As little as five years ago, HTC wouldn't have been the obvious answer if one was asked to name a company that was popular for its smartphones. Thanks to a steady stream of increasingly efficient devices from the Taiwanese handset manufacturer, this might no longer be the case. HTC has, in recent times, introduced handsets that have their distinctive USPs, such as the HTC Mozart for high fidelity listening and HTC Salsa and ChaCha for Facebook addicts. But the latest and the most potent of its creations seems to be the HTC Sensation that hit Indian markets in June this year. Does it hit the ground running?

A common Sense

Features of HTC's proprietary Sense UI, which was first integrated into HTC smartphones more than a year ago, are carried over to HTC Sensation. The ‘pinch-to-Leap' gesture that displays a matrix of all home screens has been retained from the original Sense, as is tapping twice on the Home button, for the same function.

The new active lockscreen, however, makes for a super-convenient interface that let me check my missed call alerts and read messages at a glance while still in the locked mode. A sleek, virtual ring at the bottom of the screen which I drag to unlock the handset doubles up as a quick launcher for a couple of apps. Drag any of the apps while in the locked mode – the default bunch of Phone, Mail, Camera and Messages – on to the ring and you are taken straight to the app. Mighty convenient, added the fact that these four options are customisable too!

The option of seven home screens gives you ample real estate to arrange your favourite apps, widgets, calendars, contacts and social feeds. You can prefix templates or ‘Scenes' like Social, which displays your latest FB or Twitter feed on the home screen or ‘Work' that displays stock positions or your agenda for the day.

With a quick swipe, the interface spins around all the home screens in a smooth, impressive animation.

The Sensation has a little palette-paintbrush icon on the right bottom that takes us directly to personalisation options and boy, the options to customise are aplenty! The handset gives me the freedom to create folders and group my apps with ease. A long press on the title bar lets you rename it accordingly.

It's an ‘appy day!

Let's face it! It's as much about which internet radio app we can listen to, which HD game we can obsess over and which funny noises the phone can make, as it is about the processor or the camera of a smartphone you'd want to buy. It is good news then that you have the option of downloading apps from not one but two providers here – Android Market and HTC Hub – both of which are congregated in HTC Likes.

The handset comes with the expected bunch of inbuilt apps. The Calendar lets you plan the day by the hour while showing you the expected weather for the day. The Weather app has captivating animations with thunder and lightning striking your screen as you unlock it on a rainy day or the sunrays peeping out brightly when it's a clear sky up above. Full marks to HTC for making these apps zesty and interesting. With the Sensation, HTC had debuted ‘Watch', its proprietary video service, which had a handful of teasers of newly launched and upcoming movies. It is originally meant to offer the choice of renting or buying videos and watching them on up to five different HTC devices. ‘Peep' remains the handset's Twitter link and ‘Plurk', another social networking cum micro-blogging site.

You also have a dedicated app to convert your handset into a Wi-Fi hotspot that saves you the trouble of tweaking the setting in the menu. Voice Search still remains a strange mix of being surprisingly efficient and at times, as intuitive as a rotting log of wood.

Cheese, please!

It's not too often that I have second thoughts about the budget digicam I bought last year. It gives me decent results, keeps noise low and colours bright and never fails to act out when I try to capture something in low-light or in motion. The 8-megger on the HTC Sensation, however, almost convinced me that it would be worthwhile to just get a smartphone like itself which takes great pictures – and great, here, would be an understatement. The clicker not only takes crisp stills indoors but also gives pretty stunning results. When we were on the move and going crazy with the virtual shutter, the 8-meg camera unfailingly gave us shots with unbelievably minimal blur. The Camcorder on the handset too captures videos in 1080p resolution, with full stereo sound, at up to 30 frames per second; giving you smooth video that is better than a lot of other phones we've tried.

Doting on the design

It's only a handful of companies in the game that have made themselves recognisable by their distinctive design, for example, Apple with its sleek aluminium unibody construction and Sony Ericsson with its pristine white plastic in the Xperia models. HTC is one of the few to have made it to this clique. With a stylish unibody aluminium chassis running around the handset, the HTC Sensation carries the definitive trait of a HTC. The volume rocker button barely protrudes from the side. The 8-megger with its dual LED flash nestles in the partly rubberised back panel, next to the speaker grilles. The back panel curves to envelop a bit of the fascia too.

With the first qHD (Quarter HD screen), the HTC Sensation puts the sizeable 4.3-inch screen to good use. It makes for a clear display even outdoors under bright sunlight and the ambient light sensors work quite efficiently.

Despite the 1520mAh battery, the Sensation guzzles up most of its power in a day – what with FriendStream, Weather apps, Gmail updating automatically and a couple of minutes spent every hour trying to hit the pigs! But here again, you have lots of ways to tweak your power settings and conserve some juice. At the heart of the HTC Sensation beats a 1.2-GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which prevented freezes quite efficiently. But while playing certain games, the handset unfortunately heated up in about 5-10 minutes.

Pitting it against the best

With snazzy smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S II (not withstanding the Apple ban) impressing the living daylights out of gadget enthusiasts, does the HTC Sensation stand a chance? Yes, I say! It might not have the brawn to match up to the RAM of the Galaxy S II (768 MB vs 1GB) and has disappointing low storage memory for a modern-day smartphone (1GB compared to 16/32 GB in the Galaxy S II). But it definitely competes neck-to-neck since it is packed with the 1GHz dual-core processor, dual LED flash, and stereo sound recording coupled with the improved Sense UI which might appeal to some more than the TouchWiz 4.0. The higher qHD resolution on the Sensation tries to make up for what it loses in comparison to the Super AMOLED+ display on the S II – one of the most brilliant displays adorning a smartphone. The HTC Sensation weighs in a tad bit more than the Galaxy S II but outdoes the latter with its sleek aluminium design.

Love: High-res screen, excellent camera, good build quality, slick Sense interface

Hate: Average battery life, tends to heat up

Rs 32,700

>mahananda@thehindu.co.in

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW