Yesterday I grabbed myself an HTC Sensation to replace my Nexus S and HTC Desire HD. I Decided to give it a full 24 hour run through before I ever said a word about it, to ensure a real accurate review.
I personally am a big HTC fan and have used nearly all the ‘newer’ HTC models available to us Canadians. Desire, Desire Z, Desire HD, now Sensation. So I have watched and felt these phones progress right in the palm of my hands and I’m very excited over this phone as I feel it has the biggest jump forward compared to its sister models.
Physical Design:
The design is nothing short of brilliant. The backing of the phone is very smooth, beautiful and unlink some recent HTC models, the camera is actually protected and not the first contact to the table when set down. The HTC Sensation has a more slimmer screen compared the Desire HD and its shell is slightly taller.
The front of the phone has its normal 4 touch sensitive buttons and the screen itself has raised edges, so when swiping left to right, your finger sweeps off the screen rather then feeling the sharp transition from screen to frame sometimes felt on other phones.
It has the Light sensor on the Left of the front speaker, and the notifications LED and Front camera on the right. micro USB port at the bottom left of the phone, so docking stations will require the phone to lay sideways apposed to standing up like previous models of HTC’s phones.
User Interface:
HTC’s Sense 3.0 is a really nice step forward from its previous versions. The first thing you will probably notice about the Sensation is the lock screen shortcuts. In this particular screen shot you can see Phone, Mail, Camera, Messages. To Unlock the phone, you will grab that little circle at the bottom and drag it to the centre of the screen. To activate one of those shortcuts, you grab the icon and drag it in to the circle. The icons also have badges to show you how many missed calls, messages ect.
When unlocking your phone, your set widgets do a 3D panorama spin around your screen while falling into place on the pages just outside of your view. This gives a really cool look, never before seen on HTC devices.
When flipping from screen to screen, the widgets have a 3D effect, as it appears they are lifting off the screen.
HTC included a couple new widgets, but nothing to outstanding and worth getting to deep in to.
On top of HTC’s skins and scenes for download, you now have lockscreens as well. Comes with 6 preloaded lock screens which have different modifications to the lock screens operation. For example the standard lock screen is what is loaded by default, they also offer a photo album on which your able to cycle through your photos right on your lock screen. They offer similar style for Friend stream, Stocks, and weather.
If you have ever owned a Desire, or Desire HD you will notice that almost all the wallpapers, live wallpapers, and sounds are all the same as before.
Sound and Video:
One thing I noticed right out of the box, is that the sound quality is much better then the Desire models of HTC. The sound is less tinny and is nice and loud, offering its usual SRS enhancements and Equalizer for headphones only. HTC Sensation’s screen is slimmer then its Desire HD model as stated earlier, which is nicer for watching widescreen videos as you do not have black boarders as I did with the Desire HD when watching widescreen YouTube.
The Sensation seems to have a higher support for videos then previous models as well. I had thrown some AVI videos on here that would not play on any of my android phones and they played flawlessly on the Sensation. While videos are playing, the sound comes from both front and back speakers giving a more full and rich sound experience.
The clarity of the screen is amazing and a huge step up from previous models. You can really see qHD (540 X 960) resolution screen at work here, and a very noticeable crispness.
Feel and Performance:
With its dual-core 1.2ghz processor and 768mb of ram, its not surprising that this phone as a lot of kick to offer. Its menus scroll through very smoothly, apps load up in an instant with zero lag.
The Camera is amazing. If you follow me on Google+, you will notice I posted a couple pictures using my HTC Sensation. One picture in particular I snapped a picture while my cat was grooming, the picture took which his tongue sticking out of his face in mid-lick without blur. Snapping moving pictures is often a hard thing for phones to handle and this one did it like a champ.
The only thing that holds this phone back is the massive amounts of bloatware it comes pre-loaded with.
Dice, Dock mode, FM Radio, GPS nav, Mirror, Flashlight, Nova, Peep, Polaris Office, Quick lookup, Reader, Remote PVR, Self Serve, Show me, Sound Hound, Task manager, Teeter, Top HD Games, Tunes & apps, TV & Radio, Uno, Watch, Zoompass.
With all that garbage on there that you’re unable to remove, this phone is something your going to want to root ASAP to remove the clutter. Latest word from the XDA devs is there is no current method for rooting Bell’s Sensation at this point in time, so we are stuck with this for now.
If you don’t mind the extra clutter, this is one amazing phone and a phone I think I can settle down with for a while.
Battery Life: Battery test conditions.
- Wifi + Bluetooth Always on
- Sync 2 MicroSoft exchange accounts + 1 Google account. (Push)
- HTC Facebook Friendstream Sync every 4 hours.
- Stocks, News, Show me, HTC Sense Sync set to manual (off)
- Brightness (auto)
- Location Wireless networks ON, GPS location OFF
Using these following test conditions over 10 hours, I ended up with 50% battery life when I came home from work. During that time I Streamed Bluetooth music to my headset for 4 Hours, Sent 10-20 Emails + Text messages, received 20+ Google+ notifications.
Screen Display was on for 35 minutes according to the battery monitor.
Thats about even with all my other phones, Desire HD, Nexus S were about the same. This could easily last a full work day, but your going to be charging every night if you use yours as heavily as I use mine.
All in all, I am very impressed with this phone. It offers more then I expected, with delightful surprises I never thought a phone could do. This could be the phone i actually settle down with.
If you feel I missed something in this review, or perhaps you want to add some points of interest, or you have further questions feel free to comment below.
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