HTC One X+ vs Samsung Galaxy S III

Introduction

Some Android manufacturers, like Samsung, didn't touch their current high-end phones going into the holiday season, others like Sony or LG issued brand new devices in the fight, while HTC took a different approach, and upgraded its spring chicken HTC One X to the One X+ specs.

It is the latest newcomer to the grand Android kerfuffle, so it is only natural that we intend to throw it in a bar brawl with the Samsung Galaxy S III, a phone that sold 30 million units so far.

Both handsets have large screens and quad-core silicon inside, as well as 8 MP cameras on the back, but the devil is in the details, so which one will suit you better? Read on to find out...

Design

Both phones are thin and light, with curved designs and rounded edges, making them very ergonomic to hold, to the extent that 4.7”/4.8” screens allow. The Galaxy S III feels a tad thinner in the palm, but the One X+ provides for a firmer grip with its soft-touch finish on the back.


The S III doesn't sport a unibody design, so you can pry off the paper thin back cover at any time, and swap the memory card or the battery. The One X+ is shut tight, but comes with four times the 16 GB storage capacity of a basic S III.

The Galaxy S III sports a physical home key on a pretty thin lower bezel, which is comfortable to operate, and preferable for some people before the capacitive key found on the One X+. Most side and front buttons, physical or not, are easy to feel and responsive on the phones, with the exception of the volume rocker on the One X+, which is too flush with the surface, and with too shallow of a feedback, so it takes getting used to.


Displays

We have the so-called Infinity Display on the One X+, hinting at the seamless transition of its bezel to the sides of the unibody chassis – a very good 4.7” S-LCD 2 screen with 1280x720 resolution, and 312ppi pixel density. The S III sports the same resolution, but on a 4.8” HD Super AMOLED display with 306 ppi density.

The screen experiences are pretty different, though, and we don't mean the RGB pixel matrix arrangement of the X+, versus the PenTile one in the S III, which could only be told if you examine solid colors like green and red very closely for the “screen door” looks.

What we mean is that the LCD unit on the One X+ is much brighter than the AMOLED panel on the S III. Granted, Samsung has achieved very low reflectance ratio for its display, but the visibility outside still goes to the One X+, as it has pretty low reflection as well, but is much more radiant.

Indoors the Galaxy S III display exhibits some typical for AMOLED flaws, like cold, oversaturated colors. The Galaxy S III covers much wider color gamut than the NTSC standard, and it makes for gaudy colors in comparison with the One X+. Its calibration is all over the place, too, often exhibiting various color overcasts. If those don't bother you, however (and the vivid, eye-popping colors appeal to many), you'd appreciate the deeper blacks of the AMOLED display, in comparison with the One X+.

Interface and functionality

HTC hasn't gotten much in the way of Android Jelly Bean with its Sense 4+ interface edition, leaving Google do its natural recognition thing with Voice Search, whereas Samsung has it as an option to its inferior S Voice service.

Now that Jelly Bean's Project Butter 60fps interface fluidity has disposed of any perceived lag in the performance feel and transitional animations of both Android handsets, things boil down to looks and functionality.

The Sense UI seems more polished and uniform across all of its levels, compared to the rather squarish icons and more ragtag feel of the Nature UX on the Galaxy S III, but when it comes to new functions Samsung takes the cake.

Things like the Smart Stay feature that keeps the screen on by recognizing you are looking at it, the Pop Up Play function that allows you watch video while doing something else, or the S Beam feature to swap files with fellow Samsungians might not be everyday staples, but come pretty handy at times. A most useful feature, like the dual-window mode allowing you to split the screen and operate two apps at once, is also coming to the handset, and this one we'd imagine to be helpful on a daily basis.

Sense 4+ also has its thoughtful touches, though, like going directly into the camera app when you unlock the screen, and have been taking pictures before it went to sleep or was locked. The personalization options like themes, skins and widgets of HTC's interface are also vast compared to Nature UX, where your main option to customize is change the wallpaper. Another handy option we find in the gallery, which is now a starting point not only for the pictures and videos stored internally, but also for the albums you have uploaded onto Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox or SkyDrive, not only Picasa.

The keys on the One X+ virtual keyboard are taller compared to the spaced-out ones of the S III, but it feels more compact now that the arrow keys are off by default. Both phones offer handy Swype-like input method out of the box, which is a bit easier to use on the One X+ thanks to the flashy yellow trail on a dark grey background your finger leaves behind, and the trace color can even be customized further.

Processor and memory

The 1.7 GHz quad-core Tegra 3 AP37 in the One X+ compares very favorably to or even tops in benchmarks the 1.4 GHz quad-core Exynos 4412 in the Galaxy S III, despite its older 40nm production method. When it comes to the US versions of the Galaxy S III, which are powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, the upgraded Tegra 3 in the One X+ excels even further. The downside is that it is not as power efficient and heats up the phone quite a bit under heavy load.

Both chips make sure you have an Android powerhouse in your hands, and can deal with any app or mobile game thrown at them easily, with some graphics advantage going to the GPU in Exynos. NVIDIA has its Tegra Zone, however, which offers exclusive game titles for Android phones with its mobile processors.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
HTC One X+	7244	13439	56,7
Samsung Galaxy S III	5335	12016	58,6

The handsets come with 1 GB of RAM, but HTC allows you to run only eight apps at once, and will automatically close the oldest when you open more, which can be a nuisance if you start a lot in a short time, and want to go back to where you left the first ones. The S III, on the other hand, lets a much wider task list run unabated at all times, with rarely you or your phone having to chuck any due to lack of resources.

When it comes to the all-important internal memory, the HTC One X+ wins hands down, thanks to its 64 GB of the good stuff supplied. The basic version of the Galaxy S III ships with 16 GB, and you can easily add more via a memory card to even things out, but still that huge out of the box storage on the One X+ is a major drooling point.

Internet and connectivity

Both Samsung and HTC use default browsers of their own, though HTC supplies Chrome as an alternative to its Sense one. Both stock browsers do an excellent job at zooming, scrolling, panning around, and reflowing text, with a slight fluidity advantage going to the Galaxy S III.



The HTC browser is more versatile and easy to use, however, despite the annoying habit to reload your tabs each time you switch between them. It offers full Adobe Flash support, which can be easily turned on and off from the context menu, whereas if you come across a page you need Flash with the Jelly Bean-ed S III, tough luck.



Bookmarking or saving pages for later reading is also easier in HTC's browser, due to the handy bar at the bottom that appears when you scroll up towards the address field. When we add the one-tap Read mode of the One X+, which strips an article of ads and pics, leaving only text for no-distraction reading, we can declare the HTC browsing experience a winner.

Both phones offer 100 Mbits LTE versions on carriers that have such networks, and HSPA+ connectivity for the rest, with the One X+ offering 42 Mbit/s theoretical speeds, compared to the 21 Mbit/s of the Galaxy S III.

As far as the other radios are concerned, we get the works with both – Wi-Fi, Blueooth 4.0, A-GPS, FM Radio, DLNA and NFC. The two devices have an MHL port for wired connectivity, and the One X+ now supports USB OTG, too, for hooking up flash drives and other paraphernalia, just like the S III.

Camera

We've got 8 MP BSI sensors with adjacent LED flash units on both phones, offering zero shutter lag, continuous shot, Panorama, HDR, low light and Macro modes.

The interfaces are quite different, however, and the HTC Sense one comes out on top in terms of user-friendliness, whereas you can get buried under the menus and submenus of the Galaxy S III, unless you create shortcuts on the side. HTC One X+ allows you to take pictures or shoot video from one and the same start screen, and the menu settings for both functions are integrated in one. It also offers a nice blue orb above the virtual shutter keys, that lets you apply an abundance of color effects to your pictures and videos easily.




When we come down to photo quality, however, the Galaxy S III wins, as the HTC One X+ often botches the white balance measurement, resulting in pictures with purple overcast. They also look very overprocessed and with less detail, compared to the clean, more natural colors of the pics from the Galaxy S III, which manages to keep plenty of detail with low noise levels, even inside.

Video capture runs at 1080 with 30fps outside for both devices, but the framerate from the HTC One X+ is skippy and with artifacts at times, while the rate drops to 22fps, and the phone has troubles with jumpy autofocus indoors. The Galaxy S III, in contrast, offers fluid, natural-looking videos both inside and outdoors.

HTC One X+ Sample Video:

Multimedia

The music player interfaces offer song categorization and album art, as usual, but differ in terms of functionality. The one on the One X+ allows you to aggregate access to tunes in the internal storage with the ones you have in the 7Digital locker or TuneIn Radio, but you can't create mixed playlists.

The Galaxy S III also offers its Music Hub, powered by 7Digital, but as a separate app. It does offer an abundance of sound effects and equalizer presets, though, whereas HTC only has the Beats Audio mode when you plug in a headset. The difference in sound is quite noticeable then, as the volume ramps up significantly, and the bass is more pronounced.

In terms of loudspeakers, the phones offer units with pretty decent strength and clean sounds, with the One X+ sounding a tad fuller than the Galaxy S III.

When it comes to video playback, the S III plays whatever you throw at it, while for 1080 DivX/Xvid videos you'd have to download a player off of the Play Store on the One X+. Samsung's phone also offers the Pop Up Play function, allowing you to pin the player in a window on top of everything else you might be doing underneath, so you can watch and chat comments at once, for instance. With the AMOLED display you can set a few screen presets, including a Movie mode, which, coupled with the deep blacks and flashy colors characteristic for this screen technology, make for a more enjoyable video experience.

Call quality

The Galaxy S III offers stellar sound both in the earpiece and through its microphones for the other end, whereas voices coming from the One X+ came out slightly hissing on the other end. Both phones do a great job at weeding out ambient sounds while you talk, thanks to the noise-canceling mics.

Battery

The devices are equipped with 2, 100 mAh battery units capacity, which is sorely needed by their large screens and fast processors. The One X+ doesn't have official talk times out yet, HTC only promised “up to 50% more talk time compared to the One X”, while we have the excellent 11.6 hours of talk time in 3G mode with the S III.

In battery life while browsing the One X+ has an advantage before the Galaxy S III, whereas Samsung's phone lasts longer during video playback, so things even out in the end with mixed usage.

Conclusion

HTC managed to pull off a very capable contender for the holiday Android battles by upgrading its spring chicken flagship where it counts, gracing it with the whopping 64 GB of storage at launch.

The Galaxy S III and the One X+ are very comparable devices now in processing might, and we would even give the chassis, display and storage rounds to the One X+. Chassis since the arched unibody with soft-touch finish is more ergonomic to grip and hold, display because of the better outdoor visibility, and storage - yeah, the 64 GB.

The Galaxy S III earns some points before the One X+ in the above areas, though - for usage flexibility due to its non-unibody chassis, and in display for the deep blacks. Where it definitely excels before the One X+ is the camera unit, both in pictures and video quality, and especially while shooting indoor footage.

In terms of software, HTC Sense 4+ is more uniform and its browser much more useful with full Adobe Flash support and a Read mode, whereas Nature UX is more functional with Smart Stay, Pop Up Play, and the upcoming multi-window mode.

Ultimately it all depends on what price you find those two handsets at, and what priorities you have as a user.

HTC One X+ vs Samsung Galaxy S III: