I've got a shiny new HTC One X, and I'm really pleased with it!

I can check email and LJ on it really easily, and look things up on Wikipedia etc.

My old phone was an early Windows Mobile smartphone, so could theoretically use the internet, but in practice it was so much faff I never bothered. To check email, I'd have to navigate to the browser and launch it, wait for it to start up, go to the URL bar and bring up the keyboard, enter the URL for GMail, wait a very long time for the page to load, go to the username and password boxes and peck out my username and password, submit, and wait for the inbox page to load. On the new phone I just tap the email widget on the home screen and it shows me my email, because it's all integrated.

Of course this means the new phone has my login details for various things stored, so I feel the need to password-lock the phone, which I didn't bother with on the old phone. But it does face recognition, so I can unlock it just by looking at it, and it only falls back on a PIN if it fails to recognise me, which is about 1 time in 20 and improving; so almost no extra faff.

Its text entry interface is much more sensible than the old phone. It's better at automatically bringing up the keyboard when you're in a text box. The word-completion options it offers are often better, and they include possible corrections of typos as well as just straight completions. And there's a clear and quick way to indicate whether an unrecognised word should be added to the dictionary or not - as opposed to the old phone, which would add every single typo and hapax legomenon to the dictionary, as well as tokenisation failures like "(and", so that they swamped the real words.

I had a little difficulty at first getting my contacts across to it. They were in my old phone, and synced using MS ActiveSync to my PC, which stored them in an ancient Outlook 2000 which I didn't use for anything else. I downloaded HTC Sync Manager, which offered an option to import contacts from Outlook Express, but not Outlook. It looked like I was going to have to export them from Outlook to a CSV (which was a feature not included in the default Outlook installation, so I'd have to dig out the Office 2000 installation CD from somewhere), and then import the CSV via Google Contacts, which would mean either merging them with the 700-odd acquaintances of acquaintances I have in my GMail contacts and don't really want in my phone book, or creating a new one-off GMail account for importing them via, which feels very untidy. But in the end the copy of Outlook Express which came with Windows was able to read them from Outlook, and then HTC Sync Manager read them straight from there.

I have some good games, and an app for checking live bus departures (we do use buses sometimes; the inconvenience and travel sickness are outweighed by the joy of "Mummy an Bennany go on BUS!"). It's very easy to play music on the device, including in the background of other apps. The camera is very user-friendly, and if you take a photo and want to send it to someone there's a button for that, rather than exiting the camera and trawling through the MMS interface and trying to locate where in the filesystem your photo got saved. And when I get a phonecall it rings for a sensible length of time (the old one used to go to voicemail after two rings, and there was nothing I or the internet or Orange tech support could do about it). It does lots of sensible little things, like if you receive a call from a number not in your contacts, after you finish the call it asks you if you want to save the number to your contacts. And it has contact groups! I have a group of mum-friends whose social life is organised entirely by text message, and I used to have to enter all their names every time, but not any more! It also makes it really easy to search for things (with suggestions updating instantly with each keypress) and get to things you've done recently before, whether that's apps, contacts, or whatever.

The only negative things I've found are that there seems to be a slight bug in the calendar - it won't let me edit or delete single instances of recurring appointments (although the internet seems to think it should) - and the keyboard doesn't let you swipe upwards for capital letters like the WinMo one did. There are third-party calendar apps, though, so I'm considering installing one of those, and possibly a keyboard as well.

Tags: phone, reviews