HTC One X is The Eero Saarinen Phone

One X - Your Cloud(y) Phone?
The One X brings an improved OS and the powerful processors, tempting us to accelerate the migration to mobile computing for all things and in all places. The pain of general purpose computing is coming to the formerly closed world of mobile phone like a utopian wrecking ball.

Personal Cloud
I use Polkast and Dropbox to create a personal cloud with my PC’s and laptops. The mobile client allows me to access and create local copies or stream media content to the One X. I used the unofficial VLC build for Android and I began to use my phone as a digital media proxy for my PC. Same jack of all trades media player, same content, same massive data sizes. The onboard storage began to feel like more of limiting factor than the battery life, I felt completely caged, too much data, no room for it to breath. Again, this problem is not specific to the One X but the lack of an SD card slot exacerbates the problem. These phones have the appetite of dragon and the bowels of a Siamese cat.

Streaming Video
This device is nearly ideal for audio and video streaming. The audio quality is fantastic, I tested with FLAC on VLC and high-quality streams from Spotify. I tested with two sets of earbuds, a high-end in ear and conventional teardrop that came with my Sandisk Sansa. The volume was a bit light for the teardrops, excellent and powerful with the in-ear and I don’t think you are getting the full experience with anything less than in-ear or higher end over the ear phones. The 4G LTE data speeds certainly helped for high quality streaming with YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix. For testing I watched episodes of Dr. Who and HD movie trailers including the Hobbit on Youtube. Once they get the BBC iPlayer playing nicely with Android and ICS it would be well at home on this device. The screen is large and luminous making watching video enjoyable. I wouldn’t want it to be any smaller. Streaming simply works on the One X. While the powerful Krait cores probably have the chops to run Adobe’s Flash, the snazzy Chrome for Android Beta browser and Adobe won’t have any of it.

Creating a Photo Cloud With Integrated Dropbox
Cloud storage can be expansive and liberating if you can afford the rent. The One X embraces and integrates DropBox which I used to sync all of my photos ripping through 1GB of upstream bandwidth in a single day. The implications are far reaching and too expansive to properly address here. Be patient and you will hear more about the hair trigger camera in a moment. I began contemplating video and photo editing on the phone well beyond what Instagram will do for me. I use Photoshop and Pixlr on the PC, I began hunting for a fancy mobile photo editor and then fell asleep.The possibilities are exciting, the reality is it is hard to find a decent photo management and sharing application on Android. I resorted to Flickr, Google+ and of course the automated backup and sync to PC with DropBox.