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  • I've reverted from the HTC One X to my Galaxy Nexus.

    The One X is sublime. It's fast, smooth and the screen is unsurpassed by any other smart phone of any type (iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone included).

    However... there are 2 issues that bother me:
    1) Battery life struggles to make it through a long day of reasonably heavy use.
    2) Calls are dropped too often.

    The call dropping thing is a big concern for me. I make very few calls, but when I do they are important. It's just not on to have calls drop as often as they have done. And I have a stack of phones here, and I can easily compare the reception quality on the same SIM across different devices. The HTC One X fares slightly worse than all of the other devices (iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, HTC Nexus One) in terms of signal reception, approximately 15 decibels weaker signal, whereas all of the other phones are within 5 decibels of each other (with the iPhone being weakest, and the Galaxy Nexus being strongest).

    So calls are important enough for me to have concern.

    Then there is the battery. Since coming off of a Blackberry years ago I have never been happy with other smartphone battery life. A Blackberry easily gets a few solid days of really heavy use and constantly running background processes. The battery life set the standard, it was possible to have a weekend away, leaving Friday evening, and for the phone to be on it's last legs just as you arrive home late Sunday.

    Given that I've always been frustrated with iPhone and Android battery life, I could tolerate it so long as the phone never quite died, and always had just enough juice in the bank to do just a little bit more if needed. The HTC One X is the first phone I've had in which 12 hours of heavy use away from the charger seems to be a real struggle for it. At 16 hours it's dead, pretty consistently. Bear in mind I've got a vanilla Android ICS on it, and no background processes aside from Latitude (which I've had running on every phone except iPhone for the last 5 years, so my battery expectations include it running constantly). The screen is the biggest suck of power. I apparently use the phone too much.

    Between the two, it's turned the phone from sublime piece of technology which is a joy to use, into a beautiful device that I'm cautious about using. And I don't want a phone that I avoid using, just to ensure the battery lasts or that a phonecall works.

    Switching back to the Galaxy Nexus, it's noticeably slower (the extra CPU cores int he HTC One X really show), and the screen isn't as glorious. But it's OK. I'm happy to accept the slight grain on the dimmer screen, and to not scroll so instantaneously... because now the phone comfortably makes it through the day with juice to spare and no dropped calls.

    At the end of the day, I want a phone to work well more than I want the latest bling. I knew when getting the upgrade that I didn't actually need or want to leave the Galaxy Nexus, it's a lovely phone that works really well. Now a fortnight on the HTC One X shows me how good the future will be when they manage to get the battery life to last and improve the basic telephony... but until then I'm really happy where I am.

    If people were to ask what phone to get: I'd still say the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

    I'll probably wait until another Nexus appears at the end of the year before taking the upgrade on the other contract I have.

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