I’ve used a lot of early Android flagships, but the first time I held an HTC Sensation, I remember two things: the curved Gorilla Glass felt expensive, and the Wi‑Fi dropped as soon as I wrapped my hand around the top. Classic HTC — bold ideas, awkward execution.
The Sensation was HTC’s big swing at the dual‑core era, positioned to stare down Samsung’s Galaxy S II and LG’s Optimus 2X. On paper, it’s a heavyweight. In practice, it’s a fascinating mix of clever software, decent hardware, and a few problems you can’t ignore.
Design, Screen and That “Not‑Really” Unibody
HTC sold the Sensation as a premium device, and it mostly looks the part. At 126.1 x 65.4 x 11.3 mm and 148 g, it’s thicker and heavier than some 4.3-inch rivals, but it feels solid, with a metal center plate flanked by soft-touch plastic. The curved Gorilla Glass edges are a genuinely nice touch — literally.
Despite the marketing, this is not a true unibody. The entire phone pops out of a three-piece back cover that also houses the antennas. That design choice is where the trouble starts: remove the cover and Wi‑Fi dies completely. Even worse, just holding the phone the “wrong” way can knock the signal down several bars.
The 4.3-inch S‑LCD runs at qHD (540 x 960), which was a big deal at the time. Same pixel density as a 3.7-inch WVGA panel, just stretched larger. Text looks sharp and brightness is fine, but viewing angles are mediocre and blacks are nowhere near AMOLED territory. Contrast drops fast when you tilt it, and the reflective coating makes sunlight use merely acceptable, not great.
Sense 3.0: Eye Candy With Actual Utility
The Sensation shipped with Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread and HTC Sense 3.0 plastered over the top. This is one of those rare skins that changes everything and yet feels thought-through rather than slapped on for branding.
The lockscreen is easily one of the smartest pieces of UX HTC ever shipped: four customizable shortcuts and a ring. Drag the ring up to unlock, or drag an app icon into the ring to unlock straight into that app. There are multiple lockscreen styles — weather, Friend Stream, photo album, stocks, big clock — all feeding live info onto the first thing you see.
Sense 3.0 leans hard into customization with Scenes and Skins. Scenes swap complete homescreen setups (widgets, wallpaper, layout) between profiles like Work, Travel or Social. Skins reskin widgets, dock, lockscreen frames and colors across the UI. You still only get seven homescreen panes, but with HTC’s widget library, filling them isn’t a problem.
The notification shade gets a meaningful upgrade too: a recent apps list for quick task switching and a Quick Settings tab with toggles for Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, data and hotspot, plus RAM usage. It’s the kind of stuff we now take for granted in stock Android, but Sense was there early.
Performance: Dual‑Core Specs, Mixed Results
Inside, the Sensation runs a 1.2GHz dual‑core Snapdragon with Scorpion cores and Adreno 220 graphics, backed by 768MB of RAM. On raw spec, it lines up with other early dual‑core flagships; in benchmarks, the story is more nuanced.
CPU-only tests like BenchmarkPi don’t favor its older core design, but Linpack — which can actually use both cores — puts it neck and neck with the Galaxy S II. The problem is GPU and resolution: that qHD panel means 35% more pixels for the Adreno 220 to push than the WVGA competition, and 3D-heavy tests like Quadrant show it trailing Samsung’s Mali‑400MP.
Browser benchmarks also show it lagging, despite HTC’s usual custom Flash build. SunSpider, which is pure JavaScript, still isn’t great. There’s clearly optimization work left on the table in the browser stack.
Fast boot is a nice win, though. HTC is essentially using a suspend/hibernate-like mechanism, so reboots are quick and apps often restore exactly where you left them — including browser sessions.
Camera and Multimedia: Specs vs. Reality
On paper, the Sensation’s camera setup looks serious: 8MP stills (3264 x 2448), dual-LED flash, and 1080p video at 30fps with stereo audio recorded at 44kHz. The interface is efficient, with touch focus, face detection, continuous AF, and a mix of real-time effects like depth-of-field and warp.
Reality: classic HTC camera issues. Despite the 8MP resolution, detail is underwhelming because noise reduction is overly aggressive and then cleaned-up edges are sharpened too much. You get cleaner-looking files at a glance, but zoom in and fine texture is smeared. Colors can be off, and while this is one of HTC’s better shooters, it still trails most 8MP rivals of its era.
Video is a similar story. 1080p clips are smooth and color is fine, and the stereo audio is actually better than what many competitors recorded. But detail just isn’t there — 1080p from the Sensation can look softer than some 720p footage from competing phones. The low ~10Mbps bitrate clearly holds it back. 720p mode is almost as detailed as 1080p, which tells you exactly where the bottleneck is.
On the multimedia side, the Sensation does better. Audio output quality is excellent through an external amplifier: loud and clean, with minimal distortion. With headphones plugged in, volume drops a bit and intermodulation distortion rises, but it’s still one of the stronger audio performers. The music player adds SRS enhancement, an equalizer when headphones are connected, DLNA streaming, and lockscreen controls via a 3D “card”.
Video playback is decent but picky. 1080p MP4 is fine, some 720p DivX/Xvid plays, but large files and certain encodes just refuse to run. No MKV or subtitle support, and no dedicated standalone video player UI beyond the Gallery/All videos view. MHL over the microUSB/MHL port gets you HDMI-out mirroring if you buy the dongle separately.
Connectivity, Antennas and Everyday Use
On paper, connectivity is comprehensive: quad-band GSM/EDGE, dual-band 3G with 14.4Mbps down / 5.76Mbps up HSPA, Wi‑Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, GPS, DLNA (client and server), MHL output, USB tethering and Wi‑Fi hotspot for up to eight devices.
In reality, the antenna design undermines some of that. The back cover doubles as the antenna assembly, and the Wi‑Fi radio is extremely vulnerable to how you hold the phone. Touching the area around the camera and speaker can take Wi‑Fi from full bars to zero. Cellular is more resilient but still weakens if you grip the bottom in low-signal areas.
HTC’s Connected Media app makes DLNA actually usable, pushing or pulling media over a couple of taps. USB mode gives you practical choices — charge only, mass storage, HTC Sync, USB tethering, or using the PC’s Internet connection. The hotspot app adds nice touches like auto-shutdown on inactivity and support for up to eight clients.
Calling and messaging are handled by HTC’s usual “People” app and messaging suite, with deep integration across SMS, email, call logs, and social feeds. Smart dialing, voice dialing, sensor-based tricks like flip-to-mute and pocket mode — it’s all there. The loudspeaker scores “Good” in testing, landing the Sensation in the middle of its class.
Sense Services, Apps and the Bigger Picture
HTC didn’t just skin Android; it tried to build an ecosystem. The Sensation ties into HTCSense.com for remote locate, lock, wipe, backup of contacts/messages, browser-based SMS, call forwarding toggles and app discovery that syncs to HTC Likes on the phone.
On-device, you get a dense bundle: Polaris Office for viewing and limited editing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint (including Office 2007 files), a PDF reader, calendar with multiple views and weather integration, a capable gallery with DLNA push, SoundHound for music recognition, FM radio with RDS, eBook reader from Kobo, Quick Lookup for instant web/dictionary/translate lookups, and Show Me for in-depth how-tos.
Navigation is covered twice: Google Maps with its usual strengths, plus HTC Locations (co-developed with TomTom and Route66). Locations lets you download maps for offline use and can calculate new routes offline for free, though voice-guided navigation requires a paid license.
So where does that leave the Sensation? It’s a very feature-complete device with thoughtful software and strong audio credentials that just can’t quite match its name. The antenna issues, middling camera output relative to rivals, and GPU disadvantage at qHD resolution all drag it down from what could have been a clear benchmark.
If you were a Sense fan, the Sensation gave you almost everything you wanted in one device. If you were chasing the absolute best hardware and imaging, the competition had better answers. Ambitious, capable, but not quite the Android “sensation” HTC wanted it to be.
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