The HTC One X is undergoing some kind of identity crisis in the US. While the global variant comes with a Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC, the AT&T version of the phone — renamed as the HTC One XL – will have to make do with a Snapdragon S4 processor. This ultimately means you can no longer gloat that your phone touts a quad-core processor. But is this necessarily a bad thing?
Not really. Various benchmark results have shown that the Snapdragon S4 could actually hold its own against Nvidia Tegra 3. In fact, our own Lucian Armasu has written in lengthy detail how the S4, despite its couple of cores deficiency, can handily beat the quad-core Tegra 3 at most functions, save for the browsing and the graphics test.
If that fails to convince you, just take a look at the latest results of benchmarks ran using the actual device. In both the Quadrant and Vellamo benchmark tests, the HTC One XL put other quad-core Tegra 3 touting devices to shame.
The Quadrant score of HTC One XL is more than double the score achieved by the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. In the Vellamo test, which measures the browser performance, the HTC One XL bested the Asus Transformer Prime and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Note that the HTC One XL used for the test was not even a final version. So, with optimized software, we can expect even better speeds.
The HTC One XL on AT&T is expected to hit the market in May. Aside from the change of processor, the AT&T version won’t ship with a microSD card slot and a removable battery. You’ll also only get 16GB of internal storage, as opposed to the 32GB in the global model. If you simply must have the quad-core variant of HTC One X, you can import the unlocked version of the phone and use it on AT&T. Just don’t expect any LTE speed.
