1. What Bluetooth earpiece has the best noise-cancellation
technology?
As you have probably noticed, smartphone technology moves even faster than it does on
desktop and laptop PCs. Things that were once dream features, like quad-core processors,
720p screens, and 8-megapixel cameras, are now commonplace. So it's becoming tougher
and tougher for each phone to stand above the rest. The HTC One X+ ($199.99) scores with
its quad-core processor and massive 64GB of internal storage, all for half the price of a
similarly-equipped Apple iPhone 5 . That, plus a slew of other improvements over last year's
version, help keep the HTC One X+ in the thick of the pack, if not quite on top of it. The HTC
One X+ measures 5.31 by 2.75 by 0.36 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.9 ounces. It feels like a
quality piece, with a soft touch black housing that's comfortable to hold. A standard-size
3.5mm headphone jack sits on top, while the micro USB port is on the side-an arrangement I
prefer, since it makes it easy to charge the handset on your desk while still using it. The 4.7-
inch, 720p (1,280-by-720) Super LCD 2 delivers a tight pixel density of 312ppi, which is
slightly less than you get with an iPhone 5, but in practice, you won't notice. Typing on the
oversized, HTC-modified onscreen keyboard was easy in both portrait and landscape modes.
As far as design goes, the Jitterbug Touch is identical to the Milano. It's short and squat, at
4.13 by 2.4 by 0.67 inches (HWD), and a bit heavy at 5.57 ounces. The back panel is made
of a matte gray soft-touch plastic and features the GreatCall name and logo in black beneath
an imprinted Kyocera logo. The display is a 3-inch, 320-by-240-pixel touch panel, which is
really starting to look lackluster. I dinged the Milano for this a year ago, and it only looks
worse now. Compared with the display on a standard feature phone it isn't terrible, but this is
about as low as you can go on a smartphone. The screen itself is too small, and the low
resolution makes everything look fuzzy or jagged. It becomes a little easier to see when you
crank up the brightness to the highest level, but the automatic setting is way too dark. The
Jitterbug Touch slides open to reveal a four-row QWERTY keyboard. It features keys that are
well-sized, raised, and backlit. It's easy to type on, though the phone itself is short, so there
isn't much room to stretch your thumbs out and really get going. Still, this phone will work just
fine if you want to send text messages or emails.
Inside is a 1.7GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 AP37 processor with 1GB DDR2 memory.
Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) is on board, along with NFC, HDMI via MHL, and Bluetooth 4.0. The
Tegra 3 is a nice bump over the One X's dual-core processor, but it's not state of the art for
quad-core chips-and it shows. Benchmark performance was surprisingly mixed; the One X+
is extremely fast with CPU-related tasks, but doesn't do all that well on 3D gaming tests.

2. Also, the One X+ scored slow on the Basemark Program Startup test, at least next to
comparable Samsung and LG Android quad-core phones; it looks like HTC Sense 4+, and
specifically the Contacts app, remains a bottleneck here. By all means, the One X+ is one of
the fastest handsets out there, but I expected more from the graphics hardware. Otherwise,
this is a fun handset to use. There are three customizable home screens you can swipe
between, and you can add more. You get free voice-enabled GPS directions with Google
Maps Navigation, and at the moment, it's way more accurate than what you get on iOS 6
devices. Google Play now contains over 700,000 apps, and the majority of them should work
fine on this handset, thanks to its increasingly standard 720p screen resolution, quad-core
processor, and Android 4.1 OS. There's some bloatware, as is typical for AT&T phones, but
it's not terrible.
An GP340 earpiece can imporve your sound experience, There's 54.8GB of storage
available on the 64GB handset I tested. There's no memory card slot, but with that kind of
storage, you should be fine for a while, and you can sync media via HTC's own software or
by dragging and dropping to the phone as a USB mass storage device. Beats Audio software
purportedly enhances the sound of your music on the One X+ when using wired earphones
or headphones. In practice, it boosts low frequencies and upper mids, and also cranks the
volume, which is cheating; in back-to-back comparisons, anything louder almost always
sounds better to the human ear. But once you back off the volume and make it equal to what
it was before, I found I preferred music with Beats Audio off. The enhanced headphone amp
sounded great through a pair of AKG K 350 earphones. Standalone videos played smoothly
in full screen mode, and looked resplendent on the HTC One X+'s display. I had no problem
playing any of my test files up to 1080p in resolution, except for DivX files, which wouldn't
play. Music refused to play wirelessly through Plantronics BackBeat Go Bluetooth
earphones, despite being paired properly. I'll chalk it up to a random incompatibility issue
with that set, because music did play fine (albeit in one ear) with the Plantronics Voyager
Legend headset, so A2DP streaming clearly works.
As we discovered in our testing for the Fastest Mobile Networks, Sprint has the slowest 3G
speeds of all the carriers we tested. That means that all 3G-only Sprint and Virgin phones are
running at some pretty challenged data speeds. Thankfully, 4G WiMAX support offers the
Galaxy S II a major boost. Running Ookla's Speedtest.net app, I saw average 4G download
speeds of 5Mbps in Manhattan, all the way up to an impressive 10Mbps. Uploads stayed at
1.4Mbps across the board. While WiMAX will get you much faster data speeds, keep in mind
that it isn't available everywhere the same way that 3G is. Make sure you're covered before
you buy.