HTC Desire X review: Needs and wants

Android ICS with the latest Sense

The HTC Desire X comes with Android 4.0.4 and Sense 4.0. In spite of not being the latest Android release, it still comes as quite an achievement, considering the majority of the Desire X competitors are still stuck with Gingerbread. We've seen this particular combo of ICS and Sense several times already on the HTC One series phones, but it's still interesting to see it perform on a much more affordable device like the Desire X.

Here's a video demo of the UI in action:

The user interface is trimmed down just like it was on the HTC Desire V. What's missing compared to the One X and the One S is Leap View. The Recent Apps interface is the vanilla ICS layout. The lockscreen shortcuts can be customized but you'll need to change the four docked icons on the homescreen - by default you get Phone, Mail, Messages and Camera. The lockscreen is also active, meaning you can choose from People, Photo album, Productivity lockscreen and more.

The lockscreen is quite efficient. There are the usual four shortcuts and a ring at the bottom. You can either drag the ring towards the center of the screen to unlock the phone, or any of the shortcuts into the ring to unlock the phone and launch the corresponding app.

The Sense 4.1 lockscreen

The number of homescreens is locked at five, like on the Desire V, you cannot add or remove any. There is no leap view either. You get an auto-hiding indicator of which screen you're on and a brand new dock with five shortcuts - the middle one is locked to the app drawer, while the other four can be customized as you please (you can even put a folder there, if four shortcuts isn't enough).

Some of the homescreen sections

Sense offers one of the most full-featured customization suites around. The proprietary Scenes interface lets you choose from various custom homescreen setups, which provide new wallpaper and widget sets that can be further customized to suit your needs. This version of Sense only comes with one preloaded, but hitting the 'Get More' button on the upper right will take you to the HTC Hub where you can download additional Scenes.

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds, but they're a handy feature if you want to quickly change your phone's functionality, such as going from work to home.

The HTC Sense has another customization option called Skins. Every skin changes the look and feel of most of the onscreen buttons, application screens, option menus, and other items. They also come with unique wallpaper each and use different colors for various UI elements. The Desire X comes with a total of two preloaded skins, although like with Scenes, it's easy to get more.

Setting a Skin from the Personalization menu

The main menu has the typical grid layout, which is composed of vertical pages with shortcuts sorted alphabetically. You can set different sorting options - alphabetical, most recent or oldest - but you can't rearrange them manually. There are Search and Play Store shortcuts along with a menu for some options.

The app drawer in Sense 4.1

The App Drawer uses a tabbed layout similar to different Sense elements (such as the phonebook). There are three tabs available at the bottom - All apps, Frequent and Downloads. You can rearrange them or remove Frequent and Downloads if you don't need them.

You can remove the tabs along the bottom which you don't need

The Personalize app also has Sound customizations - you can pick a Sound set or individual ringtone, notification and alarm sounds.

The Personalize menu does Sound too

Adding widgets to the homescreen is done in a similar fashion to Honeycomb and is one of the less successful changes since Sense went ICS.

You press and hold on the homescreen and everything zooms out so that the homescreen panes are visible as thumbnails on the top row of the screen. You tap a homescreen to select it and then select a widget to add to it (or you can just drag the widget).

Adding a widget to the homescreen

The main problem here is with how widgets are selected - they are shown four at a time and there's a lot of scrolling involved. Widgets are available in multiple versions - usually differing in size, but also functionality - and they're all dumped into the list, so you're scrolling through a lot of duplicates.

There's a search option to speed things along or you can choose a widget from the dropdown menu and then select which size you like, but that still feels like an extra step.

The old setup of picking a widget and then adjusting its size (if applicable) seemed simpler.

Editing the homescreen is different from vanilla Android. You can tap and hold on a widget and you can drag across homescreen panes. While you're dragging a widget (or shortcut or whatever), two fields appear at the top of the screen - Edit and Remove. You can drop the widget on either one to perform the corresponding action.

When it is highlighted, Edit can be used to modify the settings of a widget - e.g. choose a different folder for the Photo Frame album or even choose a different version of the Clock widget. This saves you the trouble of first deleting a widget and then putting it on the screen again to choose a different version, setting and so on.

Dragging a widget gives you options

The notification area no longer has the list of recent apps - it's reserved for notifications only. No more tabs and toggles either, although you get a Settings shortcut here if you need to power something on or off. There's also a Clear button to dismiss all notification or you can swipe them off one by one.

The notification area

Pressing the task switcher button on any screen displays a list of all your recently accessed apps, which you can remove with a swipe to the left or right. This is really just a quick way to access apps you've used recently, as swiping away doesn't kill them.

To actually terminate a running app, you have to close it via the traditional task manager we've become familiar with from Gingerbread. It's simple to use - each running app is listed with an indication of how much RAM it's using (no CPU usage reading though). You can terminate apps one by one and there's a Stop All button too.

The standard task switcher • The task manager

Synthetic benchmarks

The HTC Desire X is powered by a Snapdraggon chipset, featuring two 1 GHz Cortex-A5 CPU cores and the Adreno 203 GPU. The smartphone also offers 768 MB worth of RAM, all of which adds up to a pretty good combination for this price range.

BenchmarkPi focuses on the CPU's calculative performance. Given that it has no love for multi-core processors, you would expect the Desire X to fail quite miserably here, but it actually produced a pretty decent score.

BenchmarkPi

Lower is better

• Sony Xperia go
  543
• Sony Xperia sola
  551
• HTC Desire X
  639
• LG Optimus L7
  773
• Sony Xperia tipo
  987
• Sony Xperia miro
  1037
• Samsung Galaxy Ace Plus
  1037

AnTuTu gives the smartphone an all-round grade for processing (calculative and graphic, memory speed, SD card writing, etc). Here the Desire X came surprisingly close to the Galaxy S III mini, which should have a larger performance edge in theory.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

• Motorola RARZ i XT890
  6150
• Samsung Galaxy S III mini
  5823
• HTC Desire X
  5177
• Sony miro
  2916

Yet another processing benchmark, Linpack shows the Desire X to be a capable performer.

Linpack

Higher is better

• HTC Desire X
  74.79
• Sony Xperia sola
  68.1
• Samsung Galaxy S Advance
  64.74
• HTC Desire V
  34.4
• HTC One V
  34.4

SunSpider and BrowsermMark test the Desire X browsing performance. The first one is a pure Javascript benchmark, while the second one ads a dash of HTML 5 to the mix.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• HTC Desire X
  2259
• HTC Desire V
  3299
• Sony Xperia tipo
  3531
• Sony Xperia miro
  3532
• LG Optimus L7
  3661
• HTC Sensation XE
  4404
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  5911
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  9061
• HTC Explorer
  10784
• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  11966
• Samsung Galaxy Pocket
  12105

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• HTC Desire X
  66147
• LG Optimus L7
  61470
• Sony Xperia tipo
  54938
• Sony Xperia miro
  52037
• HTC Desire V
  42342
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  33994
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  27844
• HTC Explorer
  22464
• Samsung Galaxy Pocket
  20338
• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  19634

Finally the Adreno 203 GPU gets a stress test in NenaMark 2. It got a promising 35.4 frames per second, which means that most light to moderately heavy games should run trouble-free on the device.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• HTC Desire X
  35.4
• HTC Sensation XE
  23.0
• LG Optimus L7
  19.3
• Sony Xperia miro
  16.0
• Sony Xperia tipo
  15.9
• Samsung Galaxy mini 2
  15.4
• HTC Explorer
  15.1
• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  13.2
• Samsung Galaxy Pocket
  12.9
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  12.0

In conclusion the Desire X did slightly better than its specs sheet suggest. It's obviously not a benchmark champion, but the dual-core chipset does a solid job of making the Sense 4 UI run smoothly over Ice Cream Sandwich, which is quite good for a mid-range droid. The occasional hiccup was noticeable, but nothing too damaging to the user experience.