HTC Sensation Android Smartphone With 1.2GHz Dual-Core CPU & 4.3″ Screen Announced

Written by John Thompson on April 12, 2011 · Filed under Tech 

Have you been mulling over the options for your next smartphone purchase lately? With the iPhone 5 and new HP phones such as the Pré 3 and Veer around the corner, you may be forgiven for not considering a HTC device, after all there hasn’t been any unique revolutionary phones such as the Desire to come off the HTC production line for a good few months now, which, as we all know may as well be decades in tech years.

At today’s event in London, however, HTC placed itself firmly back on the radar of smartphone hunters up and down the country with the new HTC Sensation announcement. With a dual core processor, high resolution display and quality camera, the Sensation is a force to be reckoned with in the Android world!

The Sensation’s 4.3-inch display – aside from looking absolutely gorgeous thanks to its contoured edges – packs a resolution of 540 x 960, and displays all of the content powered by the Qualcomm MSM 8260 dual core processor, which is clocked at 1.2GHz. You will have 768MB of RAM to play with, and all of those apps that you love will be stored on the 1GB internal storage, although you can of course use an SD card to increase the storage several times over.

All the connectivity options you would expect are present. You will find a Bluetooth 3.0 chip waiting to serve your every beck and call, as well as 802.11n Wi-Fi.

If you don’t like to carry a dedicated camera, instead relying on your phone, you will be pleased to see that the Sensation comes with an 8 megapixel model, which of course comes with a dual LED flash and supports auto-focus as well. If you want to feel all futuristic, then you can make use of the VGA camera situated on the front of the phone for video calls.

The battery in this thing has a capacity of 1520 mAh, but you can take all of the usage estimates with a fine pinch of salt. Only when people are using the Sensation in the real world will we know how power efficient the dual core processor is, but hopefully we’re looking at a longer battery life than you’d find on the EVO 3D…

On the software front, the Sensation runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread – the latest version of Android at the time of writing – and also comes with HTC Sense 3.0. I’m not a huge fan of most custom skins, but Sense proves to be one of the better ones on the market, adding numerous improvements to the latest version.

One of the most important of these new revisions is that users can now customise the lock screen of the phone, and even add widgets for social networking or weather to check latest statuses without even unlocking the phone. This is a huge time saver if you use these widgets or applications a lot.

Furthermore, HTC Watch has also been introduced, allowing you to rent or buy movies from your phone. For me, watching any video content on a small screen is a sub-par experience, so I don’t think you’ll find me buying and renting from the Sensation anytime soon, but some users may like to do so. Whether you can download films over your carrier network isn’t specified, but I’m willing to bet that carriers will have moved to block such high bandwidth content from being downloaded.

All things considered, the HTC Sensation looks like a great phone, and has me excited about a new HTC phone for the first time in a while. Whilst there’s no official word on UK carriers as of yet, a Vodafone UK page was leaked with details about the new device not long before the event, so there’s a good chance you’ll see it on the network when it’s released. For those in the US, the Sensation will be exclusive to T-Mobile customers.