HTC Sensation 4G Review - A Sensational Smartphone
by Brian Klug on July 1, 2011 12:38 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- HTC
- Android
- Mobile
- HTC Sensation
- MSM8260
Display
I suppose that’s as good a segue as any into the Sensation’s display. It’s a 4.3” qHD (960x540) “Super LCD” display. As the displays editor in addition to smartphone editor here at AT, I have to admit that I’m granted an interesting perspective. On one hand, you have the traditional desktop LCD market, which is currently mid-stroke in a frenzied race to the bottom, and on the other, the new and emerging world of sub 10” mobile displays. Well, anything tablet sized and below.
I find myself more excited and concerned with mobile displays at any given time than desktop LCDs because that’s where everything exciting is going on. Further, it’s mobile displays where all the new innovation and competition is happening - Super LCD, AMOLED, Super AMOLED with and without Plus, qHD LCD, and qHD LCD with PenTile, all in just the last year! On the desktop side, it seems everyone wants to outdo each other at shaving another $20 off mediocre 1080P TN panels.
In the mobile game right now, you need to have some sort of non garden variety display on a flagship device, and more and more that means one of three things. Either you have to have a display that’s inordinately huge, has extremely high DPI, or is one of three AMOLED varieties.
If you remember, about a year ago HTC started marching down the AMOLED path. The Nexus One, then the Incredible, and Desire had first generation 3.7” AMOLED displays with PenTile. As things went on, availability constraints made the Incredible supplies scarce, and forced HTC to switch to Super LCD with the Desire. Depending on the content you spent most time looking at, the Super LCD Desire variant also got better battery life. I suspect that things are a bit more balanced with Android 2.3’s black-heavy theme, but back in the 2.1 days the Incredible and other AMOLED-topped displays ate battery. Since then, HTC has stuck to its guns with exclusively Super LCD displays, although they don’t underscore the Super part of that descriptor as much anymore.
So what is Super LCD? Earlier I mistakenly stated that it was IPS - it’s actually a PVA derivative. So why PVA? Well, remember AMOLED’s strengths - excellent (completely off) blacks, extremely fast response times, and good viewing angles. It’s easy to nail the first and last with IPS, but I wager that HTC also wanted to eliminate any chance of smear, and went for S-LCD which (thanks to its PVA heritage) offers a nice balance of the three. In addition, the S-LCD panels use a traditional RGB (3 subpixel per pixel) stripe rendering layout, making it even better in some ways than the original AMOLED for things like web browsing and sharp-edged or one pixel thick UI elements. Panel types aside, S-LCD is good enough that it’s hard to tell apart from IPS. Right now the options are either to get WVGA with SAMOLED+ sans pentile, or qHD with an LCD. Soon we'll have a third option, Super AMOLED qHD but with pentile. I wonder what that'll be called - at this rate, perhaps Super AMOLED Extreme HD MAX?
So how does the Sensation’s qHD 4.3-incher stack up? I’d argue that it performs very well. First off are our usual charts where we report brightness (white and black) and resulting contrast measured using an i1 Pro at maximum brightness.
Here the Sensation is actually almost top of the charts when it comes to contrast and its blacks. It isn’t the brightest display at just short of 400 nits, but does very well in the tests. I suspect the Sensation could benefit from more brightness in general, but it isn’t a huge thing.
The previous charts are at maximum brightness, I also want to continue looking at how whites, blacks, and white point change across the brightness scale. To do this, we measure all three at steps of 25% on the brightness slider and create some graphs.
We’ve just started doing this, beginning with the Droid Charge, so we’re also learning here, but the HTC Sensation has some interesting behavior. Blacks strangely enough get better at maximum brightness by a small margin, and again we see that brightness for white is pretty close to linear. Where I’m very impressed with the Sensation is its white point, which is nearly 6500K at maximum brightness. Contrast that to Super AMOLED Plus, which we showed was up past 8000K (blue).
I’d say that mirrors my experience and what I see, especially because I end up pulling down tons of screenshots over ddms on my own calibrated display, and can simply compare side-by-side to the handset. When it comes to faithful color rendering, S-LCD is a clear winner.
Side by side with another Super AMOLED Plus packing smartphone, the AT&T Infuse 4G (which we’re still working on), this is readily apparent. This is essentially a 0.2” bigger but completely comparable version of the Charge / Galaxy S 2 display. Here you can see that the Super AMOLED Plus panel looks bluer, and by comparison the Sensation a bit warmer. In addition, colors are more saturated on the Infuse.
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leexgx - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
but is not 800-900MB not enough space thought with an 8-16-32 SD card as well (i be hard pushed to use 800MB of internal storage) samsung need all that space as they have there own app store that has 3-4 games that use a lot of space, most other phones have 800-900Mb free space nowadays, i guessing most samsung phones do the 2gb/6gb split with 8gb internal spaceif you was talking about cheaper phones like the HTC desire or some random 1.6-2.1 OS phones with 500-800Mhz cpus (that are still been sold what's very lame as they are Crap) i would agree with you 110-50MB of space is not enough even with A2D (that's only on 2.2+ devices)
i agree with the sound of the load speaker seem to be lacking on 2 HTC phones i have seen
samsung need to fix there GPS issues there is Zero reason that GPS should be flaky at best (the jumping between to points every 1-2 seconds)
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i agree GPS should be tested and if the phone has less then 1gb internal storage it should be reported as it makes the phone have limited use
bubblesmoney - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
Having less internal memory on android phones is actually limitting the number of purchases on the android market. People like me would have probably bought almost all the games by gameloft and many other apps for work. But thats not possible now because of the crap apps 2internal memory policy on android and the equally crap stock app2sd move feature.The microsd cards are ok, but that does not replace the need for proper internal memory. I already have a couple of 4gb cards, a couple 16gb cards and a couple 32gb cards. Would have preffered a hot swappable card feature without needing to pull the batteries. But I guess the USB on the Go feature on the SGS2 is an alternative. My cards are mainly stuffed with office documents and presentations, teaching videos etc apart from a few songs. But still need good internal memory for apps (some games and other professional apps and loads of teaching apps for my child). Presently i am using one phone for me and another for apps for my child. If the internal memory was ok then i wouldnt need to keep switching between two phones depending on what app i want to use. Not everyone is interested in rooting and playing around with firmware. But the present internal memory hardware situation and crap app2sd stock situation doesnt leave one with much alternatives on android for people who need more internal memory.
ph00ny - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - link
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/864/sc2011070611392...As for GPS, i've done multiple tests including a tunnel pass and they've been spot on. Walking sessions showed the exact side of the road that i was on (google maps showed accuracy of ~10m) and during the tunnel test, it was able to get gps signal as soon as i was out of the tunnel.
dtomilson - Sunday, July 3, 2011 - link
Let's see some Mango chatter. Let's see a new and innovative mobile OS that has cool new features that no other OS does. Other blogs have raved about it, has Google paid you not to?kmmatney - Sunday, July 3, 2011 - link
I'm still waiting for a good real-life battery assessment for a phone. How long does the battery last if the phone is sitting around doing nothing? Can I squeeze 2 days out of it if I forget my charger on a short business trip? How much charge does it lose sitting on a nightstand overnight? I'm a current iPhone 3GS user, and can get up to 3 days of battery out of my phone if I need to. I have no idea if I can do that just by reading this review.JasonInofuentes - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
So, battery life assessments are really particular to the user and even down to what day it is. Let's cover your specific questions first.-Battery life sitting around doing nothing: Well, what good is the phone to you if you're not doing anything with it? And, what is nothing? If you mean screen off and not handled (as I'm guessing you mean, does that mean it's also not updating e-mail, and other apps? If you have absolutely no applications periodically pulling data and you leave any of these phones untouched until they die then they will last . . . a really long time.
-2 days on a business trip: What do you do for a living? Again, if you don't have any apps downloading data periodically, you only ever use your phone as a phone and maybe a few e-mail sessions, then any of these phones should hopefully last that long.
-Sitting on a night stand overnight: See the first answer.
Don't look at these battery life measurements as an absolute, look at them as a guide. If you spend a lot of time downloading data on 3G, then make sure to get a phone that does really well in the 3G test. If 3G isn't your thing but you're on WiFi downloading data a lot, then grok the WiFi graph and pick something near the top. And if you're main use for the phone is voice calls, there's a great list of voice call data available to you. Not sure which you are? Well, it sounds like battery life is your bread and butter so just pick one from the top of the list and go for it. You've got at least two weeks to decide if it's for you and my experience is that the honeymoon period when people get new phones is about 5-7 days, at that point they'll either be happy or dragging their charger around with them.
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crb119 - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - link
so is this better than iphone4..........in terms of software avilability...ahat about skype video????.....winst - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - link
Hello,Why so much emphasis on phone features and such, but little or no information
on the fundamentals , being able to make a decent phone call in various conditions ?
winst