaneous documentation

As usual we cannot guarantee that the contents of our box exactly matches that of your favorite retailer or carrier, or even your region. If the contents of the box is of great importance to you, we suggest you contact your retailer or carrier before making the purchase.

Design, build quality and construction



The front of the device is pitch black and is of course dominated by the 7.7 inch large display, which is almost indistinguishable from the bezel/frame when turned off. Surrounding the screen glass is a frame of what looks like aluminium but most likely is plastic. In any case it feels very sturdy.

The feeling of quality is from the very first moment very high and after but a few minutes of squeezing, bending and shaking we have not been able to make the Tab 7.7 creak or rattle of make as much as a sound. The device is almost as stiff as a piece of think glass, but if we press out finger down right on the middle of the metal back casing id does flex a bit.

Handling the Tab 7.7 is very pleasant thanks to both the materials used; glass, stiff plastic and metal, the low weight (335 grams or 11.8 ounces) and the overall shape of the tablet. The design, with a nicely rounded plastic frame that almost seamlessly transitions into the metal casing of the back, and that also extends to the top and bottom parts of the back where the camera, LED flash and the internal WiFi and Bluetooth antennas are placed.

A slight objection to how slippery the device can get, because of the slippery screen glass, the thin frame between the screen and the edge of the device and the smooth metal casing of the back. Especially the fact that the frame around the screen is so narrow, which gives our thumbs very little to hold on to without touching the actual screen, makes is a bit trickier to hold. Though, thanks to the low weight, it’s not a big problem at all.

The build quality and the fit between the different parts of the shell is quite simply nothing short of fantastic. Using words such as “fantastic” is usually a bit of a hyperbole, but we can only establish that Tab 7.7 is at least a few notches above the current Android tablet competition, with a possible exception for the Asus Transformer Prime with its metal casing which does come close.

The back of the tablet is mostly metal, a brushed aluminium one-piece slightly curved slab covering approximately 80% of the back. By the top and the bottom of the back we instead find plastics, which as previously mentioned house the camera lens, the LED flash and supposedly the antennas (WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS). The plastic itself is of good quality but the transition between the metal casing and the plastic parts is not completely seamless. This is just us being very picky though and not at all a real problem.

Buttons, connectors, slots and sensors


Tab 7.7 is a tablet of Honeycomb(+) standard and that means that all the usual Android buttons (Menu, Home, Back and Search) have been moved from the device itself to the operating system interface. This not only makes the buttons a lot more flexible as far as configuration, design and function goes, but it also means that you can twist and turn and hold the bezel of the tablet as you like and your fingers will never accidentally push any buttons.

The left side of the tablet (seen from a portrait point-of-view) is smooth and lacks all sorts of buttons, but by the bottom end we find a small hatch for the memory expansion (microSD). On the right side, by the very top, we find the power button (which also acts as the screen lock button) and just below that one there’s the volume rocker (+/-). Both these buttons is of good quality and offers just enough resistance for not pressing them by accident. Furthermore the buttons protrude just enough to easily blindly find them with your fingertips. If they’re made from metal or chromed plastic we have not been able to determine, but then again it does not really matter — metal or plastic, the quality of these buttons are top notch.

On the top there’s a 3.5mm port for headphones and just to the right of it we find the secondary microphone for filtering/reducing of background noise while recording sound or talking on the phone (VoIP only, for the WiFi only device we tested). In the bottom end we find the proprietary docking port, centered, with two small speakers on each side. Here we also find the primary microphone.

On the front, centered above the screen, we find the speaker for phone calls. We find it a bit amusing that a tablet has a phone speaker, but the fact of the matter is that it is fully possible to hold the Tab 7.7 against your ear like a normal phone, unless you have very small hands — but you look a bit ridiculous if you try. Since our review unit lacks a SIM slot and therefore 3G/HSxPA we have not been able to try it out as a normal phone, but phone calls via VoIP (such as Skype) works as intended.

To the left of the speaker for phone calls we find the light sensor that will automatically adjust the screen brightness (optional) and next to it there is a proximity sensor that will shut the screen and touchscreen off as you hold the tablet to your ear while making a phone call. To the right of the phone speaker we find the front camera lens.

Reception and data speeds

Our unit is as mentioned the WiFi only model and does not have 3G/HSxPA. The WiFi connection offers an impressive stability that neither of our reference units Acer Iconia A500 and Motorola XOOM can match. Both the Iconia and the XOOM lose connection to our WiFi router (b/g/n) several times a day, and sometimes fail to reconnect automatically, but the Tab 7.7 has not failed one single time during our weeks with it, except when we did our death grip/maximum range tests.

The maximum data speeds via WiFi (801.11n) is about 32 Mbit/s (4 MB/s) when we by sending large files to and from the device (not sending and receiving at the same time) to max the connection out on our local WiFi FTP network. This is an OK result, but a bit shy of the 40 Mbit/s (5 MB/s) both sending and receiving that the Tegra 2 devices manage. At the bottom end of the spectra we find the Motorola RAZR with a max speed, both sending and receiving, of a mere 20 Mbit/s (2.5 MB/s).

In our range/signal strength test we simply connect the Tab 7.7 along with a reference unit (Motorola XOOM in this case) to our WiFi router and slowly walks away from it, down a long corridor with thick concrete walls in the way. While the Tab 7.7 manages to keep a signal for far longer than the XOOM, we also note that it depends a lot on how and where you hold the device. As long as you avoid the plastic top and bottom of the device the signal is strong, but if you cover the bottom part of the unit with your hand (from a portrait perspective) you quickly lose range and signal strength. In short, the Tab 7.7 is sensitive to the so called death grip.

Sound

When we use the analysis program RightMark Audio Analyzer to measure the sound quality if the 3.5mm port of the Galaxy Tab 7.7, using a pair of AKG K 420 headphones, we immediately run into problems with so called clipping, which means the output level gets too loud and distorts the sound, not only in the headphones but also via the line-in on the computer running RMAA. To get an accurate reading with no clipping we have to bring the volume of the default music player, which bears mentioning has all sound effects and equalizer settings turned off, not just one but down two notches.

When we finally get a successful reading without clipping or any other warnings we can see that the Tab 7.7 performs fairly well and about on par with the Galaxy note. We do however note that the Tab 7.7 does not go quite as low in frequency (Hz, bass) as the competitors and that the stereo crosstalk, where the sound from one stereo channel leaks over to the other, is not quite on par with the competition. When we, with out untrained non audiophile ear, listen to music (lossless/FLAC) via Tab 7.7 and our AKG K 410 headphones we have absolutely nothing to complain about — we most definitely can’t notice the problem with stereo crosstalk that RMAA reports.

As usual we cannot guarantee that our RMAA analysis is a fair representation of the audio quality of the device. The results are only to be interpreted as a small indication of how goo, or how poorl, the audio chip in combination with the software is. If you are an audiophile or if the audio quality is of great importance to you we recommend that you bring your favorite headphones to a local retailer and ask for a trial.

RMAA summary, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

RMAA (complete test)	Galaxy Tab 7.7	Galaxy Nexus	Sony Ericsson Xperia ray	Sandisk Sansa Clip+
Frequency response (40 Hz -15 kHz), dB:	+0.34, -0.74	+0.59, -0.72	+0.59, -0.26	+0.02, -0.14
Noise level, dB (A):	-86.8	-89.8	-89.4	-86.3
Dynamic range, dB (A):	83.3	84.3	84.0	86.3
THD, %:	0.0075	0.048	0.299	0.034
IMD + Noise, %:	0.169	0.050	0.441	0.053
Stereo crosstalk, dB:	-23.7	-51.8	-48.0	-56.0

The sound quality via the external speakers by the bottom of the device (portrait mode) is fairly weak and thin, at least compared to the blaring external speakers of the Acer Iconia. This does not come as a surprise though, given that the Tab 7.7 is close to half as thin as the Iconia — there’s simply no room for large speakers. Even if the sound is thin and a bit weak the clarity and quality is good, far better than the Iconia, and even at maximum volume we can’t discern any audio distortion.

GPS and positioning

Because of problems with the Google developed My Tracks app, where the last few versions inexplicably outputs a broken route where the recording stops after just a few 100 meters — at least on our two test units. Because of this we’re forced to skip the recording of our route and instead focus on how we subjectively feel that the GPS performs.

As far as locking the satellites goes, with or without the help of WiFi, is very quick. Even in a fairly difficult suburban surrounding with high buildings and trees we rarely have to wait more than 10 seconds for the app GPS Test finds a good fix of 15 meters (50 ft) or less and at least 10 satellites locked. Wait a few seconds longer and we’re down to 5 meters (16 ft). This is a very good result and a huge leap forward for Samsung who in the past has had a lot of problems with their GPS’es, GPS antennas and GPS software.

As far as the accuracy goes, which we briefly mentioned in the paragraph above this one, we have had very little to complain about except for a few random lateral jumps of 20 meters (65 ft) or so, and then only for a short second before the GPS is back on track. In general the GPS seems to track our actual position well, no matter if we use it while taking a stroll, riding a bike or driving a car. Just like with the WiFi signal we have however experienced some issues with the way we hold and cover certain parts of the tablet. At some point we almost immediately lost all contact with the satellites while holding the device the wrong way. Worth mentioning.

Using the above mentioned app, GPS Test, we could from an urban surrounding with tall buildings lock on to no less than 15 satellites, with an estimated accuracy of 5 meters (16 ft). Compared to the Motorola RAZR on the exact same spot and its 11 satellites and an accuracy of 10-15 meters (30-50 ft) the Tab 7.7 simply outclasses the RAZR. It is however worth noting that the accuracy value is just an estimation by the software and is not to be considered an exact science.

Screen and digitizer

Apart from the excellent build quality, the fit and the nice materials used to build the device the true selling point is the screen. The 7.7 inch Super AMOLED Plus screen uses unlike most AMOLED screens the RGB subpixel matrix, which means that when Samsung says the screen has a resolution of WXGA (1280×800 pixels) they’re not lying. Other AMOLED screens usually have a subpixel matrix called PenTile, which because of its structure in reality offers a resolution that is about one third less — and therefore a lot less sharp. Furthermore the RGB pixel matrix offers less color change while viewed from angles.

After but an hour with the Tab 7.7 we can conclude, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is the best Android tablet screen we have ever laid eyes on and quite possibly even better than the iPad 3 screen, despite its lower resolution. With the exception of the maximum screen brightness in full daylight, which is OK but not more, this screen takes the victory in every single event.

The color reproduction is clear, vivid and powerful and thanks to three different screen settings that regulates the color saturation there’s a setting that ought to be satisfactory for everyone. Our favorite is the “Movie” setting which is the least saturated of the three, and in our eyes delivers the most realistic colors. If you like the colors to pop a little more, even if it’s not quite realistic you have the “Standard” setting which is something in-between and then the “Dynamic” setting which really makes the colors pop in a very typical AMOLED way.

Thanks to the resolution, 1280×800, and the slightly smaller screen than we’re used to on tablets, the pixel density is higher which offers a noticeably sharper screen. The contrasts are as usual with AMOLED screens very good and the black level makes tablets with even the best of TFT LCD screens look grey and washed out. The viewing angles are the best we have ever seen, with the possible exception of the Samsung Galaxy S II which also sports a Super AMOLED Plus screen — although at a lower resolution — and even from extreme angles we only notice a slight decrease in brightness, contrast and shifting colors.

In full daylight the readability of the screen is OK but can’t quite match our reference device the Galaxy Note, which in turn can’t quite match the Galaxy S II. We have not had any major problems using the Tab 7.7 out in the brightness of spring, but in direct sunlight the Tab 7.7 like almost all other screens, AMOLED and TFT LCD alike, become more or less unusable. As usual we find ourselves looking for a shaded area when we have to use the tablet outside when the sun is out.

The digitizer, the touch sensitive surface layer of the screen, is as we have come to expect from Samsung very good. We measure up to 10 simultaneous touch points which is more than enough for all kinds of currently applicable multitouch features. We also measure a touchscreen refresh rate of 63Hz, which quite simply means that the digitizer tracks our taps and swipes of the screen 63 times every second.

Despite the fluent and speedy digitizer we have had some issues with taps and swipes going unregistered by the device. This only happens sporadically and usually during certain scenarios, in some apps, so we assume that this is an issue with software and not the touchscreen hardware itself. In any case, no matter if it’s a hardware or a software issue, it does cause some frustration.

Most frequently the delayed or absent response to our taps and swipes happens when we tap the Home button (could be a Samsung TouchWiz issue) and when we try and swipe through a long website in the default browser. Oftentimes we can swipe the screens entire height (landscape mode) without as much as a reaction. If we slow the swipe down the screen reacts and the webpage scrolls, but only a little. A page that on the Acer Iconia only takes three swipes to get from top to bottom can take ten or more on the Tab 7.7.

We hope that this is merely a software issue and one that Samsung will address in a future software upgrade – maybe in time for Android 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich?

Operating system and software
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 comes preloaded with Android 3.2/Honeycomb with version 4.0 of Samsung’s TouchWiz UX interface. An update to 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich is slated for release sometime during the second quarter of 2012.

Home screen/Launcher

The home screens/launcher of Tab 7.7 differs just like with the Tab 10.1 and Tab 8.9 slightly from the default Android Honeycomb interface. Most things are however the same or only slightly altered and if you have used a Honeycomb device before you will soon feel right at home. There are however some differences as far as features, layout and graphical interface and design goes.

Amongst other things Samsung has, in its TouchWiz interface, added a nice feature for taking screenshots. The button for this you can see in the above image; the fourth button from the left in the status field. As soon as a screenshot has been taken a simple app for editing pops up, in which you can draw (using your finger), add text, crop and resize and share via your preferred protocol; such as Gmail, Facebook and FTP. This is both a simple and a very nice feature.

Centered in the status field you’ll find a small arrow or V shaped button which acts as the toggle for the TouchWiz app dock. This dock consists of seven apps; Task Manager, Calendar, World Time, Pen Memo, Calculator, Alarm and Music Player.

What’s special about these apps, which are not configurable or changeable, is that they can be run in windowed mode, which means you for example can have a GMail document open and at the same time have the calculator in a window next to it. You can move these seven apps around as you see fit, but unfortunately you can only run one of them at a time which is a bit of a disappointment.

One of the more useful functions of TouchWiz is the upgraded Quick Settings menu that you reach by tapping the time by the bottom right corner od the screen. Where the Quick Settings menu in default Honeycomb is fairly featureless Samsung has rearranged and changed the layout as well as added a number of toggles for things like WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, Notifications and Sound.

Furthermore Samsung has changed the layout of the home screen management quite a bit, as the above images demonstrate. The functionality is basically the same, even though you with Samsung’s solution can extend the home screens from the default five to a maximum of seven or down to just one single home screen. Even though the basic functionality is the same as in default Honeycomb, we do prefer Samsung’s version. Unlike default Honeycomb there’s also the option to use folders on the home screen — an omission in default Honeycomb that we never quite understood.

Web browser


The default web browser in Tab 7.7 is of course based on the default Honeycomb browser — and it shows. Apart from slight differences as far as graphical tweaks and a few extra settings goes the only real difference is the way Tab 7.7 handles favorites and browsing history. The functionality is the same more or less, it just looks slightly different.

What this means is that Tab 7.7 along with the default web browser does its job fairly well, but there are far better alternatives on Google Play Shop (formerly known as Android Market), such as Dolphin Browser HD.

The performance in the web browser is good, at least as far as rendering of heavy websites goes. Noticeable faster than our Tegra 2 equipped reference units Acer Iconia and Motorola XOOM. Unfortunately we have had lots of issues with the touchscreen being unresponsive, especially on large/heavy websites, when we try to quickly swipe/flick up or down do scroll through the webpage quickly. Oftentimes the screen does not react at all, and if if does react it only scrolls a few lines up or down the page. To make it work we have to slow our swipes down a lot, which means that we have to swipe at least twice as many times to reach the bottom of the page, compared to the Acer Iconia for example.

We also note a slight touchscreen keyboard lag (using both the default keyboard and SwiftKey Tablet X), while in the web browser. This is also a problem on our Tegra 2 equipped reference units Iconia and XOOM, but it is more noticeable on the Tab 7.7. As far as software and web browsing goes we hope that Samsung addresses some of these issues as soon as possible – or at least for the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich update.

Gallery and media players

The Gallery app is despite its simplicity nice to use, and feels very fluid. Swiping between full size images is almost completely free from any stutter at all and it’s obvious this app is both optimized and hardware/GPU accelerated.

The default video player is as far as features goes very basic, but just like our favorite MX Video Player it will chew down almost anything you throw at it. Its limitation is first and foremost the lack of DTS and subtitle support, but these issues are easily fixed with for example the aforementioned, and free, MX Video Player which will software decode DTS and play most kinds of subtitle formats flawlessly. A nice additional feature is that we within the default video player can choose between three different color saturation modes – just like under the global screen settings. The three modes in the video player are; “Normal”, “Warm” and “Cold”. Furthermore there’s a “Outdoors visibility” setting, on/off, which boost the contrasts a lot.

Clip	Resolution	Codec / Profile / Container	Bitrate	Audio	Results (MX Video Player)
#1	640x352	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK
#2	576x320	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1,4 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK
#3	720p	h.264 / High@L3.1 / MKV	3 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK
#4	720p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	9 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK
#5	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	14 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK
#6	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	19.2 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK
#7	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	22.8 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK
#8	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	25 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK
#9	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	30 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (low FPS)
#10	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	42 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (very low FPS)

The default music player is a pleasant app with support for most audio types and codecs out there, and of course Album Art support. In the settings menu we find an equalizer (disabled by default) with a number of presets and a “Custom” option for setting the sound up just like you prefer it.

Furthermore there are a number of sound effects to choose from. If you like to play around with the sound and equalizer settings to find the perfect setting for your ears and your headphones you most likely won’t be disappointed. Unfortunately there seems to be no way of saving your own profiles, if you for example would like a different profile for different headphones.

Settings


Even if Samsung has added its own interface on top of Android 3.2/Honeycomb little has changed in the Android settings menu, apart from the graphical tweaks, which is why we wont delve deeper into this chapter of the review. We would however like to point out a few important additions made by Samsung.

In the settings menu for the screen we find some new functionality and features, like the option to change the color saturation of the screen, in three different settings; “Dynamic” which delivers very strong colors that really pop, “Standard” which is the default setting and noticeable less saturated and then finally our favorite “Movie” which in our opinion delivers the most life-like colors. Which one you like and prefer is of course up to you. In the screen settings we can also change between a four different fonts which will change the fonts throughout the entire operating system, and you can also download more fonts from Google Play Shop (Android Market).

There are also settings for gestures and motion which lets you zoom in and out in the web browser as well as in the Gallery app by holding two fingers (usually each thumb) on the screen and tilting the tablet up and down. The feature itself works as intended but we fail to see any practical use for it.

Finally Samsung has added a few smart features for the Power Saving mode, where the tablet itself will adjust and disable things like the brightness of the screen, the timeout of the screen and disabling of components like WiFi and Bluetooth when not in use. The Power Saving mode is of course optional.

Other applications worth mentioning

Samsung bundles the app AllShare to handle DLNA playback and communication. This works very well in general and the video support is OK but not great. Avi files encoded with divx and xvid works more or less every time but mkv/x264 and mp4/x264 tends to fail. We would very much like Allshare to ask us if w want to use a different player for unsupported formats, but unfortunately it does not. We also find an app for reading e-books, called “Books”, and one separate for purchasing books, called “eBooks”.

Samsung Music Hub and Game Hub are both apps for buying music and games. The choice of prominent games is more or less the same as on Google Play Shop (Android Market) but we do find a small number of free games on Game Hub that are not free on Google Play Shop.

The Samsung File Explorer works just as intended and does most things really well. It does not offer as many features as Astro or ES Explorer for example, but the interface is nicer and for most tasks — and users — it’s good enough. Moving, copying, renaming and deleting single files, multiple files and folders is easily and quickly done.

Pictured above we see Polaris Office 3.0 which will handle almost any Microsoft Office format/file up until Office 2010. Readers Hub is a service for buying e-books, magazines and newspapers. It quite simply combines three different stores into one simple app; PressDisplay, Zinio and Kobo.

For those of you having difficult finding good apps in the chaotic jungle that is the Google Play Shop (Android Market) we find an app called Samsung Suggest, which as its name suggests, suggests apps that Samsung thinks you should try out. It does not seem to take into account what you have installed on your device already — so it won’t suggest sports apps if it finds that you have lots of sports apps installed on your tablet — it merely lists apps that are popular and useful based on your geographic location.

We’ve mentioned Samsung’s hubs for Music, Books and Games, but they also offer movie rentals. Unfortunately we have not been able to get this to work — we end up with the same error message no matter what we do — so we can only assume that this service is not yet available here (Sweden).

The camera

Samsung has equipped the Tab 7.7 with a camera sensor of a measly 3 megapixels, which at least is accompanied by a LED flash and auto focus. Thanks to a fairly decent camera software with plenty of options such as tap-to-focus and smile detection this somewhat compensates for the low resolution of the camera.

Despite the resolution the focus, the sharpness and the overall quality is decent, but we note that photos taken outdoors tends to get a slightly blue hue and end up a little bit murky when compared to how our eyes perceived the real life conditions. The reference unit for our camera test is the Motorola XOOM, which definitely offers a more realistic color tone and brightness level, but the focus and the camera software of the XOOM (default Honeycomb camera software) is nowhere near the Tab 7.7. Overall the Tab 7.7 is definitely the better choice as far as the camera goes, but don’t buy this tablet expecting images anywhere near the best smartphone cameras.

On the front we find a 2 megapixel camera, primarily intended for video calls and self portrait photography. This camera delivers decent quality photos, for being a front camera, but compared to rear facing cameras it’s more or less useless. This is for video calls and the odd self portrait — nothing else — and you do well in making sure you are in a very well-lit environment, preferably outside in the sun, or the images and video will end up very grainy and out of focus.

The fixed focus lens is only good for short distances, like up to a meter or two, simply because that’s what it’s intended for. If you try and use the front camera to take pictures of distant objects the result is very poor, as you can see in the first of the front camera photo samples below. The setting options are meager and features such as tap-to-focus are nowhere to be seen.

The maximum resolution for the rear camera is 720p (1280×720), and if the lighting is good it delivers a frame-rate of up to 30 FPS. Neither fluency nor focus/sharpness is on par with what we’re used to from the best smartphone cameras, but for a tablet it’s not bad. Unfortunately the microphone(s) pick up a lot of wind noise during video recording in windy environments – a lot more than the XOOM we compared it to.

Video recording using the front camera is despite 2 megapixels a mere VGA (640×480 pixels) and the quality of the video is as expected appalling – just like most front cameras. To avoid too much grain and problems with focus we’re forced to try and find the best possible light source we can find or the end result could be so bad you can barely make out a face.

Finally we note that the recorded video via the front camera, when shot in portrait mode, does not automatically, using the gyro/accelerometer, output the video in portrait mode. You will have to flip the video 90 degrees yourself. This is a very basic task nowadays, and even YouTube offers editing options like that, but we don’t think it should be necessary. This is a point-shoot-share thing and should not require any editing.

Camera software

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (3 megapixlar)        Motorola Xoom (3 megapixlar)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 front camera (2 megapixels)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 video sample (720p)

Motorola Xoom video sample (720p)

Bugs and problems
Even though our weeks with the Galaxy Tab 7.7 mostly has been nothing but a pleasure we have noticed a few problems that makes using the tablet daily a little less pleasant that it could have been. The problems we have had has almost exclusively been about the unresponsive touchscreen, especially in the web browser where our swipes on heavy/lobe web pages frequently go unregistered, unless we make sure that our swipes are very slow.

If this is a software or a hardware problem we can’t say for sure, but since it tends to only happen in certain apps we are fairly convinced it’s a software issue — and as such it can be fixed with a future software update.

Battery performance

In this test we play a high definition (720p) sample video clip with a bitrate of about 5 Mbit/s in the mp4/h.264 container/codec and with AAC stereo sound at 96 kbit/s. The player we use if the free version of MX Video Player with hardware decode enabled. The device is set to airplane mode and the screen brightness is set to 50%, which is then compared to the reference device ASUS Transformer Prime. If the brightness differs too much we increase or lower the brightness of Tab 7.7 until they according to our eyes are close enough in terms of brightness.

Galaxy Tab 7.7 performs very well in the above video playback test and we assume that this is due to a combination of the AMOLED screen, which tends to be less power hungry than TFT LCD screens during video playback, and the fact that the screen is a bit smaller than most of the competitors. It’s also possible that Samsung’s Exynos 4210 platform is less power hungry than the Tegra equipped competitors — but this is just us speculating.

At normal usage, such as surfing the web, e-mailing and chatting and so on the battery drainage is, as expected, noticeably faster. Because most web sites, e-mail clients and chat apps have a white or at least fairly bright interface the AMOLED screen, as has since long been established, consumes a lot more power than the TFT LCD competitors under identical conditions. Despite this we still manage to get at least as many hours of usage out of the Galaxy Tab 7.7 as we get from the reference devices Motorola XOOM and ASUS Transformer Prime — though note that this is the Transformer Prime without the keyboard dock which effectively doubles the battery performance.

All in all we give the battery performance a big thumbs up, in part because of how thin and light the device is but especially because of the video playback performance. Close to 11 hours of HD/720p video playback is impressive for a tablet weighing half of some of the competitors and as thin as an average pencil.

System information



As mentioned in the introduction of this review the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is unlike its larger siblings Tab 10.1 and 8.9 been equipped with Samsung’s own SoC (“System on a Chip”) called Exynos 4210. This platform consists of a Cortex A9 dual core processor at 2×1.4GHz – the same platform as in the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II, though just like in the Note it’s been overclocked from the SGSII’s 2×1.2GHz to 2×1.4GHz.

The graphics chip is the Mali 400 which is a chip that has proven to be very competitive over the past year or so, and it’s not until recently we’ve seen it surpassed by a few competitors running Android. At the moment the only chip that is consistently outpacing the Mali 400 is the GeForce ULP chip in the much newer Tegra 3 platform.

Our test device of the Tab 7.7 is equipped with 16GB of built-in storage, of which about 12GB’s are available for the user to distribute freely between app installations and storage of things like music, videos and photos. The remaining 4GB is taken up by Android itself and pre-installed apps.

Tab 7.7 comes with 1024MB RAM and when system components like the graphics chit, the radio and the camera has taken its share there’s about 766MB left for the operating system to utilize.

Games, performance and graphs

As a gaming unit the Tab 7.7 is splendid. The competent graphics chip in combination with the gorgeous screen and the responsive touchscreen makes gaming a pleasure. Note that the problems with the unresponsive touch screen is limited to the web browser, not gaming. We have tried a number of games on the Tab 7.7 and every single one has been more than playable as far as the framerate goes. During long gaming sessions the metal on the back can get somewhat warm, but not so much that we feel it might it cause overheating problems, like the Galaxy S II.

Benchmark Pi measures the calculation capacity of the device, which gives us a score that reflects the capacity of the processor(s). Lower is better.

Linpack measures the floating point capacity of the processor and the result is shown as MFLOPS. Higher is better.

CF-Bench measures both the processor and the memory performance and adds the two for a total score. Higher is better. Transformer Prime is with it’s quad core processor far beyond the competition.

Rightware’s BrowserMark is a platform independent benchmark performed in the web browser. In this test a number of short tests are undertaken and the result is shown as a total score where higher is better. Since this is a test independent of the platform we have also added a few test results from a couple other mobile platforms than Android.

Sunspider measures the processor’s and the default browser’s combined JavaScript performance. A lower time in ms (“milliseconds”) is better.

Just like Sunspider above, Vellamo measures the JavaScript performance of the processor and default web browser, but unlike Sunspider the Vellamo app consists of several different JavaScript benchmarks which are added as a total score, where higher is better. Note that one or two of the tests within Vellamo are affected by the resolution of the screen, which means a low resolution screen will have a slight advantage, and vice versa.

Monjori Shader Benchmark measures the fragment shader capacity of the graphics chip. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Once again this is a benchmark where the resolution of the device is of huge importance, and devices with a high resolution will get a lower score than devices with a lower resolution screen – provided the hardware (processor, GPU) is the same.

Nenamark 2 is just like Electopia above a 3D benchmark designed to put the graphics chip to the test, but unlike Electopia this one is based on the newer OpenGL ES 2.0 framework. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames per Second”) and higher is better.

Electopia is a 3D benchmark based on the OpenGL ES 1.1 framework and is designed to put the graphics chip to the test. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Note that phones with a screen resolution of less than WVGA (800×480 pixels) gets and unfair advantage since they give the graphics chip far fewer pixels to shuffle, resulting in a higher FPS.

M3D is a fairly new 3D benchmark running the OpenGL ES 2.0 framework. The app itself is based on the Unity engine which a plethora of games both for gaming consoles and mobile devices. The result is presented as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better.

Name	Sequential read (MB/s)	Sequential write (MB/s)	Random read (MB/s)	Random write (MB/s)	IOPS/s read (4K)	IOPS/s write (4K)
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 (3.2)	43.03	4.51	8.62	0.18	2206.8	46.13
ASUS Transformer Prime (3.2)	19.33	3.41	2,48	0.16	635.87	42.87
ASUS Transformer (3.2)	20.79	6.06	2.6	0.27	667.61	69.4
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (3.1)	26.4	4.89	3.7	0.21	948.85	55.9
Acer Iconia A500 (3.2)	6.19	4.03	2.18	1.65	560	424

With Androbench 3.0 we measure the performance of the internal flash memory — not the external SD card. A higher score is always better, both for read, write and IOPS. Samsung has equipped the Tab 7.7 with ridiculously fast flash modules as far as read performance goes. The device outperforms the best competitors by twice the score, if not more. As far as write performance goes it’s more evenly matched, but the Tab 7.7 is by no means a slouch and is on par with the competitors.

Conclusion
Samsung has with the Tab 7.7 created a tablet which greatly impresses us in many ways, but that also has one or two issues as far as the screen response within certain apps and the fluidity in some graphical transitions. The build quality, fit and materials are the best we’ve ever seen on an Android tablet and the low weight and thin profile makes it a pleasure to hold and handle.

Under the bonnet we find, as previously mentioned, the Exynos 4210 platform, which with its dual core processor gives the tab plenty of oomph and very competitive benchmark results. While browsing using the default browser the horse powers under the bonnet clearly shows and the rendering times of heavy and complex webpages is almost always far better/faster than the Tegra 2 equipped reference units Acer Iconia and Motorola XOOM.

The graphics chip, Mali 400, easily chews down every single game we have thrown at it and even though the Tab 7.7 id forced to concede defeat to the Tegra 3 equipped Asus Transformer Prime in our graphics benchmarks it still performs well and can hold its head up high. Apart from its Mali 400 equipped smartphone sibling the Galaxy S II the Tab 7.7 never, despite its thin chassis, gets warm to the point of worrying us.

The screen is as we’ve mentioned several times fantastic, and the best we’ve ever seen on a tablet. Even if the pixel density is nowhere near that of modern smartphones or the iPad 3 it’s still a sight for sore eyes. Color reproduction (adjustable in three levels), viewing angles, blacks and contrasts are all top notch, bar one. The only thing that is “only” OK is the maximum brightness which is about the same as the competition. The digitizer, the touch screen, is as usual with Samsung devices good, but sometimes, namely in the web browser, it can get very unresponsive and slow unless we are over-explicit in out taps and swipes.

The three megapixel camera does its job, but does not exactly impress anyone. Compared to other tablets it does well, but compared to the best smartphones it’s far far behind in both still photography and video recording. The decent camera software with features like auto focus, smile detection and tap-to-zoom somewhat compensates for the few megapixels and so-so image quality.

When we summarize the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 we can only conclude that this tablet creates a lot of desire. Despite a few problems, which we think are 100% software related and therefore fixable by way of software updates, we don’t hesitate for even a second in recommending this tablet — despite its premium price tag. If you’re looking for an Android tablet with small dimensions and a very low weight the Samsung galaxy Tab 7.7 is in our opinion the absolute best choice you can currently make.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 is suitable for you if you:
* Want the the lightest and most nimble Android tablet on the market today
* Demand high quality in terms of material, build quality and general feel
* Want a good media player that easily will devour most of what you can throw at it
* Want a decent battery performance and a fairly fast charge
* Want what we consider being the best tablet screen on the market right now

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 might be suitable for you if you:
* You are looking for a good hybrid between a large smartphone and a full size tablet
* Are willing to trade in connectors such as USB HDMI for a more nimble size

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 is not suitable for you if you:
* Are looking for the most bang for the buck — the Tab 7.7 is very expensive
* Want a tablet with a great camera
* Is sensitive to so called “lag” and a screen that at times can be slightly unresponsive
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Introduction
Xperia S is the first Sony Android phone hitting the market since Sony and Ericsson recently split up. Since Ericsson were responsible for the UI development, and since they were responsible for making the Sony Ericsson UX one of the least bloated and fastest UI’s on the market, there has been some concern that Sony with its track record would revert back to a bloated UI – one that not even powerful hardware can handle without lag and stutter.

The hardware itself is certainly nothing to scoff at. Sony has equipped the Xperia S with Qualcomm’s MSM8260 SoC (“System on a Chip”) which consists of a dual core processor at 2×1.5GHz and the Adreno 220 graphics chip. In addition to that we find 1GB of RAM and a 4.3 inch TFT screen with an insanely high pixel density. The camera of the Xperia S is yet another impressive part of the puzzle — a Sony Exmor R sensor with a whopping 12 megapixels.

In this review we’re going to take a closer look at more or less everything – from the contents of the box to its battery capacity, from construction to software. Furthermore we’re going to, in addition to running a number of synthetic benchmarks, test the phone in real world scenarios: like most people do, only a lot more intensive than what is to be consider normal for most people.

We hope that after having spent a few weeks testing the phone to its absolute limits we’re going to be able to give an answer as to whether this handset is worth your hard earned money or if you are better off spending them elsewhere.

In the box




In the almost all white box, which is a bit different than we are used to, we find the phone itself in its own compartment, but after having slid the outer shell of the box off we have to open another hatch to get to it. Opening yet another hatch reveals the rest of the contents, in separate compartments.

The box itself is of course of little real importance, but we are happy to note that Sony has put a little more effort into this then Sony Ericsson used to do. The unboxing experience is important for a lot of people. Worth nothing is that the charger, most of the documentation and the headset still bears the Sony Ericsson brand. We suspect it’s going to take a while yet for Sony to phase out all Sony Ericsson branded accessories.

The contents of the box:

* Sony Xperia S (”White”, 32GB)
* Wall charger with a USB-port (5V, 850mA, ”Sony Ericsson GreenHeart”)
* USB -> Micro-USB cable (roughly 1 meter/3 ft in length)
* Black stereo headset (”MH650c”, in ear, button for answering calls, no media controls)
* Three pairs of rubber ear-buds of different sizes for the headset mentioned above
* 2 x Sony Smart Tags (NFC tags)
* Quick start guide, SAR information (1.30 W/kg), warranty card

We cannot guarantee that the contents of our box exactly match the contents of boxes bought from other retailers, carriers or regions. Slight, or even large, variations may occur. If the contents of the box is of great importance for you then we recommend you contact your retailer before you make the purchase.

Design, build quality and construction


Aesthetics and design has always been and will always be a matter of personal preference, which makes it difficult for us to come to a conclusion with any kind of objectivity. What we can say is that little has changed in that department since Sony and Ericsson broke up.

In the new line of Xperia phones, called NXT, the most striking new design feature is perhaps the transparent strip of glass near the chin of the phone. Many of you will recognize this design feature from Sony’s line of flat screen TV’s. Apart from being a design feature and a notification light for incoming calls it also hosts the phone’s mobile antenna.

Just like with earlier phones from the Xperia line Sony has made an effort to give the phone a distinct design that immediately separates it from its competitors, and they have also made sure that the design appeals to most people – men and women alike. When we hit the town and let people try the phone out almost everyone is positive, and one even placed an order for an Xperia S on the spot after having used our device for a few minutes.

Handling the Xperia S is a nice experience. The size is good for most people with normal sized hands and the softly rounded back makes the phone feel nice in our hands. However if you have small hands, or if you like to be able to reach all four corners of the screen using the phone one handed, or if you have small and tight pockets, then the Xperia S might not be for you.

As far as material goes it’s plastic, both front and back, the screen glass of course excluded. This does not however mean that the phone feels cheap or “plastic”. Thanks to the surface, the finish of the plastic, the phone feels nice to hold. It can get quite slippery if you have dry hands though.

The build quality and the fit/tolerances between the parts is good, with one exception; on both our test devices the hatch on the back of the phone is a little bit loose in the corners. When you hold the phone in one hand and use the other to navigate the screen you constantly feel the hatch move slightly. Not more than half a millimeter, but enough to notice. We would have preferred it if Sony had skipped making the hatch detachable (since the battery can’t be replaced anyway) and gone for a solution where you insert the SIM card from one of the phone’s sides.

Device	Screen (inches)	Width (mm)	Height (mm)	Min. depth (mm)	Max. depth (mm)	Weight (gram)	Battery (mAh)
Sony Xperia S	4.3	64.2	128.1	7.3	10.6	144	1750
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	4.65	67.94	135.5	8.94	9.91	135	1750
Samsung Galaxy Note	5.3	82.95	146.85	9.65	10.05	178	2500
Motorola RAZR	4.3	68.9	130.7	7.1	10.55	127	1780
Samsung Galaxy S Plus	4	64.2	122.4	9.9	12	119	1650
Samsung Galaxy S	4	64.2	122.4	9.9	12	118	1500
Samsung Galaxy S II	4.3	66.1	125.3	8.49	10.4	116	1650
SE xperia arc	4.2	63	125	8.7	10.7	117	1500
HTC Sensation	4.3	65.4	126.1	11.3	11.3	148	1520
Google Nexus S	4	63	123.9	10.88	14.6	129	1500
HTC Sensation XL	4.7	70.7	132.5	9.9	11.16	162.5	1600

Buttons, connectors, slots and sensors

The front of the phone is as usual nowadays little more than a slate of glass and lacks the physical buttons of most Android handsets from 2008 through 2010. As the manufacturers are preparing for Android 4.0 and beyond, where the menu buttons have been moved to the UI of the actual operating system, chances are that physical hardware menu buttons to many people’s chagrin will soon be a thing of the past.

Xperia S, which is being launched with Android 2.3.7/Gingerbread, instead used capacitive menu buttons, so called “touch buttons”, three of them, below the screen; Back, Home and Menu. Unfortunately these capacitive buttons has proved to be a bit of a nuisance, on both or devices, since they have a tendency to frequently not react/respond to our input. To make them work you have to hit just the right spot, a very narrow spot, while the pad of the fingertip can’t touch wither the screen above the button or the transparent strip below the button as this sometimes seem to “short circuit” the menu buttons.

The best way of going about this is to be slow, careful and almost over-explicit when pressing the buttons. Owners of early versions of the Nexus One might be familiar with how distinct you have to be – only with the Xperia S it’s even worse. As time passes we get better, we learn how to use the menu buttons, but the amount of unregistered inputs is still worse than with any other phone we have tested. The screen itself does not have any of these issues.

Apart from the Micro-USB hatch on the left side of the phone it’s completely smooth, but on the right side we find several ports and buttons. From the top and down; hatch for the Micro-HDMI port, volume rocker (+/-) and then near the bottom the dedicated camera button with two pressure points; first one for focus and the second for the shutter. On the top of the device, all the way to the left, we find the power button (which of course also acts as a lock/unlock button for the screen) and next to it the 3.5mm audio jack.

On the bottom end of the phone we find an oblong opening in the plastic, for attaching a wrist strap, and next to it the primary microphone.

Jointly for all hardware buttons — volume rocker, power and camera — is that they apart from being nicely chromed offers a nice resistance when pressed, not to much, not too little. They also protrude from the chassis enough for our fingers to quickly and blindly find them with the phone still in the pocket. We’re very happy with the placement of the power button on the top of the device rather than on the side because this means far fewer accidental lockings and unlockings of the screen while we’re adjusting the volume or simply picking the phone up.

On the front, centered above the screen, we find the phone speaker and to the right of it the lens of the front facing camera. To the left we find the LED diode for notifications (new texts, low battery, new mails and so on). Somewhere hidden on the front of the phone there’s the light sensor for automatic adjusting of the screen brightness and a proximity sensor that shuts the phone’s screen and touch screen off while we’re holding it to our ear during a phone call.

Unfortunately the transparent strip near the chin of the phone, while being lit by both LED:s (while using the capacitive menu buttons) and that lights up with an incoming call, is not used for any other kinds of notifications. Since it can be seen no matter of the phone is placed screen up or screen down and from virtually any angle it would be perfect for all sorts of notifications — but alas it is not used for that.

Beneath the slightly ill-fitting hatch on the back all we find is the slot for the SIM card, Micro-SIM to be exact. There is not slot for memory expansion and the battery is not removable without taking the phone apart in ways that might void the warranty. Fortunately the Xperia S comes with 32GB of internal storage (~26GB available) which ought to be enough for most. A 64GB version would however be nice for all the stockpilers out there.

Reception and data speeds

As previously mentioned the transparent glass strip near the chin of the phone is not just a design feature but also a light diode for incoming calls and the mobile antenna. This placement of the antenna and the fact that the transparent glass strip is hollow, gives the antenna a free “line of sight” in several directions, unlike most phones with a metal front and chassis. This means that the reception of the Xperia S has been very good in our tests. When we apply the so called “death grip” made famous by the iPhone 4 we see only a slight drop in reception – even when using both hands.

A few quick tests on our usual spot for testing the reception reveals that with the phone lying flat on its back on a table reports -67 dBm 23 asu, which on this very spot is a very strong signal. When we pick the phone up and apply a one handed death grip the reading is -79 dBm 16 asu which is still good and far better than the Galaxy Nexus for instance. We then do the two handed death grip and thereby cover the lower part of the device completely, which gives us a reading of -83 dBm 15 asu which is actually almost as good as the Galaxy Nexus lying on the table with nothing covering it. It seems that Sony has managed to kill two birds with one stone — a nice design feature that also offers a great antenna reception.

The radio chip is via 3G/HSxPA good for up to 14.4 Mbit/s download and 5.76 Mbit/s upload, but with our subscription with our carrier our top speeds are on paper 7 Mbit/s down and 2 Mbit/s up. In our real world tests we managed to reach 6 Mbit/s down and 2.5 Mbit/s up at best, which is more than decent. We don’t doubt that Xperia S can reach close to 14 Mbit/s, but unfortunately we could not test this.

Via WiFi the reception is good, but we immediately notice that the signal strength is very much affected by how we hold the phone and on which surfaces we place it. We’re guessing, without knowing, that the WiFi antenna unlike the mobile antenna has a more traditional placement along one of the sides of the phone, making it more sensitive to how you hold it.

The data speeds via WiFi (n) on our local FTP network are good but not great. When we transfer large files to and from the device (not at the same time) we note a top speed of 28 Mbit/s (3.5 MB/s) while downloading (from server to phone) and a mere 22 Mbit/s (2.8 MB/s) while uploading (to server from phone). We can compare this to the 45 Mbit/s (5 MB/s) in both directions on Tegra 2 devices and about 18-20 Mbit/s (2.3-2.5 MB/s) with Motorola (Droid) RAZR.

Sound
We find the quality of sound in phone calls (both 2G and 3G) to be more than satisfactory and we can’t really find anything to criticize except for the usual complaint — the sound in the internal phone speaker on the front is not quite as loud as we would have liked it to be, especially for the hearing impaired. In the sample recordings below we compare the front phone speaker on the Xperia S with Motorola (Droid) RAZR and we find that the Xperia S is both louder and clearer.

The recording is made with both phones set to maximum volume at a distance of 5 centimeters (2 inches) from the microphone we use to record (Blue Yeti Pro).

Sony Xperia S (front phone speaker)

Motorola (Droid) RAZR (front phone speaker)

Like the Sony Ericsson Xperia arc and arc s, Xperia S is equipped with a secondary microphone, placed on the back of the device. The secondary microphone is used to record background noise and then filter this noise from the recording made by the primary microphone on the bottom of the phone. This feature works fairly good on the predecessors and does so on the Xperia S as well – not better, not worse. In the settings menu for the phone this feature can be turned off.

The “external” speaker on the back of the phone produces a crisp and loud sound in noisy environments, even when we have the XLoud feature turned off, which Sony claims to boost the volume even more. We’re not particularly fond of the XLoud feature though because we feel it distorts the sound, and it gets worse the higher the volume setting. Compared to the Xperia arc the Xperia S is definitely louder, but our impression is that the arc produce a more balanced sound whereas the Xperia S produce a sharper and more high pitched sound — which the sample recordings below demonstrates.

In these recordings we have placed the phones 45 centimeters (16 inches) from our microphone (Blue Yeti Pro), set the phones’ external speakers to 100% and then we play our sound test clip using the default music players with equalizers and other sound effects turned off — of course not both phones at the same time.

Sony Xperia S external back speaker

Sony Ericsson Xperia arc external back speaker

Sony Xperia S external back speaker with XLoud

Sony Ericsson Xperia arc external back speaker With XLoud

Sony bundles an in ear headset that at first glance does not look like anything special or qualitative, but after having tried them for a few minutes we’re pleasantly surprised at the quality – at least in our untrained non audiophile ears. Unless you have very high demands as far as the sound quality of your headset goes these will most likely be good enough for most. As an addition to the headset a set of three different sized rubber ear plugs for the headset.

In comparison with the Samsung Nexus S with Voodoo control, or the Sandisk Sansa Clip+ with a proper pair of headphones, the difference in sound is noticeable. In Xperia S we miss the power and the dynamic the aforementioned players deliver, especially if we connect high impedance headphones. If you know you prefer high impedance headphones with large elements and like to listen at a high volume, we’re not sure the Xperia S will be up to the task. As always — if the sound bit is important to you we recommend that you bring your favorite headphones to your favorite retailer and try it out before you make the purchase.

Unfortunately we have not been able to perform the usual RightMark Audio Analyzer test for the Xperia S because of technical issues rendering the output result completely off the charts and therefore unusable.

GPS and positioning

Show walk through town with Sony Xperia S (blue) vs Sony Ericsson Xperia arc (red) on a larger map

In this test we take the Xperia S with us for a walk through town (buildings and parks) and in our car for a short trip in mostly open terrain. The application used to record our trip is called Open GPS Tracker and is available for free on Google Play (former Android Market). Since this test is supposed to test the GPS/GLONASS capacity we disable all mobile positioning aids.

We start by, in a place with no buildings or trees obscuring the sky comparing the time it takes for each device (Xperia S and Xperia arc) to get a reliable lock against the satellites with an accuracy of 25 meters (~80 ft) or less. After numerous tests we conclude that the Xperia S is the faster of the two with a lock within 2-3 seconds compared to the arc which needs a few seconds more.

Going by the map above we can see that both the Xperia S and the Xperia arc at times have some trouble tracking our route. Both devices are guilty of momentary “detours” slightly off our real route lasting but a second or two. According to Google Maps this means we have traveled through buildings, parkways and trees even though we of course have not. It bears pointing out that it’s a difficult setting for any GPS as there are high buildings and lots of trees along the route we walk.

Show trip with car with Samsung Galaxy Note (blue) vs. Sony Xperia S (red) on a larger map

During our GPS test in a car we find that the Xperia S performs just as well as the Samsung Galaxy Note, with one exception. As we approach the forest area near the end of our route the Xperia S loses contact with the satellites completely. Not just most of the satellites, but every single one. This is however not something we have been able to reproduce, so we’re inclined to write it off as nothing but a random fluke or a bug in the GPS app (Open GPS Tracker).

Screen and digitizer

The Xperia S has been equipped with a 4.3 inch TFT screen with a resolution of 720×1280 pixels, also known as 720p. This resolution in combination with the 4.3 inch screen gives the device a pixel density of a fantastic 342 PPI, which of course results in what can only be described as razor sharp. The much talked about iPhone 4(S) retina screen “only” has a PPI of 326 PPI. So with the Xperia S not only do you get a higher pixel density, you also get far more pixels and a larger screen.

The latter, screen size and therefore phone size, might not be a plus for everyone, but as screens tends to get larger and larger we have to assume that that is what most people want. We cannot, try as we might, make out single pixels unless we literally hold the screen just a few inches from our eyes, which makes us go “Finally!” because this is a first on any of the Android devices we have tried and reviewed over the years.

The color depth is of course in the millions, about 16 million nuances to be more precise, and the screen delivers vibrant and realistic colors without falling for the temptation of making the colors over-saturated because it looks good under the bright light at the retailers. Unfortunately the backlight, as per usual with Xperia models, requires a higher setting for the colors to come to life and be as good as they can be. Compared to our reference device, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the Xperia S needs a brightness setting of 65% to match the 50% brightness setting of the Galaxy Nexus. Sharpness, colors and contrasts are all very good and even the blacks are decent for an LCD TFT screen.

The only real Achilles’ heel of the screen is the viewing angles, which are fairly poor. The screen quickly gets wishy-washy, loses contrast and brightness even in moderate angles (45 degrees or so). When the phone lies back down on our desk next to us it can even get hard to read some text (depending on text color and background color) without having to pick the phone up, which if course is far from ideal.

The screen readability in full daylight is good thanks to a fairly high maximum brightness (even though the screen is very dim at 50%). Even though the Xperia S does not have the new RGBW (Red, Green, Blue, White) sub pixel matrix of its smaller sibling the Xperia P we still think the white levels at full brightness are very good. We notice a bit more screen reflection on the Xperia S than on both the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Nexus, but that is to be expected on a TFT screen.

The digitizer, the touch screen itself, is good and generally responds quickly and accurately to our taps and swipes. We measure a refresh rate of 60Hz using the Input Benchmark app, which means that the screen reads our taps and swipes 60 times every second. We also measure the multi-touch capacity using the same app, and find that it can handle up to seven (7) simultaneous touch points, and track their movement. This is of course more than enough for any practical implementation of multi-touch.

When compared to the absolute cream of the crop touch screen phones we notice that the Xperia S screen might be slightly less responsive, but the difference is so small that it might be all in our heads. However, when laying on the back on certain surfaces the screen definitely loses some responsiveness. We’re not sure how or why, but we have seen this behavior on other phones as well. We assume that the static electricity in some surfaces somehow interferes with the slight electric charge in our fingertips which are used by the phone’s touch screen too register our taps and swipes. The problem is not a big one though, but worth mentioning.

The biggest problem, which we have already mentioned in the Buttons, connectors, slots and sensors chapter, is the capacitive menu buttons below the screen. Time and time again they miss our taps, our attempted input, and it happens very frequently — roughly estimated one in three times, unless we make sure we are slow and almost over-explicit when we press them. The “sweet spot” so to speak is very narrow, just 4-5 millimeters as per our rough estimate, and if you’re off just by a fraction the button won’t register the tap.

Furthermore, if you just mash down the entire flat of your fingertip to be sure to hit the right spot, you will at the same time touch either the transparent strip just below the buttons or touch the actual screen surface above the buttons, both of which seem to “short circuit” the menu buttons, rendering them unresponsive. The trick is to simply take your time and make sure you hit just the right spot, indicated by small dots. Having nimble fingertips and not being in a hurry is a definite advantage. The issue with the unresponsive menu buttons is magnified while the phone lies on its back on certain surfaces.

Operating system and software
Sony Xperia S comes with Android 2.3.7/Gingerbread (with an upgrade ti 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich slated for the second quarter of 2012) with Sony’s (Sony Ericsson’s) in-house developed UX on top. Sony/Sony Ericsson UX is a bit of a favorite among the Swedroid staff, as far as the manufacturers own interfaces goes, because of its lightness and speed. No bloat or an abundance of animations and features slowing the device down — just like we want it.

We’re happy to note that even though Ericsson (who was responsible for developing the UX interface) is now out of the game the latest version (6.0) of the Sony UX is still very quick and responsive. However, straight out of the box Sony has applied every single widget they have to the home screens, which does slow the phone down a bit while swiping between the home screens or pinching the screen to get an overview.

As soon as we clean the home screens up (i.e. removes most of the widgets we don’t need), as we suspect almost everyone buying a new Android phone will do, the phone ends up just as snappy as we have come to expect from Xperia phones from 2011 and on. As with all Android phones a plethora of widgets will slow the phone down — so avoid that of you can.

Home screen/Launcher

On the surface not much is new in the latest and greatest Sony UX interface — at least not in terms of features. Overall the graphical interface is more polished with nice blue gradients in the bundled widgets and settings menus. A new textured background instead of the old barely noticeable blackish gradient is a nice touch as well — and luckily Sony has managed to made these eye candy improvements without making the interface slower. Notice the NFC widget which works with the Sony Smart Tags bundled in the box. More about this further down in the review.

Sony offers only one theme to choose from, but in several different colors. We would like to see more options here in the future – not only different colors but also slightly different graphical designs (like in earlier versions of HTC:s Sense UI). A pleasant addition is the option to change the lock screen background, via the screen settings menu.

In the app menu everything looks exactly like before, except that the dots indications which screen you are on are now circular and not rectangular.

Phone app and calendar

The calendar has been redesigned, but unfortunately it seems the calendar widget has been lost in the process. The new calendar design has made it easier to read and understand in comparison to the old one in the Xperia arc.

The web browser

We chose to compare the Xperia S against the Galaxy Nexus because of the same screen resolution and the fact that both are dual core devices with 1GB of RAM. The Xperia S beats the Galaxy Nexus time and time again, however slight, in terms of rendering speed, zooming, scrolling and panning. Considering that the Xperia S and its Gingerbread innards are only able to use one of the two processor cores properly this is a very impressive feat. We’re really looking forward to the Ice Cream Sandwich update.

Gallery and media players

Clip	Resolution	Codec / Profile / Container	Bitrate	Audio	Results (MX Video Player)
#1	640x352	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK
#2	576x320	XviD / Simple@L5 / AVI	1.4 Mbit/s	MP3 2.0	OK
#3	720p	h.264 / High@L3.1 / MKV	3 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#4	720p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	9 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#5	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	14 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#6	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	19.2 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#7	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	22.8 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#8	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	25 Mbit/s	DTS 5.1	OK (sound: S/W only)
#9	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	30 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (low FPS)
#10	1080p	h.264 / High@L4.1 / MKV	42 Mbit/s	AC3 5.1	Fail (very low FPS)

The Xperia S, with Qualcomm’s MSM8260 platform under the bonnet, is a very competent video player. With the right video app (in this case the free version of MX Video Player) which is able to software decode the sound formats the Xperia S lack native support for (AC3 and DTS for example), we managed to play all our test clips without a hitch, except the very demanding “bird clips” that for many years have been used to test the limits of the software and the hardware of video players.

Thanks to the high resolution of the screen (720p) and the crisp and strong colors it’s a bit of a pleasure to watch TV episodes in HD/720p (1280×720 pixels) or even more – the Xperia S will handle FullHD/10180p (1920×1080 pixels) as well, though it will of course get down-scaled to the 720p screen. Watching such a small screen will however in the long run strain your eyes, but then again that’s true for all smartphones on the market today – even monsters like the 5.3 inch Samsung Galaxy Note. An extra point is awarded to Xperia S for the, for a smartphone, loud and crisp external speaker.

As far as the Gallery app goes, Sony simply went for the Android 2.3/Gingerbread default app, and this also extends to the video player which is the default Android 2.3 player. The Gallery app itself does its job, but there are far better free alternatives on Play Shop/Android Market, like QuickPic. The stock video player however is very poor and has not changed much at all since Android 1.5/Cupcake. Sony has added a far better container/codec support though which at least makes the player usable, but once again you will find a plethora of far better video players on Play Shop.

The music player is in essence a completely new and revamped experience and in addition to that a lot better. The navigation and browsing through albums, artists and songs, and a five band equalizer for finding the best possible settings for your headphones and personal preference is a big step up. Sony has also added a feature for selecting songs based on mood and creating a playlist based on this.

We also appreciate the DLNA support which is very easy to access and use. After but a few taps of the screen the music is flowing through our DLNA compatible Onkyo amplifier. The music player is also tied (optional) to Facebook for easy sharing of your current songs, or to follow what your friends are listening to.

Sony has not only equipped the Xperia S with a Micro-HDMI port but also with a more TV friendly hub/interface that is activated automatically as you connect the phone to the TV. Because the device also supports “Remote Control Passthrough” through the HDMI interface controlling the device via the TV’s remote control is simple and intuitive. No configuration is necessary other than finding your favorite media apps (video, music) on the Google Play Shop.

Settings

The settings menu is fairly standard for Android 2.3/Gingerbread as the above screenshots reveal. Sony has added a few bells and whistles though, such as the Xperia sub menu where the most essential feature is the Facebook integration, as shown in the video below.

As usual with Xperia phones you cannot disable the automatic screen brightness feature which supposedly serves to extend the battery life, but can result in a way too dim screen for some. The only way to disable this it to either set the screen to 100% brightness manually, or downloading third party apps for this on the Google Play Shop (formerly known as Android Market).

Sony Smart Tags / NFC

In this video we demonstrate how the NFC tags can work with Sony’s Xperia Smart Tag software. Each tag/brick activates a different profile, as configured by the user. The Smart Tag app itself is very easy to use and for better or for worse the options are limited. Some like the simplicity which makes the app very user friendly even for novices; others prefer a plethora of settings. As usual, though, there are several third party NFC apps to choose from on Google Play Shop.

Other applications worth mentioning

The Sony Ericsson PC Suite is now updated and renamed Sony PC Suite. The program itself works exactly like it did before and lets you update the phone software and make backups and restore the device among other things.

Pictured above we see the FM radio, the alarm and the Power Saver app. The latter is very easy to configure and create profiles which help you conserve the battery life, depending on things like location and the time of day.

The Camera

The camera has a whopping 12 megapixels and is Sony’s own Exmor R sensor, which means high quality images. The megapixel count does not say much — or anything at all — about the actual picture quality and is only a measurement of the maximum dimensions of the image. 12 megapixels equals images of 4500×3000 pixels in size, and the video camera handles up to 1080p (1920×1080 pixels) at 30 FPS.

The camera has both auto focus and tap-to-focus and a number of additional focus settings like smile detection. The software offers more or less what we have come to expect from Xperia phones, which means that it for a smartphone is very good. Next to the camera lens on the back there’s an LED flash to help while snapping shots in poor lighting. The LED also serves as an optional video light while recording videos. The LED is not strong enough to be of any use over great distances, but up to a distance of three or so meters (10 ft) it works surprisingly well.

On the front we find the secondary camera lens for video calls and self portraits. The resolution is a more modest 1.3 megapixels and will record videos at 720p (1280×720 pixels) at 30 FPS. This is more than enough for its purpose, but as usual with front cameras the picture/video quality is very poor unless you are in an extremely well lit environment — preferably outside, in sunlight.

All pictures below are taken with each camera’s maximum resolution and with the default settings.

Right click images and open in a new tab/new window for full size versions.

Sony Xperia S Sony Ericsson Xperia arc

Click for full size

Click for full size

Click for full size

Summary — camera stills
Going by the sample camera images above it’s fairly obvious that the Exmor R sensor in the Xperia S, in addition to offering more megapixels, delivers images that are at least a few notches better than its predecessor Xperia arc, especially in terms of detail and crispness. In the images above we have chosen three images on random and cut out the same area from each image to demonstrate the difference in detail. We know that the Xperia arc had one of the best cameras of any Android phone in 2011, but as you can clearly see the Xperia S is far better. Note that we had to shrink the Xperia S images slightly to get the size comparable to the Xperia arc, but other than this no editing has been done.

While taking photos in poor lighting, without the LED flash, the Xperia arc, using default/auto settings, produce images with less graininess than the Xperia S. This is due to the default/auto settings where the Xperia S prioritizes a lower ISO than the arc. When the LED flash is active the end result is far more even since the graininess caused by the poor lighting becomes less of an issue. The strength/brightness of the LED’s on the Xperia S and arc are as far as we can see comparable. With the LED flash active the Xperia arc has a lot more trouble finding focus if the object is less than about half a meter (1.5 ft) away. The Xperia S does a much better job, at its default setting.

The auto focus is in good lighting quick and does its job well. In sequence we manage to take about one picture every half a second, but this if course requires the lighting to be good and the focus to already be fixed after the first shot. In comparison to the Xperia arc this is a great improvement, but compared to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus with its Zero Shutter Lag feature, the Xperia S cannot quite compete. After about ten shots in sequence the camera momentarily lags for a second or two, presumably while writing to the internal NAND flash from the RAM buffer dedicated to the camera.

Macro photography is in relation to other phone cameras we have tested very good, as long as the default auto setting is disabled along with smile detection disabled. With smile detection enabled macro photography of certain objects can become more or less impossible. The minimum focusing distance is about 6 centimeters (just over two inches) which means we can get very close to the object, which in combination with a speedy auto focus/tap focus produces a very good result, even when the object is not completely motionless — such as a flower gently swaying in the wind.

Sony Xperia S — more camera samples

Sony Xperia S 1080p @ 29,692 FPS (13,9Mbps)MP4 AVC Baseline@L4.0. Stereo AAC, 48KHz, 96Kbps

Sony Ericsson Xperia arc 720p @ 29.692 FPS (6 Mbps) MP4 AVC Baseline@L3.1. Stereo AAC, 48KHz, 96Kbps

Sony Xperia S front camera samples

Bugs and problems
The problem with the Sony Xperia S has almost completely been about the three capacitive menu buttons by the bottom end of the screen. At first we thought it was a problem with our review unit, but then a few days later when we received a second device we noted the exact same behavior on that unit as well. The way to go about using these buttons — because they do work if you use them the right way — is to be over-explicit and make sure you not only press fairly hard but also hit that tiny little sweet spot, can’t be more than 4-5 millimeters (one fifth of an inch) in height, or the button might not register your tap. Unless we changed our behavior to the above when using the Xperia S, a considerably slower way of using the menu buttons, we estimate that about one in three taps failed.

After some research we found that this is a problem mentioned time and time again by both reviewers and regular end users using the phone. For some users the problem is far less noticeable because they by nature are more precise and deliberate in their usage of the menu buttons, while it for others who are used to more responsive buttons and not having to slow down to make sure to hit a tiny sweet spot it’s more than a little frustrating.

We can only conclude that Sony might have to rethink the design/size of the capacitive buttons in future models if this is not something that can be resolved with a software update or slightly revised hardware in future Xperia S batches leaving the factory.

An important note is that the digitizer, the touch screen itself, does not have any of these problems — the problem is 100% restricted to the menu buttons.

Battery performance

The battery performance during video playback proves, with a time of 6 hours and 27 minutes of continuous playback, to be a bit of a disappointment. Previous models from the Xperia line has shown a far better battery life in this test and the absolute best phones we have tested keeps going for another five hours after the Xperia S throws in the towel.

Note that because of the low screen brightness of the Xperia S at 50% brightness we had to up the brightness all the way to 67% for the Xperia S to match our reference unit Galaxy Nexus at 50%. Just to be thorough we then ran the test again, this time with the brightness set to 50% instead of 67%, which gave us an additional 55 minutes of battery time. Considerably better, but still far behind some of the competitors. However setting the Xperia S screen to 50% also means that it gets so dark that we at certain dark parts of the movie could not make out much detail at all, unless we were in a pitch black room.

Why the Xperia S, with a larger battery, performs so much worse than some previous Xperia phones, we don’t know. Our guess is that a larger screen combined with a higher screen resolution takes its toll on the battery. It’s also possible that the drivers for the relatively new Qualcomm MSM8260 platform still needs a bit of tweaking and optimizing, which could improve battery life. The upcoming Android 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich update might also improve battery life.

If we disregard the poor battery life during video playback and instead focus on a more relevant “real life” type of usage the battery performance is a lot better. The fact is that the Xperia S after a regular 16 hour day with approximately 45 minutes of phone calls, 30 minutes of composing/sending/receiving e-mails, an hour of listening to music via Spotify (offline mode), an hour browsing the web and using Google Reader and finally some simple puzzle games, Facebook and Twitter and a permanent data (3G) connection still have battery left at the end of the day — something far from all Android phones can manage.

As always the screen is the most power hungry component during normal usage (CPU and GPU can be worse if maxed out constantly), followed by phone calls via 3G and finally the web browser (which is a combination of the screen being on and lots of heavy rendering and Flash/JavaScript content). Making it two days is simply not possible with our usage pattern, so as usual we have to make it a habit of charging every night.

System info


Under the bonnet of the Xperia S we find Qualcomm’s dual core MSM8260 platform, which consists of a processor running at 2×1.5GHz, the Adreno 220 graphics chip and 1GB of RAM. Even though quad core devices are waiting just around the corner this dual core solution gives the device plenty of “oomph” and we rarely or ever find ourselves wishing that we had two more cores.

The Android version is 2.3.7 (with an update to 4.0.x coming during the second quarter) and on top of this Sony has added its own UI called Sony UX.

A shortlist of the more prominent features of the phone is as follows: The 4.3 inch 720p (1280×720 pixels) screen, the nifty NFC support and an Exmor R camera sensor with a whopping 12 megapixels.

Sony has equipped the Xperia S with 1GB or RAM which is twice the amount of the Xperia flagships of yesteryear. This increase in RAM makes a huge difference for those of us that likes to multitask heavily, run lots of apps simultaneously and switch between them instantly.

On Xperia phones from 2011 with only 512MB of RAM Android was forced to try and juggle the active processes and make the most of the limited RAM, which meant the OS sometimes had to terminated processes that was not currently in use, which in turn meant that once we decided we needed that particular app again it would take a second or two extra to switch to it. With the Xperia S this is not a major issue anymore.

The Xperia S comes with 32GB of built in storage memory, out of which almost 27GB are available to the user for storing things like music, videos and images. Of the remaining 5GB about 1800MB is reserved for app installations and the rest is taken up by Android itself.

We hope that when Xperia S gets the Android 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich update the partition will be like on the Galaxy Nexus where the user gets to decide how to distribute the available app and storage space, without separate partitions defined by the manufacturer.

Gaming, performance and graphs

Benchmark Pi measures the calculation capacity of the device, which gives us a score that reflects the capacity of the processor(s). Lower is better. Xperia S can’t quite match the best scores, especially not when considering the MHz of the processor.

Linpack measures the floating point capacity of the processor and the result is shown as MFLOPS. Higher is better. In this test Xperia S does a lot better and is only beaten by the two Exynos 4210 equipped Samsung devices Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II.

CF-Bench measures both the processor and the memory performance and adds the two for a total score. Higher is better. Xperia S snags second place and shows that the Qualcomm MSM8260 platform combined with Sony’s software is competitive.

Rightware’s BrowserMark is a platform independent benchmark performed in the web browser. In this test a number of short tests are undertaken and the result is shown as a total score where higher is better. Since this is a test independent of the platform we have also added a few test results from a couple other mobile platforms than Android. In this test the Xperia S performance is a bit of a disappointment, but we need to remember that the Xperia S is still on Android 2.3.7/Gingerbread which in the default browser cannot utilize both processor cores. As it’s upgraded to 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich (second quarter of 2012) we are likely going to see a huge boost in a number of benchmarks, such as BrowserMark and Sunspider.

Sunspider measures the processor’s and the default browser’s combined JavaScript performance. A lower time in ms (“milliseconds”) is better. The Xperia S is once again in the top two, and we have to remember that this is using only one of the two processor cores. With Android 4.0 it will be able to use both cores and the Sunspider score will get a nice boost. We will of course run these tests again as soon as the device gets updated.

Just like Sunspider above, Vellamo measures the JavaScript performance of the processor and default web browser, but unlike Sunspider the Vellamo app consists of several different JavaScript benchmarks which are added as a total score, where higher is better. Note that one or two of the tests within Vellamo are affected by the resolution of the screen, which means a low resolution screen will have a slight advantage, and vice versa. An example of this is the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy S II which both have the same hardware (Exynos 4210) and that the Note while slightly over clocked still gets a lower score than the Galaxy S II. Despite its high definition (720p) screen, the Xperia S beats out the competition by a large margin.

Monjori Shader Benchmark measures the fragment shader capacity of the graphics chip. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Once again this is a benchmark where the resolution of the device is of huge importance, and devices with a high resolution will get a lower score than devices with a lower resolution screen – provided the hardware (processor, GPU) is the same. Because of this the only three models in the graph above that are fairly comparable as far as the screen resolution goes are the Xperia S, the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Nexus, and as we can see the Xperia S snags first place ahead of the Galaxy Note and far far ahead of the as far as graphical rendering goes underpowered Galaxy Nexus.

Electopia is a 3D benchmark based on the OpenGL ES 1.1 framework and is designed to put the graphics chip to the test. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames Per Second”) and higher is better. Note that phones with a screen resolution of less than WVGA (800×480 pixels) gets and unfair advantage since they give the graphics chip far fewer pixels to shuffle, resulting in a higher FPS. Once again the Xperia S performs well, but gets beat out by the Samsung duo Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note.

Nenamark 2 is just like Electopia above a 3D benchmark designed to put the graphics chip to the test, but unlike Electopia this one is based on the newer OpenGL ES 2.0 framework. The result is shown as FPS (“Frames per Second”) and higher is better. In this test the Xperia S is so close to the Galaxy S II that it’s well within the margin of error – when we run the test a few times sometimes the Xperia S comes out on top, sometimes the Galaxy S II.

Name	Sequential read (MB/s)	Sequential write (MB/s)	Random read (MB/s)	Random write (MB/s)	IOPS/s read (4K)	IOPS/s write (4K)
Sony Xperia S	35.74	6.63	7.03	0.18	1800	48
Samsung Galaxy Note	43.04	5.26	3.43	0.2	881	52.5
Samsung Galaxy S II (2.3.5)	45.6	5.17	4.54	0.24	1164	64
Samsung Galaxy S Plus (2.3.5)	30.57	5.69	4.87	0.17	1250	44
Samsung Galaxy Gio (2.3.5)	6.19	4.03	2.18	1.65	560	424
SE xperia arc (2.3.4)	7.9	5.48	4.36	5.71	1117	1462
LG Optimus 3D (2.2)	18.59	2.12	0.47	0.1	121	27
HTC Evo 3D (2.3.4)	24.41	1.56	2.66	0.18	681	48
Motorola RAZR (2.3.5)	34.03	6.56	4.34	0.37	1113	95
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	26.71	5.08	5.28	0.21	1351	54

With Androbench 3.0 we measure the performance of the internal flash memory — not the external SD card. A higher score is always better, both for read, write and IOPS. The Xperia S performs well and even dominates the competition in terms of random read/IOPS.

Heat generation

Despite long gaming sessions with demanding games where both the graphics chip and the processor gets maxed out we never feel that the device gets hot to the level of becoming a problem. We measure a moderate max temp on the hottest place of the back of the phone of 42.5 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to the steaming hot Samsung Galaxy S II’s 56.5 degrees Celsius (134 degrees Fahrenheit). We suspect part of the explanation for this is that the Xperia S chassis is a few millimeters thicker, providing more air/space for the heat to escape. Furthermore it’s possible that the Adreno 220 graphics chip is cooler than the Mali 450 chip in the Galaxy S II. In any case the Xperia S never gets worryingly warm, which of course is good.

Conclusion
The Xperia S is an interesting device in quite a few different ways, but above all it’s the first Android smartphone from Sony since the joint venture with Swedish based Ericsson recently came to an end. Because of this we didn’t expect to see any major differences from last year’s line-up of Sony Ericsson branded smartphones – at least not with regard to the look and feel of the UI. How much influence could Sony possible have over a time span of a few months? And sure enough – once the phone arrived most things both looked and felt just as we expected.

It’s quite obvious though that Sony has had a bit more to say this time around. There’s a new design language which closely resembles that of their Bravia TV line-up rather than the earlier Sony Ericsson Xperia phones, but as with the earlier Xperia-devices they’ve put a great deal of attention to create a unique physical design which undoubtedly makes it stand out amongst its competitors. In general the design seems to attract people’s attention in a most positive manner. Further along both material and build quality is something that we can relate to from earlier models.

The material of choice for the Xperia S is plastic with the obvious exception of the transparent glass stripe and the mineral glass screen. It doesn’t however feel that “plastic” or cheap since Sony’s done a remarkable job of putting this device together. It feels solid and well built for a plastic device and is much sturdier than say the Xperia Arc. We’re not so fond of the removable cover though as the fit isn’t as good as we would have hoped for. There’s just a very slight glitch between the cover and the rest of the device which takes away a little bit from the overall feeling of the device.

Sony delivers the Xperia S with a new version of their rather snappy UX UI running on top of Android 2.3.7 – Android 4.0 is by the way promised to come along within a few months of time. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s dual core MSM8620 2×1.5GHz (45nm) Snapdragon S3 platform paired with the Adreno 220 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It’s not a quad core monster, but upon flicking around amongst the home screens, watching 1080p MKV/h.264 video clips, browsing the web or even playing more advanced 3D-games such as Shadowgun; we never think to ourselves “Darn! If only they’ve paired it with a quad core CPU…”. The Xperia S does by the way deliver a smoother browser experience than both the Transformer Prime or the Galaxy Nexus with stock ROM.

The screen is among the very best we’ve ever laid our eyes upon, with a pixel density (PPI) and sharpness that at present lacks equivalence amongst any other smartphone on the market today. The color saturation is also very good, but only if we increase the brightness of the display quite a bit. Both contrast and black levels are good with regard to the fact that this is a TFT LCD screen. The main weakness of the screen is viewing angles which does disappoint.

Sony Ericsson has been pretty consistent with delivering a good camera experience since the introduction of the Sony backlit Exmor R CMOS sensor. This time around they’ve bumped the megapixel count to 12 megapixels, which usually doesn’t mean a thing considering how small the sensor is, but after comparing the results with last year’s Xperia arc we can only conclude that it’s a major upgrade. The sharpness has increased by a huge margin. High ISO performance isn’t that good though and in darker environments the 8MP Exmor R sensor within the Xperia arc outperforms the Xperia S. Overall though this is the best smartphone camera we’ve yet to experience from an Android device and will of course be using this reference unit for future reviews.

The GPS performed well and we’re quite happy that Sony has enabled GLONASS support. It’s especially of good use for us living in the north where the GLONASS coverage is especially good.

There really isn’t a perfect device out there and the Xperia S is of course no exception. Most of the problems such as the ever so slightly loose removable cover, doesn’t really matter that much. On the other hand we do have a major problem with the not so responsive front mounted capacitive buttons. To call them unresponsive might not be fair though since the problem really is about the touch sensitive area being too small. In time it does get better as we learn exactly where to press. We still never really feel that comfortable with them as we would’ve wished though and do hope that this is fixable via a FOTA update.

We had pretty high expectations with regard to the battery time of this device but came to be a tiny bit disappointed. During our video playback test the Xperia S didn’t perform that well, but during more normal usage it’s pretty average for heavy users as us. We usually manage a whole day without any troubles, but still have to charge it every night for it to the last another working day.

The lack of SD card might pose a problem to users eager of storing large amount of video, pictures or music, but since it’s delivered with 32GB NAND memory (26GB available) it’s not that big of a problem as with the Galaxy Nexus and it’s tin-pot 12-13 GB of available memory. We sure do hope that Sony will deliver a 64GB version in the future for all of you stockpiling hamsters out there.

All in all the Xperia S is, as it should be, the best Xperia phone that we’ve yet to test. With a much faster CPU, GPU and twice the amount of RAM as its predecessor combined with a fantastic screen and also what probably is the best camera within the Android world it’s as of this moment one of the best and most solid devices on the market.

Sony Xperia S is suitable for you if you:
* Want an Android phone with a world class screen
* Want the best camera of any Android phone around — by far
* Want great gaming, browsing and app performance
* Want great native video support — but third party player like MX Video Player is recommended
* Premiers a nice and modern design that stands out in the competition
* Sees a lot of use for NFC tags now or in the future

Sony Xperia S might be suitable for you if you:
* Want a supposedly speedy upgrade to Android 4.0.x/Ice Cream Sandwich
* Are fond of the (for now) lightning fast and minimalistic Sony UX interface

Sony Xperia S is not suitable for you if you:
* Gets frustrated by unresponsive menu buttons (not to be confused with screen response)
* Demand the absolutely latest in terms of hardware (namely upcoming quad core devices)
* Demands the absolute best in terms of materials and build quality
* Demands a battery time that matches the absolute best competitorsRelated Posts:

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Swedroid opened its doors during the very first quarter of 2009 with the release of the very first Android handset in Sweden – the HTC Magic – and has since grown to become the largest android/mobile community in The Nordics with over 35 000 members and 160 000 unique weekly visitors.

During the last few months we’ve received lots and lots of requests from fellow international readers via both Swedroid.se and especially our YouTube channel, which alone carries almost 4 million views in total, asking us to provide some of our in-depth reviews of Android devices in English – why we’re glad to report that we’ve finally managed to come by some spare time in order to begin this journey.

We don’t have the same resources as some of the big guys out there on the interwebs, but still think that we can bring something different to the table. As we’re not interested in providing our readers with yet another news- or rumour mill, our goal is instead to focus solely on thorough, solid and reliable reviews of Android devices. Simple as that.

To sum things up we’re very much looking forward to get going!  Today we’re starting off with our latest  review – the Sony Xperia S – and will of course carry on with lots of other devices in the future.Related Posts:

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