HTC Desire X review

While HTC’s Desire brand was originally attached to premium smartphones, these days Desire-branded handsets have a distinctly mid-range feel. The Desire X inhabits the crowded sub-£200 SIM-free market, so we were interested to see how it would stand out.

First impressions are, thankfully, good. The Desire X is a smart phone. It’s slim and light with a pleasing curved shape, and our review model was the classy white and silver version. We didn’t like bending and prying the rear cover off to fit the SIM card and microSD, but it’s not like you have to open your phone very often.

We were impressed with the Desire X’s screen. It’s a 4in model with an 800×480 resolution, and the screen’s high contrast makes the phone pleasant to use. HTC has modified Android heavily with its Sense interface, and the customisations tend to polarise opinion. Comparing the Desire X side-by-side with a phone running a stock version of Android 4.0, we felt Sense added to the experience. The replacement icons are big, colourful and detailed, and the main apps screen has buttons to show all your apps or filter them by most frequently used or just those you have installed yourself. The phone has around 950MB free to install apps, and if you add a microSD card you can use a dedicated app to move programs to the memory card and free up internal storage.

Adding a widget to the Desire X

It’s also easy to add Widgets, Apps or Shortcuts to various functions to one of your homescreens; a long press on a spare bit of a homescreen brings up a menu with a list of items you can add, along with thumbnails of your homescreens at the top so you can see where there’s room. A 1GHz dual-core processor is standard for a mid-range smartphone, and this is plenty to run Android 4.0 smoothly. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 2077ms, which is what we expect from this kind of processor, and while this isn’t a huge score we found the phone fine for normal web browsing.