The HTC Sensation, earlier known as the HTC Pyramid, has finally been confirmed at a press conference held by HTC in London yesterday. While many folk were expecting multiple product announcements, the Sensation was the only product revealed, and looking at goodies like a dual core 1.2 GHz processor, 1080p video recording, a larger (for HTC) 1,520 mAh battery and a brand new Sense UI, it seems to deserve hogging an entire event by itself.
Check out highlights of launch event in London below:
HTC Europe already has the phone listed here. With the Sensation, it seems HTC is finally ruining LG and Samsungs parties, as these are the only other companies to have dual core offerings. In fact, HTC had been silent on this front, and we were quite frankly waiting for something to give. And all three phones are based on different internals. While LGs Optimus 2X runs NVIDIAs Tegra 2, and the Samsung Galaxy S2 runs their own Exynos SoC, the HTC Sensation is based on the third generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC namely the MSM 8260. Among other goodies is the Adreno 220 GPU, which supposed to be three times more powerful than the previous generation Adreno 205. 768 MB of RAM might seem less, considering the Samsung Galaxy S2 has 1 GB, but do remember than Android manages memory quite well, and the LG Optimus 2X makes do with 512 MB!
On to more goodies – an S-LCD display, something that the HTC Desire HD should have included. The HTC Sensation also upps the ante in terms of display resolution. Move over 480 x 800 pixels and make way for 540 x 960 pixels – with a display size of 4.3-inches, the Sensation’s display should be sensational and killer for browsing and reading fine text. In fact, HTC has been marketing the display as qHD or quarter HD, which it is, at exactly one fourth the resolution of full HD i.e. 1920 x 1080 pixels. While on the topic of resolution, how does an 8 MP camera with dual LED flash sound? Add full HD 1080p video recording @ 30 fps, and the camera is pretty standout too. The front-facing camera is still VGA while the Samsung Galaxy S2 has a 2 MP unit – some things never change…
We mentioned the 1.2 GHz dual core earlier, and Qualcomm claims to be the only one able to individually power gate each Scorpion core on their Snapdragon SoC. Thanks to this, and the die shrink to 45nm, the MSM 8260 should be frugal on battery, although the Sensation comes with an upgraded 1,520 mAh battery (which we’re sure nobody will complain about). What’s even more amazing is, despite the same screen size, better hardware and the same aluminium unibody, the Sensation is a whole 16 grams lighter than the Desire HD and weights 148 grams – very acceptable for a phone of this size. Then there’s the new Sense UI 3.0 with a number of usability-enhancing and visual tweaks.
And perhaps, the best of all we’ve heard unconfirmed reports that the HTC Sensation might be hitting India within a couple of months of it hitting the UK market, which would mean we could expect it by June. This is perhaps the best bit of news, because HTC has a reputation for doing region-specific launches. Prices are obviously unconfirmed at this point but we’re hoping it’ll be somewhere southwards of Rs. 30,000, though given current phone prices, could be around the Rs. 35,000 mark. At any rate as soon as we know something more, so will you…