Now that smartphones are sprouting in the electronics market like wild mushrooms, it becomes imperative for consumers to review and evaluate each product that comes their way.

With the launch of the 4G-attuned HTC One XL, the world of smartphones got a new landscape. As an up-to-date version of HTC One, it seems identical to it at first glance. It likewise sports a polycarbonate body which is sleek and thin. Unlike HTC One, however, this new device is faster and has a longer battery life. When HTC One was introduced, its first-time users were appalled by its battery life which did not last very long and was not suitable for frequent travels. This vulnerability is now cured by HTC One XL.

However, Samsung’s 4G devices are still faster by two notches than HTC One XL, especially since Samsung is updating to Android 4.1 version. Even so, HTC One XL is supported by a chipset similar to that of Nokia Lumia 920 which is backed by Windows Phone 8. Despite this, the latter is quicker when it comes to web browsing. The reason for the difference is their dissimilar operating systems. In the United Kingdom, the original version of HTC One X utilized a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset. Meanwhile, in the United States where 4G was already offered on the market, the model being promoted used a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon chipset. The chipset was made to support LTE frequencies; hence this was the one that HTC had chosen. If you think about it, the shift from quad-core to dual-core appears to be a backward movement on innovation. This is not accurate because the Snapdragon utilizes a CPU core by Qualcomm’s Krait, which is more sophisticated than the Cortex A9 cores in Tegra 3. This is proven by a SunSpider Javascript score of just 1,153ms, three-fold faster than Tegra 3 gadgets. This fact is corroborated by Quadrant benchmark suite which pegged its speed score at 5,060. In terms of 3D performance, it registered a score of 22fps using the Egypt HD test.

Since HTC One XL is a 4G handset, both the processor and the internet connection are fast. Download and upload speeds are at around 20Mbit/s up and 40Mbit/s down. Its disadvantage, however, is that HTC One XL is still stuck with the old Android 4.0.4 version, instead of the more sophisticated Android 4.1 which Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE uses.