HTC One X Smartphone – Indepth Analysis

1. Introduction2. Hardware Tour - Front3. Hardware Tour - Back4. Hardware Tour - Sides5. Android 4.0 combined with Sense 4.06. Stock Browser, Sense Keyboard7. Other Applications8. Wireless Connectivity, Messaging, Calling9. Multimedia Performance and Quality10. Camera and Video Performance11. Hardware Information and Benchmarks12. Battery Life and Heat13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

The battery found in the One X is a 1800 mAh Lithium Polymer battery which has a total capacity of 6.66 Whr. This number is somewhat left behind in comparison to the 2500 mAh battery in Samsung’s Galaxy Note and the 2100 mAh battery in the Galaxy S III.

Any One X user will soon discover that the Tegra 3 chipset (while active) and the 4.7 inch 720p display are the main sources of power drain.

Because of this, gaming battery life is not amazing, especially when you crank the graphics details up in Riptide GP. A single 20 minute session of it drained the battery roughly 15 percent on one occasion. Under continued heavy use like this you could expect about 2.5 to 3 hours of intensive gaming battery life.

If you find yourself having a lazy Sunday (or Friday afternoon at work) don’t go purchasing a One X expecting a day full of gaming and movie watching on a single charge.

When watching videos with roughly 20% brightness using the default gallery application (which takes advantage of Tegra 3’s fifth companion core) the battery will deplete about 15 percent per hour. This was based purely on non-HD .avi files so we freely admit 720p H.264 files could go through it faster. Based on our context scenario you could expect 6.5 hours of battery life.

We know this result is much longer than other sites have experienced, this is because of lower brightness settings and lower quality video content used.

Idle battery life has been highly touted by One X users and we have to disagree with them and we put it down to the battery figures not being reported correctly by Tegra 3’s fifth core. Over a 6.5 hour period with only 3G data enabled, Wi-Fi and auto-sync were disabled battery life fell 6%.

After a couple of minutes of light use (disabling alarms, scrolling through Gmail) the phone reported a 3% fall in battery life.

We don’t think this is bad, it just isn’t the amazing 2% battery loss overnight some users have been fantasized by (followed by 10% drops after five minutes of use). Of course, enabling flight mode you will only lose a few percentage points overnight but this doesn’t resemble a realistic usage scenario.

Looking at a more subdued usage scenario over the course of an entire day the One X lasted me until I slept every day – unless I did some intensive gaming for a respectable amount of time. 30 minutes of Grand Theft Auto 3 or Riptide GP will put a nice dent in battery life and will likely result in it not quite making it to the end of the night.

Typically my 17 hours of daily usage would involve an hour of music playback, 30 mins of ebook reading, 20 mins of video playback and up to an hour of other tasks including texting and some gaming. Other functions including auto-sync, 3G data and Wi-Fi were commonly used.

Under the above usage scenario, where I often ended the day at roughly 20% (less if I played games for more than 15 minutes) of juice remaining is acceptable but not impressive. We don’t consider battery life on the One X bad at all; mediocre would be the best word to describe it.

Heat

With a Tegra 3 chip manufactured on a 40nm process you’d be mistaken if you thought the phone would stay as cool as the surrounding winter weather. While I was on the older 1.26 firmware the rear of the phone around the camera sensor would heat up to a if not uncomfortable then certainly concerning temperature while gaming.

Fortunately the newer firmware updates (1.28 and 1.29) have since fixed most heat issues. This could have come at the cost of gaming performance if reports of HTC modifying the CPU governors in favour of battery life are anything to go by. However, heat is still present under some scenarios – I noticed it while stress testing the burst capture mode on the camera.

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