HTC are well known for releasing phones in every shape and size

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HTC are well known for releasing phones in every shape and size, catering for every possible price point and dominating the market all at once. Well, they’re either well known for that or simply because they make some of the finest phones on the planet they’re immensely popular, so what of their pièce de résistance, the very top of their tree, the HTC Sensation. Is it really all that? Read on, brother.

Design/construction:

Like every HTC phone of recent memory, they’ve plumped for a aluminium unibody as seen in the HTC Desire S and rubber design (rubber for grip and somewhere for the antennas to shoot out their signals and receive in turn) which makes the phone incredibly sturdy. Interestingly, they’ve done it in a slightly different way to their previous generation which used a sort of draw at the bottom which allowed you to slide the battery/sim card/micro-sd in out of the frame. In the Sensation the entire frame pops off, leaving you with just the shockingly slim internal components and a chance to fondle the aluminium shell (spolier: it’s absurdly hard to bend or twist) .

The sides of the phone are completely bare bar apart from a large volume rocker along the left side and a uncomfortably placed micro-usb (uncomfortable for anyone who’s left handed and likes to use their phone while charging) and along the top we’ve got sleep/power button and a headphone jack. The real fun happens along the back, which while featuring a recessed 8mp camera and dual LED flash (whatever happened to Xenon?) and a speaker grill is also home to the phone’s real design flare. The entire back is split into three slanted sections, starting at the top with a handsome gray rubber, followed by a gunmetal aluminium and then a black rubber. It’s a design you might imagine would cause some split opinions but everyone I showed it to really enjoyed both the look and feel of it.

Speaking of feel, the ergonomics on the Sensation are truly top notch, for a phone with a not inconsiderate screen size of 4.3″ it doesn’t feel unwieldy or hard to hold at all (something I’ve noticed with the Galaxy S2), HTC deserves all the accolades they can get for their design department, the Sensation isn’t a wild departure from previous efforts but what absolutely is, it the perfection of all their efforts.

Screen:

HTC have seen fit to install a qHD 4.3″ super LCD screen into their top of the line handset, so let’s start with the good news. Touch detection and accuracy is absolutely top notch, every single touch and swipe was recorded and reacted to with the kind of ruthless efficiency you’re going to expect from your money, the true can also be said for the qHD screen resolution (quarter HD) which makes everything sharp and crisp on the screen, allows you to see more emails at once or simply browse without zooming in quite so much. Colour accuracy is good and everything is exceedingly bright, but sadly not everything is perfect and the viewing angles are surprisingly not that great compared to other Super LCD screens we’ve seen (Desire S, anyone?) leading me to believe this is a slightly different type of screen they’ve used compared to it’s kissing cousin. Generally, it’s a very good screen both indoors and out, just make sure to turn auto-brightness off.

An interesting design note, the edges the screen are curved upwards, meaning the screen actually sits a few millimeters back from the face of the phone. avoiding all those nasty scratches that accumulate from leaving your phone face down. Not like you’d get them anyway, with the entire thing being covered by Gorilla Glass. Nevertheless, it’s still a really nice touch, looks beautiful and makes using the phone feel all the more special.

Speed/battery life:

Didn’t you hear? Dual core phones are all the rage, yes, it’s practically expected that all high end phones launching should come with more than a solitary core. The Sensation therefore doesn’t bend those rules, bringing Qualcomms 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. I recently found myself at a Qualcomm chip event where they went over the roadmap for what’s coming in the Snapdragon line and currently the chip powering the Sensation is the very best they have on the market. They even had a development phone running the same chip powering some of the most spectacular mobile graphics I’ve ever seen (almost console quality).

So you’d think that would power the every day use cases for the Sensation, right? Yes, well, it’s almost too powerful. Apps open almost before you even press them and panning around the screen is a complete joy (bar some software issues I’ll talk about later). Facing it, dual core phones don’t have much purpose at the moment because so few apps are truly designed to take advantage of them that they usually go unused until you’re say, recording in 1080p. Webpages load quickly and are the for most part stutter free, amazingly I even managed to get a 720p youtube video running in the browser. Needless to say, alongside the Adreno 220 GPU absolutely nothing put a stutter in this phones performance.

Those dual core phones though, don’t they ravage your battery life? Good news! Apparently not, going a full day I didn’t struggle with the Sensation, although taking photos and videos drains the battery quickly the phone draws almost no power when the screen is off, I’ve had it locked for 2 days to test it out and the battery is barely below 70%.

Photo/video:

The 8MP rear facing camera on the Sensation is truly superb, pictures came out crisp, colourful and blur free in most situations other than those with a lack of natural light. Infact, that’s the major problem with the Sensation’s camera, when you step indoors and into some unnatural light it tends to get more than slightly unflattering. On a positive note the snapper is capable of 1080p video capture, which frankly looks superb either outputted to a HDTV or on the phones screen, it’s one of the few places where that monstrous core comes in useful.

Software:

The Sensation is one of the first UK outings for HTC’s Sense 3.0 offering, running atop of Android’s minty fresh 2.3.3 build. So with a whole 1 point improvement, you’d be forgiven to expect a large difference between the old software and new. Well, I hate to break it to you but Sense 3.0 is almost exactly the same as older versions of the software, only with a little visual spit polish. When flipping through the homescreens, they now act as if they’re on a carousel, flipping in and out, that too for the widgets which now display a depth to them as they leave the screen. It’s all very pretty and entirely useless visual fluff really.

Visual fluff is of course perfectly okay if it doesn’t hinder performance, but strangely it seems to on the Sensation (a phone with immense power) as the phone itself seems to drop a few frames when flipping between home screens. It can’t be the hardware, so the blame has to lie on undercooked software here on behalf of HTC. In time I’m sure this’ll all get ironed out but for now it’s a minor annoyance you’ll notice almost every day.

Wrap up:

Resisting the urge to use the obvious pun here, the HTC Sensation is a spectacular phone. In raw specs, it falls short of the bar raised by the Galaxy S2 in becnhmarks, but in every day use the form factor, construction and video recording all come together to perform some real magic to make a phone that you’re going to want to keep with you.

Thanks to Three UK for shipping us this handset out.

Rating: 9 out of 5 stars (9/10)