Software
In order to evaluate the users’ experience
on One X+, you really need to look over and consider our full reviews about the
Sense 4 and Jelly Bean. Combining both of them together, you will have the
Sense 4+, which is relatively a lightweight and similarly friendly interface
just like before, but with some basic enhancements which mostly come from the
shift to Android 4.1
HTC
One X with Android 4.1
Google
Now
Imagine the all traditional home screens of
Android are lying along a horizontal line, and then Google Now will transform
that shape into a T. That tail is very meaningful as it increases the depth of
the operating system, in the form of a vertical line including the cards that
will appear whenever you hold the home button for seconds, and develops smartly
based on what Google can pick up from your personal life. During few days of
using the One X+, we had cards waiting for us whose contents are about the
local weather forecast (which is presented ore nicely than the weather utility
of HTC), bus routes, the local time, and even a particular card for a local
coffee shop which is very worth stopping by. However, it is not perfect. Some
cards have no use, even the working calendar card in which there is space
enough to record one single meeting (and it is always someone’s meeting from
the common calendar). More seriously, Google Now may bring the feeling of
hard-to-use, as if it was a starting version of a brand new OS that is growing
inside the old one – something is for adding more features but it is sure that
it also represents the special feature of Android in scaring some people off
with its complexity.
The
weather card presentation
Voice
search
It is a part of Google Now which is
relatively powerful. Unlike Siri of Apple and S Voice of Samsung, it can
process the voice recognition offline, which turns it to be so fast. It can
implement complex Google searches as well as processing basic personal
assistant tasks like starting a text message or setting the alarm clock or
creating notes to self. (Correction: At the beginning, we announced that you
would not be able to search for the music, which was saved locally, by voice,
but such searches are possible with the “listen” or “play” commands. Thanks,
jadeboy7).
Project
Butter
We cannot pretend that this really made a
huge difference, but of course it is still noticeable if you are really looking
out for it. It relates to the fact that Jelly Bean requires system resources
any time when you touch the screen for navigation, for example like animations,
transition and movements on the screen can be operated at the speed of 60 fps. Even
during the short time of trial, we recognized that the pull-down announcement
could move easily across the home screen, and now it feels so odd to go back to
the original One X.
A
new, aggregated gallery app
This is the addition that HTC helps
organizing pictures in the order of events and locations, which leads to more
convenient presentation – even though your photos are regularly captured near
your house. It also allows you to access into the photos which are
locally-stored and cloud-stored much faster by combining all of these icons
(Facebook, SkyDrive, etc) in one place. You can also access the photos
separately through each accompanied applications, but over time we have
recognized that it would be more logical to collect pictures this way.
The
One X+’s software and applications
HTC
Get Started
This is a special app that allows you to
use PC to improve the speed of the phone’s configuration, because you can type
your credentials on a large keyboard. We used it when setting Hotmail and
Dropbox, and in order to set one of the gallery photo as the background, but
that is all. The choice of accounts are also limited – we still spends lots of
time creating setting up Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Evernote and many other
things from the phone itself.
There are some other things that are not
very important to us, and therefore do not deserve to be placed in any of the
parts of the list.
Music
app of HTC
It works very similarly to Gallery in the
effort of combining the local content with the content in cloud. The problem
here is that you cannot create the playlist across different resources, which
make it useless – you can also access into each different resource via its own
special app.
