HTC One VX review

A quirky but above average mid-range smartphone

HTC One VX
HTC One VX

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Contacts

HTC One VX review

Names have been changed to protect the innocent

While we've dissed some of HTC's aesthetic choices with Sense UI, it's top-notch as far as keeping your rolodex neat (Remember those? Nope, neither do we).

This is Android 4.0: Ice Cream Sandwich, so you can easily import your contacts from standard social sources like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, or Outlook. Sense UI then does the grunt work of merging your friend's info from all those different sources. Soon everyone you know has a neat little entry stamped with a profile picture. Annoying duplicate contacts are a rare occurrence.

You can further sort your friends into groups. Friends, family and co-workers are there to start, and you can create your own custom lists as well. It's then easy to send a mass text or email to that group.

A log of imported contacts is also kept, making it easy to track changes and revert back to an older version of your address book, should you create some sort of disaster.

It's very nicely executed. We'd say it's one of our favorite things on the software side of HTC phones, and certainly a standout feature of Sense UI.

Calling

HTC One VX review

So the One VX runs a tight ship as far as address books go, but what about making regular old phone calls? We're happy to say it does that just as simply and neatly.

The One VX is exclusive to AT&T, and we tested the phone in the San Francisco Bay Area and while traveling in the Chicagoland area. Throughout that time, we never had a single dropped call, and the only time when service became unavailable was when traveling via underground train.

Back when it was the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, AT&T caught a lot of flack for having an unreliable network. Dropped calls and low service areas were common, but a lot has changed since the carrier went 4G LTE.

Our experience with call service on the One VX was impeccable. Calls were easy to hear and always connected. The quality of the voice over the line was tinny, but there was no static, and we never had trouble understanding callers.

The phone's speaker was easy to hear without maxing out the volume, and the microphone did an excellent job of removing background noise. We made several calls standing near busy intersections, and our friends on the line heard a minimal amount of traffic noise.