HTC One X vs Samsung Galaxy Note

Introduction:

The Samsung Galaxy Note bully is not just the record holder in screen size among high-end phones, it also comes with a baseball bat to crush the competition, in the form of a stylus. This actually puts it in a category of its own, but for the sake of the comparison with another giant - the HTC One X - we’ll pretend that size doesn’t matter.

Once you go big, you might never look back - valid as much for banks as for smartphones now. If you’d told us just two years ago that we will be comparing a phone with a 4.7” display to one with a 5.3-incher as if it’s no big deal, we’d be recommending a full mental checkup.

Yet here we are, comparing HTC’s high-end for the year - the One X - with the phone Samsung took a big risk with and won - the 5.3” Galaxy Note. We say won, since it has sold millions to date, backed by a lofty marketing campaign, whereas the HTC One X has only been around for a few weeks, but the Taiwanese already pledged that its One series trio will receive the best marketing attention the company’s ever done too.

So which one of these gigantic and expensive phones should tickle your fancy? Read on to find out...

Design:

The Samsung Galaxy Note is actually pretty well done in terms of size and weight, considering the display diagonal. It’s bearable if you have larger palms, but we won’t pretend that one-handed operation is viable on it with anything, including typing. The 5.3” size of the screen has other virtues, but the phone being comfortable to hold in not one of them. Thankfully the handset is less than 1mm thicker than the One X, so you can slip it in a back or even a baggy front pocket, but it’s way more suited for a purse or a handbag, which might explain why Samsung threw so much money to position it amongst women, and offering the Note in pink.

The HTC One X is no small potatoes with its 4.7” screen either, but the so-called “Infiniti Display” is made to seem as if falling off the sides, despite the normal amount of bezel around it, and the phone is made of unibody polycarbonate, making it compact, light and durable. This brought along a sealed battery compartment, lack of microSD card slot and a micro SIM card, though, and those are easily accessible on the Note by just prying off the thin back cover over the 2500mAh battery, which is a huge plus.

The S Pen stylus is what drew many to the Note, and it’s not only from nostalgia. Stashed in the lower left corner of the back, it is unfortunately not very easy to draw out quickly, but you get used to it with time. There is no arguing that it is more natural to scribble down an address, reminder or a shopping list quickly on the huge screen of the Note than to type it on even the most comfortable on-screen keyboard, but in reality if that’s the only use you find for the Note’s stylus, you’d better look elsewhere. Samsung touts drawing design sketches, directions, floorplans and whatnot with it, so if that’s your thing, the Note is certainly for you.

The One X actually has a pretty cool Notes app, which allows you to doodle with your finger on the screen, and if you master it enough, it could serve as a partial substitute to the stylus frenzy around the Note.

Displays:

You have to be really picky to tell the PenTile pixel matrix arrangement on the Note with its 1280x800 pixels of resolution. You've got to stuff the phone in your face and examine solid colors like the green in the battery icon, or the red in Contacts up close and personal to notice an alternative pixel arrangement.

Yet the 4.7” Super LCD2 HD display on the HTC One X is one of the best, if not the best LCD screen on a smartphone we’ve seen to date. It just doesn’t have a weak spot. Granted, at first look the saturated colors of the HD Super AMOLED display on the Note are more appealing to the eye, but the colors on the One X are vibrant enough, too. Its contrast is very good as well, even though the blacks still look greyish compared to the infinite contrast of the AMOLED screen, which in its turn has the typical cold colors those Samsung screens exhibit.

Amazingly enough, the viewing angles are almost on par on both phones, but the One X has a huge advantage in terms of display brightness, which is pretty important if you want to use the phone comfortably outdoors. The Galaxy Note is brighter than the Galaxy S II, for instance, but no match for the luminous screen on the One X.

Interface and Functionality:

HTC has the Sense 4.0 interface on the One X, whose features are richer, better integrated and uniformly looking compared to TouchWiz, as we find it on the Note. There is no need for 3rd party apps for most everyday functions, and even the holiday functions on the One X - the Car mode and HTC Locations offline navigation apps are the case in point. Of course, it helps that One X is running Android 4.0, while only some Notes have gotten the Ice Cream Sandwich update yet, but this should be remedied fairly soon.


The Note strikes back with its suite of doodling and note-taking apps, which prevent the stylus from being just a tool for better picking your nose while at a boring lecture. They allow the usual brush size and color adjustments, as well as easy mashups of text, voice notes, pictures and drawings. The thing is that you can easily strike the edge of the screen by just writing one or two words with the stylus - you have to choose a very thin brush size not to do it, and write carefully and relatively slow, which defeats the purpose of jotting things down quickly. You get used with the size of your canvas with time, but it’s no paper notebook, that’s for sure.



Processors:

We are comparing the international versions here, with dual-core Exynos vs quad-core Tegra 3 chips.
Samsung’s 1.4GHz Exynos powers the Galaxy Note with aplomb, and was the master of the Android universe before the 1.5GHz Tegra 3 quad or 28nm Snapdragon came around with the One X. Thus in everyday interaction with the interface or running apps on both handsets you won’t notice lag or hiccups. The quad-core version of the HTC One X will allow you to play games from NVIDIA’s Tegra Zone that are exclusive for the chip, but other than that it’s fair game, so let’s wage a score war for the benchmarking crowd. As you can see below, the One X easily beats the Note in pure numbers.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
HTC One X	4848	11024	47,4
Samsung Galaxy Note	3871	6409	40,9
HTC One X AT&T	4958	6863	57,7

Internet and Connectivity:

Both browsers feel very fluid while panning around and scrolling, while during zoom the Galaxy Note sometimes shows a glimpse of the checkered boxes until the huge screen gets filled. The One X, on the other hand, flickers for a split second at every zoom level as it reflows the text each time to fit the screen width, which you can turn off from settings if it annoys you.

The One X browser is brimful of easy to access functions, though, like a bottom navigation strip to quickly manage bookmarks and tabs and save pages for offline reading. There is a Read mode that clears the screen of ads and pics to only leave text in an article for easier reading, and you can toggle desktop view and Adobe Flash directly from the context menu key by the address bar.


Still, the monstrous display on the Galaxy Note trumps it all with the sheer real estate size, making a lot more of a page visible at any given time.


The phones are on par in terms of connectivity options with both in possession of 21Mbps HSDPA radios, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, A-GPS, DLNA with the respective apps to manage it, and the obligatory FM Radio with RDS. The HTC One X has NFC and the latest Bluetooth 4.0 version, though.

Camera:

The handsets sport 8MP cameras with LED flash, but the camera UI on the HTC One X is the more functional and easy to use app of the two. Thanks to the Android ICS camera API and the dedicated HTC ImageChip ISP we have a sub-second focus and capture time with it, as well as the ability to take pictures while shooting video.

There are plenty of shooting modes like Panorama, Smile Shot or Action Shot on both phones, but HTC has made them very easily accessible, plus it excels in the number of effects you can quickly apply to your photos – no less than 15 like Retro or Vignette.

In terms of picture quality, though, the HTC One X sometimes takes wrong white balance measurements, resulting in a purplish sky at points, while the Galaxy Note module is spot on. The Note's pictures are overall brighter and more saturated, too.

Indoors both handsets capture a lot of detail and keep noise in check, but there is a reddish overcast in the One X's photos, plus the LED flash on the Galaxy Note illuminated our test scene better.

When it comes to video capture, 1080p is the norm, but our One X unit produced 22-24 fps inside and out, whereas the Note was consistently shooting with 30fps outside, falling to 24fps inside.

HTC One X Sample Video:



Samsung Galaxy Note Sample Video:



HTC One X Indoor Sample Video:



Samsung Galaxy Note Indoor Sample Video:



The focus on the One X seemed to struggle in the beginning of the video, too, resulting in jumpy frames. The One X, on the other hand, had much less visible noise in the indoor video, but outside its white balance was a bit off with tricky lighting spots, unlike the Galaxy Note, which got it correct.

Multimedia:

The Beats Audio branding of the HTC One X should be giving it an edge in the sound department at first look, but in reality there are only regular headphones in the box, not a Beats or other high-quality pair, so you’d have to splurge extra to take true advantage of the red branding.


The Galaxy Note also has some tricks up its audio sleeve with a mock 5.1 channel surround sound in headset mode and a rich number of sound regimes and equalizer presets. Both music player interfaces do the job in terms of tunes categorization, but are nothing breathtaking as interface. The loudspeaker is stronger and cleaner on the Galaxy Note, compared to the ho-hum unit on the One X.


Video playback is becoming one of the most important factors to draw people towards huge screens, and since both phones play most formats, including DivX/Xvid up to 1080p definition, we’d have to give the video round to the Galaxy Note, on account of the gigantic display with peppy AMOLED colors, although the One X actually offers a great viewing experience as well.

Performance:

The HTC One X sports better call quality than the Galaxy Note, especially in terms of strength and clarity of the earpiece, not so much for the microphones. Yet again we have to mention - talking? With a Note? Not very comfortable, my friend.

The Galaxy Note more than compensates with a great battery life, though - the huge 2500mAh battery is rated for no less than 13 hours of talk time in 3G mode, and thanks to the frugal Exynos and the loose PenTile screen matrix, it clocks some of the best times we’ve seen in other tasks too, like video playback.

The HTC One X performs above average in battery life, too, as its 1800mAh battery is able to cross the 10 hours of talk time mark, but falls short in video playback time, for instance. We ran a little unscientific experiment who will reach 90% battery down from full charge while playing the same HD video on maximum brightness with the MX Player with all radios off.

The One X did that in 16 minutes, while the Galaxy Note battery meter in the video player was still showing 97% battery. When we switched over to the browser at full brightness, showing PhoneArena.com with its white background for 10 minutes at full brightness made the battery on the Note dip 5%, while the One X wasted double that to maintain the page image on its screen. Thus, despite the larger screen on the Note, its 2500mAh battery wants you to pay it the respect it deserves, compared to the One X.

Conclusion:

The Samsung Galaxy Note not only has a certain charm to it, but is very capable too. Charm because it is the sole member of a special 5”+ screen club, and offers a built-in stylus to doodle on it, certainly evoking nostalgia, even if it didn’t have the S Pen apps that make it useful. Capable, because it has all the prerequisites of a modern high-ender, like multicore processor and HD display, and at the same time it excels in photography and battery life.

It is not for everybody, though. You get used to the size and weight, but you just can’t slip it in a front pocket and forget about it, or talk comfortably with it to your ear for a long time, and that’s its main disadvantage. The HTC One X, on the other hand, is slim, light and compact, yet offers a huge 4.7” display, on which you can certainly do some decent doodling or notes with your finger, if you aim for it. It will bring you street cred, whereas the Galaxy Note brings with it geek cred, but it’s still a very cool phone in its own way, and certainly one to attract attention.

The Note is for people who need to jot down ideas, directions, schemes or floorplans on the go, and then shoot them out quickly for discussion, for example. It is also for those who don’t talk that much on their phones, but rather use them for browsing, reading and movie watching, as an increasing number of people do. Both camps can’t be the tight pant types either, or go out only with a wallet and car keys, as most men do. You need a coat pocket or a handbag for the Note, and that’s why Samsung is so heavily promoting it towards women.

The One X and the Galaxy Note are very close in terms of specs - both have big beautiful screens, fast processors and very good cameras. The HTC One X has the upper hand on the interface front with its Sense 4.0 overlay, well integrated with Android 4.0. The Note is about to get its Ice Cream Sandwich update, too, but now the goodies that come with ICS in the camera department, like zero shutter lag and simultaneous picture and video taking, are only present on the One X.

If you are eying the Galaxy Note, though, it would probably be hard to dissuade you into looking for anything else without a stylus, even a 4.7-incher like the One X, and you are likely to save about a benjamin on an off-contract Note to boot.

Software versions of the reviewed units: 1.29.401.7 (HTC One X) , 2.6.35.7-N7000XILB1-CL933381 (Samsung Galaxy Note)

HTC One X vs Samsung Galaxy Note: