So many manufacturers have been pumping out dual-core phones lately, such as the Samsung Galaxy SII, the LG Optimus 2X and the Motorola Atrix. It didn’t take HTC too long to figure out that dual-core phones are what consumers want right now, thus the Sensation was born.

I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely impressed with the HTC Sensation from the little hands on time I got at the HTC Event. Although on paper the device was a lot different than the HTC Desire HD, it didn’t feel like a big change but we’ll discuss that later on in the review.

I’ll reserve my full judgment until the end and as with all our reviews, I’ll be talking about the bad and the good and give you a final conclusion.

Jump to:

Design Screen Hardware Software Camera  Browser  Benchmarking Battery Hackability Conclusion

Design 

The HTC Sensation is roughly the same size as the HTC Desire HD, it’s slightly taller but slimmer and lighter at the same time, weighing in at 149g, which is 15g lighter than the Desire HD. The dimensions of the device are: 126.1 x 65.4 x 11.3 mm compared to that of the Desire HD which is 123 x 68 x11.8 mm. The Sensation has very curved edges and a rounder back which make it feel that much more comfortable to hold than a Desire HD. From a certain distance the device also looks similar to the HTC Desire S in the sense that it’s also using three shades of grey in the back.

Another interesting design to the Sensation is its concave screen, it makes the device look unique and gives it that extra cool factor, of course it does have its practical uses as well. The screen curves inward leaving the bezel of the phone slighly protruding from the glass, so you can place the phone flat down on its face without worrying about scratching the screen.

Screen

The Sensation features a 4.3 inch, Super LCD, qHD 960 x 540 pixels screen compared to that of the Desire HD which features a WVGA 800 x 480 screen. qHD or quarter HD screens are pretty much the highest resolution you can find on an Android device at the time of writing this review. Having a higher resolution is always a good thing, as you can see in the images below, you get to see more within an application thus making use of that 4.3 inch real estate. The qHD screen offers much greater pixel density over WVGA screens and you also get a wider 16:9 aspect ratio making it that much better watching movies.

The Sensation is also using Gorilla Glass for its fascia, so it should be more resistant to scratches and cracks but it isn’t something I would want to test.

Overall the 4.3 inch qHD screen is great on the Sensation, you get to see more of the page and the higher pixel density obviously makes things look much crisper, however the colours don’t look as great on the Super LCD as they look on SAMOLED Plus screens. The colours seem a bit dull and blacks appear to be a little grey, and you get a slight change in colour when viewing it at an angle but that’s definitely not a deal breaker . The Sensation isn’t going to win any prizes based on colour or contrast ratio but viewing pleasure isn’t completely bad, the extra detail from the qHD screen makes up for the areas it’s lacking in.

Outdoor visibility wasn’t that bad either, as long as you aren’t in direct sunlight but as with most phones I’ve seen, there’s nothing to brag or complain about here.

Hardware

The Sensation is running on the newer Dual core Qualcomm MSM8660 at 1.2GHz and it’s using the Adreno 220 GPU. Its got 1GB for storage and a fairly good helping of RAM at 768 MB. The Sensation isn’t the fastest dual core phone out there, but it certainly performed better than the Motorola Atrix.

When looking at the back of the device, there’s an 8 mega-pixel camera with dual LED flash, capable of recording 1080p HD video (more on that in the camera section of the review). To the right of the camera is the speaker grill, which was fairly loud, although not as loud as the Galaxy SII, it did however perform better than the Desire HD. At the front top right side of the device there’s a VGA camera right next to the phone speaker grill, and all the usual sensors. On the left side of the Sensation, there’s the volume toggle keys and the MicroUSB port. On the top right side of the device you’ll find the power/unlock button and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top left. As with many HTC devices, the right side of the device is flush with no buttons what so ever, as I’ve ranted many times, why couldn’t HTC use that side for a dedicated camera button like the Evo 3D, who knows. Opening the battery cover reveals a standard 8GB Micro SD card, that’s hot swappable, so thumbs up for that. There’s also a 1520 mAh battery below the cover, which you’ll have to take out in order to remove or insert a Sim card.

At the bottom front side of the device you’ll find the usual 4 capacitive buttons for navigation, these are the home, menu, back and search buttons. There’s is nothing new about them, and they don’t do the same cool flippy thing like the Incredible S. The buttons lit up when unlocking the device or powering it on, and they always worked unlike the Desire S which had problems lighting up at certain times.

Software

The HTC Sensation is running on Android 2.3.3 with the latest HTC Sense 3.0 UI running on top, although the latest Sense brings about many changes, it’s mostly superficial. HTC has made many changes to the way Sense looks and hasn’t added as much new functionality as we expected it would. The look and feel of some of the widgets have been changed, and there’s also a new cool live weather wallpaper that changes the animation depending on the weather condition.

By far the biggest change made to Sense is clearly visible when looking at the new lockscreen, it’s had a complete overhaul in both design and functionality. You get four customisable application shortcuts, which if dragged into the bottom ring will immediately unlock the phone straight into the application.  HTC has also given users the choice of different style of lockscreens that display different types of information. My favourate being the animated weather lockscreen displaying the current weather, but there’s also others, such as: stock updates, floating gallery pictures, and friend stream.

Overall as I’ve said on many of my reviews, Sense is one of my favorite…..or actually it’s my only favored custom skin.  My first choice would be to use a vanilla ROM, that doesn’t feature any UI tweaks but if I had to choose a skin, it would deffiently be Sense above all others. During my one week use of the Sensation, I found Sense to be quiet smooth and responsive without any head bashing lag. So there you go, Sense 3.0 doesn’t bring with it that much new functionality but it’s still welcomed eye candy.

Camera

As mentioned in the hardware section of the review, the Sensation features an 8 mega-pixel camera with dual LED flash similar to that on the Incredible S and Desire HD but significantly better. I didn’t bother comparing pictures taken with the Sensation with other HTC phones, I thought it would be best comparing it to the Samsung Galaxy SII as that packed a very good camera too.

Outdoor pictures taken with the HTC Sensation

Outdoor pictures taken with the Samsung Galaxy SII

Macro shots taken with the HTC Sensation

Macro shots taken with the Samsung Galaxy SII

Night shots taken with the HTC Sensation

Normal Settings                                                                                         Low light settings

Night shots taken with the Samsung Galaxy SII

Normal Settings                                                                                        Low light settings

The HTC Sensation’s 8-megapixel camera is by far the biggest improvement I’ve seen to the previous run-of-the-mill optics HTC has used, however don’t get me wrong, the Incredible S wasn’t a bad shooter. The Sensations camera is one of the best I’ve seen so far, and as you can see from the above samples, it even beats the Galaxy SII on many examples.  The snaps taken by the Sensation are clear and crisp, and it performs even better in brighter situations but let’s be fair, so do most phones. The only problem the Sensation had was in really bright sunny areas, where the images tend to get washed out and lose a lot of detail. As long as there’s a balance in lighting conditions you should get very vibrant images.

A great feature that I like that’s been included in the Sensation camera software is Instant Capture, it isn’t possible to toggle it on and off as HTC assumes that everyone prefers minimum amount of lag when taking pictures, and rightly so. The instant capture works pretty well when in fairly lit conditions but try and use it in a darker area and it might take a bit longer to focus. I initially thought that the Galaxy SII was faster at snapping and reloading, but the Sensation seems to fair just as well.

Before we move on to the camcorder, let’s talk about the VGA front facing camera. As you’d expect, it’s pretty pixelated and grainy but there’s no point ranting here, as I doubt you’ll be wanting to take a professional photoshoot of a super model with it, for that you’ll want to switch to the rear 8mega-pixel camera. For general video chatting the VGA camera is sufficient but it cannot even compare or come close to the 2mega-pixel front facing camera of the Galaxy SII which can take some pretty good mugshots.

Video taken with the HTC Sensation

The HTC Sensation can record video at full HD 1080p, so it would only be fitting that I compare it to the video recording capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy SII. The HTC Sensation performs fairly well compared to that of previous HTC phones, I have to put it out there and say it is an improvement as with the camera but there are still issues to be discussed. Panning even a little bit can cause blurriness and jerkiness, obviously keep the phone steady and you’ll get comparable results to the Galaxy SII. Another annoyance is the sound recording in videos, the phone can’t seem to handle louder noises such as car sounds and church bells (check the video above).  When there are loud noises, you’ll bound to get clipping and hissing sounds which can be annoying. For best results keep the phone steady and make sure you’re not recording on a windy day, I would have preferred being able to record video in all conditions, but maybe that’s too much to ask for.

Here’s a video comparison of the video recording capabilities of both the Sensation and Galaxy SII if you’re interested:

Browser

Fast forward over to 07:44 in the video below to see a browser test between the Sensation and the Galaxy SII.

If you saw the video above, you would have noticed that the Galaxy SII is just a fraction of a second faster than the Sensation when it comes to rendering webpages. From my own personal usage of the Sensation, I can say that it performed fairly well when it came to zooming and scrolling but it’s nothing to write home about. When scrolling on pages with more content the Sensation was a bit jittery and laggy. Flash video performance wasn’t too bad compared to the Galaxy SII. I also compared the Sensation and Desire HD browsers and came to the conclusion that the Sensation didn’t bring any huge improvements as I would have expected from a dual-core phone. The Sensation performed just slightly better than the Desire HD in loading webpages and there wasn’t much difference in responsiveness.

Overall the browser on the Sensation is still quiet pleasant but for a dual-core phone I expected slightly better performance.

Benchmarking

Linpack

• Galaxy SII – 82 (Multi-Thread)
• HTC Sensation – 69 (Multi-Thread)
• Google Nexus One (Froyo) – 42
• HTC Incredible S – 41.563
• HTC Desire S – 41.461
• HTC Desire HD – 39½
• SE Xperia Play – 38.491
• Google Nexus S – 14
• Samsung Galaxy S (Speed Fix’d) – 9.9
• HTC Desire – 7
• Dell Streak – 4

Quadrant

• Galaxy SII – 3,000
• Galaxy S (with speed fix) – 2,200
• HTC Sensation - 2176
• Google Nexus S (No textures) – 2,100
• HTC Desire HD – 1,860
• HTC Incredible S – 1,619
• SE Xperia Play – 1,526
• Google Nexus One (FroYo) – 1,300
• HTC Desire S – 1,225
• Samsung Galaxy S – 800
• HTC Desire – 520
• Motorola Milestone – 350

The HTC Sensation got a score of 69 in the multi-thread Linpack test and that’s pretty much what I expected the Sensation to get. It scored higher than previous HTC phones, so at least we can see some progression there.

The Sensation also got a Quadrant score of 2176, the score obviously shows progression but it isn’t significantly better than the Desire HD and  Incredible S. As a dual-core device I expected the Sensation to score more closer to what the  Galaxy SII scored but it blatantly didn’t. I don’t know whether I should trust Quadrant anymore, maybe it isn’t as accurate as I once assumed so lets base performance on actual real word experience.

In our real world tests, the Sensation performed pretty well, tapping on applications launched them fairly instantaneously although not twice as fast as the Desire HD and Incredible S as HTC would like you to believe. Side by side comparisons demonstrated just a slight improvement in speed and performance so it would be hard to justify upgrading.

Overall the Sensation is still a pretty snappy device and it’s certainly one of the fastest devices out there, just not as fast as the Galaxy SII. It ran all the games you would want to play without lag, it pretty much walks over games like Angry Birds and such.

Battery

I can get to nearly 2 days of usage from my Galaxy SII after taking it off the wall plug, so you would expect me to have high expectations. I’ve been using the Sensation for over a week now and I must say, I’ve had to plug it back in every night. The Sensation has 1,520 mAh battery from which HTC says you can get up to 495 minutes talktime or up to 400 hours standby from the device, we’ll have to take their word for that. On days I used the Sensation quiet heavily, watching a few Youtube videos, playing a bit of Angry Birds here and there, taking pictures and video, and of course making/receiving  roughly a total of 60 minutes of calls throughout the day, I was left with about 15% of battery life by midnight. Also keep in mind that I had GMail, Facebook, Twitter, and few others on automated syncs so all in all the device lasted quiet a lengthy period.

For someone that uses the device a little less than I do and manages power slightly more efficiently then I did, I’m sure you can stretch the battery life to the next day. The battery life might not be as good as the Galaxy SII but it definitely outdoes the HTC Desire HD.

Hackability

This section might only matter to very few people, but for those who are interested in tweaking and modding their phone, it’s essential information. HTC has been locking down their bootloaders thus it hasn’t been possible to load custom kernels or start-up files on devices with a locked bootloader. It’s still possible to root a device even if the bootloaders locked but certain things require that it be unlocked. HTC  has recently announced that all new devices will continue to ship with locked bootloaders but they will provide a  web-based tool to unlock it, this was announced on their Facebook page. This web-based tool isn’t live yet but should be available by the end of August 2011, the HTC Sensation and EVO 3D will be the first devices to be given access to the tool. On the unofficial side of things, AlphaRevX and Unrevoked have successfully designed a full unlock, permanent root and s-off for the Sensation. Whether this will come out before the official unlocking method is unknown, but it’s a win win situation. So, it wont be too long until you can get cracking away at flashing ROMs, in the mean time, keep an eye out on our site and on the XDA Sensation Forums for more news.

Conclusion

Andy’s Thoughts

The new version of Sense UI looks nice enough, but these days I’m too used to Market bought interfaces, widgets and apps I’m no longer as interested in Sense as I once was.  Whilst the build quality feels better than the Desire HD, it’s still not the solid device I was hoping for, the screen moving just ever so slightly as you press it at the edges.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic device.  If you’re intent on staying with Sense UI, or don’t like the light weight design of Samsung devices, this is the phone to get hold of.  For me though, it doesn’t throw the SGSII off its throne.

Why Buy

• High pixel density screen
• Generous amount of RAM
• Fair performance
• Great camera

Why Not To Buy

• Noisy video recording
• Slightly heavy
• Not a huge improvement over predecessors like the HTC Desire HD.

The Galaxy S II has already proven that Android is a very capable OS for smartphones, and the Sensation adds to that by proving that it wasn’t just a one-trick-pony. Android has matured into a stable platform with an ever growing number of applications and games in the Android Market, giving users that much more choice thus making the experience on the Sensation even better.

The Sensation’s qHD display is great for browsing and reading, while the lower-resolution Super AMOLED Plus of the Galaxy SII looks better with multimedia and games. Even if the Sensation doesn’t make huge imrovements over its predessors, it’s still an improvement never the less, pushing aside benchmarking apps results, the Sensation performs very well in real life situations.

The camera on the Sensation is a huge improvment over previous HTC devices, so thumbs up to that and as usual with HTC phones, their Sense skin is smooth, responsive and beautiful. The Sensation is a well built device that feels great in the hand, when holding it, you can tell it isn’t cheap from the metallic feel of the device. The design is unique with its concave screen and it’s deffinetly a nice device to look at and use, we at hemorrdroids.net would highly recommend the Sensation but personally between the Sensation and GSII, I would go for the latter for its vibrant SAMOLED Plus display and amazing performance, what ever you choose will at the end of the day be down to personal preference.

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