HTC One X vs Sony Xperia S

Introduction:

The HTC One X arrived after the Sony Xperia S, so it should be better, right? Moreover, it sports either a quad-core Tegra 3 processor, or a dual-core Snapdragon S4, compared to last year's S3 in the Xperia S.

Still, what looked from the onset a battle between the camera modules, since both phones have multicore processors and HD displays – necessary prerequisites for any high-end smartphone these days – turned out to be a bit more than just that when we ran the phones through their paces.

Well, we are not going to tell you right away who wins – we upgraded the phones to their latest firmware versions and charged ahead, so read on for the full picture...

Design:

Both phones come in black or white, and are made of light and durable plastic, which is polycarbonate in the case of the One X - uniformly colored inside and out. There's no arguing that the HTC One X is a large 4.7” device, but the thickness of the Sony Xperia S also makes it feel that way, despite the smaller 4.3” screen. The Xperia S, however, is more narrow, so it is easier to operate it with one hand, whereas with the One X you often resort to your other palm for holding the phone while typing or navigating the interface.


The Xperia S has a more boxy, rugged good looks, enhanced by the illuminated strip at the bottom – a signature mark of Sony's NXT design line. The HTC One X, on the other hand, has a slightly curved, while amazingly slim and light chassis for a phone of this size. In the end, the handsets look very distinct and you'll be able to immediately recognize them in a crowd of smartphones, which means the design studios have reached their goal with both devices.

The Xperia S has an advantage in the camera department (no, it's not the 12MP resolution vs 8MP) with a dedicated shutter key, allowing you to immediately go from sleep mode to focus and shoot in two seconds or so, whereas you'd have to unlock the screen on the One X first. Speaking of buttons, the capacitive “dots” for navigation underneath the screen of the Xperia S are not very responsive and are hard to spot, whereas those on the One X are pretty sensitive, and the phone also integrates well the on-screen button navigation that comes with Android ICS in the default apps.

Both handsets sport non-removable batteries and 32GB of internal memory, with no way to add extra via a microSD card slot.

Displays:

The 4.7-incher on the HTC One X is one of the most gorgeous displays we've seen on a smartphone to date. It is way brighter than average, and with 1280x720 pixels of resolution on a regular RGB matrix, the pixel density is more than enough for well-defined text and polished small interface elements.

The 4.3” Reality Display on the Sony Xperia S gives way to the quality of the screen on the One X in brightness, contrast and viewing angles, which are better on HTC's phone. Sony's display is able to show quite vivid colors straight-on, too, but they get rather washed out with the viewing angle increase. Its black levels look more greyish than the blacks on the One X, making for a poorer contrast ratio, but the most important advantage of the One X's screen is its higher brightness, contributing to better sunlight visibility. Sony's handset sports extremely high 342ppi pixel density, though, since the same 1280x720 pixels are distributed across a smaller footprint, but with 312ppi the One X is no slouch either, so you are unlikely to notice the margin from a normal viewing distance.

Interface and Functionality:

Due to the presence of the latest Android 4.0 ICS on the HTC One X out of the box, and its simplified Sense 4.0, the phone's UI seems more uniform and functional than the Gingerbread overlay of the Xperia S. Granted, Sony's handset is getting the Ice Cream Sandwich update, and we don't know how the Timescape UI will be changed for it, but for now Sense 4.0 has the upper hand in integration and functionality.



We'll just mention apps like HTC Locations, with its free offline navigation, HTC Car and HTC Portable HotSpot, which make life with your smartphone easier, and are uniform with the interface design, including some dedicated widgets. Moreover, the HTC One X boots for five seconds on restart, as the device goes into some kind of hibernation mode when you turn it off, which was introduced with last year's HTC handsets.

Typing with one hand is easier on the Sony Xperia S, not only because of its narrow profile, which requires less thumb-stretching, but also since the buttons of the on-screen keyboard are more spaced out, thus making it a snap to hit the right one most of the time. The keys on the One X are bigger, but mostly in height, while the keyboard has one extra row of arrow keys at the bottom, which comes in  handy very often.




Processors:

We have the quad-core Tegra 3 with Mobile GeForce GPU in our international HTC One X unit, and a dual-core Snapdragon S3 in the Xperia S with Adreno 220 GPU, both clocked at 1.5GHz. In everyday tasks such as navigating the interface and running apps you just can't notice lag or stuttering on the phones, despite the core number difference, so we'd have to resort to synthetic benchmarking for the kicks.

These chips are made with 40/45nm silicon wafers generation, so no die shrink advantage here, as there would be with the 28/32nm process the S4 or the new Exynos are made with. Still, having more cores means better performance in actions that can be sped up by running more processes in parallel, like web browsing, video editing and 3D games, which partially explains why Tegra 3 excelled by more than 50% in benchmarks.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
HTC One X	4848	11024	47,4
Sony Xperia S	3206	6595	37,5

Internet and Connectivity:

The Xperia S browser is not as fluid as that on the One X when it comes to panning around or zooming in, due to the fact that it renders the page in real time, while the One X only renders as you lift your fingers off in the final zoom stage. With text reflow the roles are reversed, since the One X tries to fit the screen width at every zoom stage by default, resulting in a split second screen flicker as if in a flashback from a thriller movie, which is annoying.


As far as navigation, the browser on the Xperia S is pretty clean, with only the address bar shown that goes out of the way when scrolling down.

In the new One series, HTC introduces a bottom navigation bar, which appears when you scroll up, and gives you quick access to bookmarks and open tabs management, as well as the ability to save the page for offline view.


There is also a Read mode button, which strips the article of any distractions like ads and pictures, and only fits plain text in the screen width, like in Safari. This reading mode on the One X, the bottom navigational strip, and the ability to toggle Adobe Flash and desktop view with one tap of the context menu key right under your thumb, make it the more functional browser of the two.

The handsets sport plenty of connectivity options, but the One X has a faster HSDPA radio allowing  up to 21Mbps downloads, against the 14Mbps of the Xperia S. It also has Bluetooth 4.0 against the 2.1 version in Sony's phone. Xperia S strikes back with USB on-the-go functionality for hooking up flash drives directly to the phone, but the HTC One X compensates with its MHL port combining microUSB with HDMI functionality, whereas HDMI is a separate port on the Xperia S. Both handsets sport DLNA connectivity with dedicated apps to manage it, and NFC chips.

Camera:

As members of the sub-second camera club, the phones feature extremely fast shooting times, which are utterly seamless in the case of the HTC One X. The Xperia S has the upper hand when it comes to taking a picture as quickly as possible, since its physical shutter key wakes the phone directly into the camera app, focuses and shoots for about two seconds, while on the One X you have to power up the display and start the camera app from the lock screen first, making for a total of at least four.

Both handsets offer Panorama, smile shots, and plenty of additional shooting modes for most lighting situations, but the HTC One X has the upper hand in terms of effects you can apply to change the appearance of your photos, and offers slow motion video capture. The macro mode on the One X is very capricious in terms of focusing, though, while the Xperia S Auto Scene regime does a splendid job at figuring out where to focus most of the times, without even needing a close-up mode.



Despite the dedicated ImageChip HTC is using for the One X, its more streamlined and feature-rich interface, and the perks like taking photos while shooting videos, the Sony Xperia S still takes better pictures most of the times.

The 12MP shooter on the back of the Xperia S doesn't capture more detail than the 8MP one on the One X, but its white balance measurements in automatic mode are more accurate, and there is less amount of noise in the pic. Sony saturates more, but in the end the colors in its pictures are more pleasing to the eye, which is what matters to most users. There seems to be zealous noise suppression, which smears sharpness a bit in the Xperia S pictures, making leaves and branches, for example, appear less distinct than in the One X pictures, which, however, seem a tad overprocessed in terms of sharpness.

The phones perform pretty good indoors too, with sufficient detail and noise kept in check up to the darkest conditions in our test. The images from the HTC One X indoors are slightly sharper, but its white balance measurements bring a red overcast to the photos, while the Xperia S clings to the yellow a bit too much, but not nearly as pronounced as the One X's red.

As far as video capture, it is HTC's turn to oversaturate the colors in the 1080p footage from the One X, making it more eye-friendly. You can take pictures, or toggle the video light on the One X while filming, which are added bonuses.Its videos, however, skip frames and struggle to focus when panning around, especially in the beginning, unlike the consistent and smooth 30fps capture from the Sony Xperia S.

HTC One X Sample Video:



Sony Xperia S Sample Video:



HTC One X Indoor Sample Video:



Sony Xperia S Indoor Sample Video:



Multimedia:

The Xperia S has more streamlined and easy to use music player interface, and also more functional with the easy equalizer presets access. The HTC One X counters with its Beats Audio equalizer mode, which, however, still requires a good set of headphones for a full experience, and HTC only provides its run-of-the-mill pair in the box, so you have to chip in extra for Beats or another expensive set. In terms of loudspeakers, the Xperia S takes the cake, providing one of the most powerful and clean speakers we've encountered on a handset, as has become customary for the Xperia line.



As far as video playback, both handsets support DivX/Xvid codecs playback out of the box, but due to the higher contrast and bigger screen of the HTC One X, watching videos on it is a more pleasant experience.

Performance:

Call quality with the Xperia S is a bit better than on the One X, with loud and clear voices in the earpiece on our end, while the other side said we sounded very clean and with strong volume. The noise-canceling mics managed to weed out the ambient sounds while we were talking. The One X performs pretty well in terms of volume and clarity of the conversation, too, but is just a level below the earpiece and microphone(s) performance of the Xperia S.

As we mentioned, the loudspeaker on Sony's phone is very strong, too, meaning that it will be unlikely that you miss a call, while the One X unit is simply average.

The Xperia S has a 1750mAh battery against the 1800mAh juicer in the One X, and they are both non-swappable, meaning you'll have to make do with whatever battery life the manufacturer has in store with the handsets until you hit an outlet.

The 1750mAh battery is rated for the commendable 8 hours and 30 minutes talk time in 3G mode, 25 hours of music playback, and 6.5 hours of video playback. HTC doesn't quote official talk times, but some independent testing pegs it as very efficient in that regard, easily surpassing the 10-hour barrier in 3G mode.

We looped an HD clip at 75% brightness and the Xperia S battery went from hero to zero 10 minutes before it reached the 5-hour playback mark with Wi-Fi off, but connected to the HSPA+ network. If we had placed the brightness on 50%, the Xperia S would probably hit the six hours and thirty minutes video playback threshold it quotes for itself, which is about the norm for most high-ends. The HTC One X fared only a bit better on the same test, passing the 5-hour mark with five minutes.

Another feature in the Sony Xperia S is the improved lithium-polymer technology that allows the device to charge in half the time of a regular battery. This might affect the battery longevity down the road, but at least you'll have good times while it lasts.

Conclusion:

There is no arguing that the HTC One X feels more modern than the Sony Xperia S with its slim, light and curved profile, plus the uniform HTC Sense interface over the latest version of Android. The Xperia S, on the other hand, is quite boxy and heavy in comparison, while the Timescape UI over Android 2.3 is no match for the streamlined Sense 4.0. Its design, however, offers a few perks that set it apart, like the transparent illuminated strip at the bottom, and a dedicated camera key that makes it the fastest sleep-to-snap smartphone out there, not to mention the size makes it more suitable for one-handed operation.

As for the power under the hood – granted, the One X with its Tegra 3 quad or dual-core Snapdragon S4 is superior to the S3 on the Xperia S, but that would be insignificant to the normal user as long as the interface and apps run well, and they do on both phones. What would concern every user is battery life, though, and that is pretty comparable on both devices, with a slight advantage going to the One X.

Design is a matter of personal preference, but if HTC's focus groups are to be believed, Android users now prefer slim and light smartphones with big screens, which, of course, would give the design round to the One X. Both phones have sealed batteries, micro SIMs and no microSD slots.

So, to sum it up – the Xperia S makes more appealing pictures and video than the One X most of the time, and has a tad better call quality plus more potent loudspeaker, while the One X excels in chassis design, processor power and screen quality, as well as in the interface and software integration.

Thus it comes up to what's more important for you from the above mentioned features, and whether it justifies the $50-$100 price premium the unlocked HTC One X commands before the Sony Xperia S for the latest and greatest.

Software version of the reviewed units: 6.0.A.3.73 (Sony Xperia S), 1.29.401.7 (HTC One X)

HTC One X vs Sony Xperia S Video Comparison: