Gadgetory

what's up everyone John retinue from TechnoBuffalo here with a full review for you of the HTC Sensation for t-mobile with a name like that let's see if it really is alright so in this review of the HTC Sensation we are going to cover call quality Sense 3.0 speed screen battery life build quality and all the specky goodness that comes in those categories so let's start with what matters most with the phone that is of course called quality the call quality on the sensation is probably amongst the best of the phones I've tested and I've tested quite a few I actually did a thirty call test as opposed to my usual twenty and I had zero dropped calls I've got an associate about 20 minutes away whose home is located in a complete dead zone we hooked up the sensation to his Wi-Fi calling there and ordinarily where he wouldn't be able to get reception with the Wi-Fi calling I was able to pull in a much stronger signal so if that's what you rely on to make your phone calls don't worry the sensation is going to work out wonderfully for you the speaker quality here is also outstanding and one of the cool features of this particular phone and some of the other HTC built devices that we want to access this pick your phone don't have to actually hit the speaker button you just turn it over mid call it's going to activate that speaker for you it's quite loud for you speaker or files out there which sounds like a creepy word but it works very well if you speakerphone in a car in a meetings you're going to get a pretty decent audio fidelity you get that little bit of tinny sounding that you'd expect from a speaker phone but it does work quite well alright so now let's talk about Sense 3.0 this is sitting on top of the latest version of Android that's 2.3 Gingerbread and there's a lot of stuff that's new and unique here this is the first phone it's actually launched with Sense 3.0 we've covered a bit of it in previous videos and ordinarily in phone reviews I don't cover the OS skins but since this is the first time we've really seen it on the phone I think it's important to talk about some of the things that it does so let's start with the lockscreen here is the lock screen of Sense 3.0 or here's one of the lock screens of sense 3.0 and I'll show you what some of those are so a narrow lead unlock a phone you just slide something up or slide to the left to the right and you are unlocked that is the same here with sense three Oh however you can access four applications of your choice you set icons here and the Preferences and go ahead and jump right to them all you got to do is find a jump to say camera I take the icon I drag it right to the circle and it's going to launch that camera for me very quickly and you can set that for the any application it's a nice handy feature you can do a lot of customization here as well if you go ahead and go to that customization window you see you've got lock screen and you can pick from different HTC choices from what you'd like all them are going to give you four options down below for applications some are going to show pictures so we're going to show stock prices whether some are going to show weird chronograph clock but you have a choice for what you'd like so you can customize the device as is the Android mantra any way you like I really liked the option of having those lockscreen shortcuts made it a bit easier you also have some 3d animations here you can sort of see them as I scroll along and if I scroll really quickly you can see them sort of show up there hopefully I'm not making people not just but there's a lot of 3d animations here this is not a 3d screen just appear sort of be 3d and this is of course taking advantage of the beastly processor that it found in HTC Sensation and that is the Qualcomm built 1.2 gigahertz dual-core Snapdragon which is pretty beastly and we'll talk a bit more about that as we go you also have some quick setting options as well that's going to be found in Sense 3.0 there's a lot of goodness here to dig into the quick settings when you slide this down go ahead and jump right into quick settings and you can see what those are right there nice and simple and pretty elegant to use I like having those options readily available all right so let's talk about what I know you guys all want to know and that is the speed does this thing is big a speed gaming as you would expect benchmarks really mean nothing to me actual phone performance is what matters most and this thing absolutely hauls browser speed application speed everything is just apps lutely lightning fast so we will load up TechnoBuffalo calm and we are just over the 4G network cute we're not connected to Wi-Fi flash is enabled content loads very quickly and one of the problems I've seen of Android are at least the older versions of Android the slower processors I was it as you did your scrolling down you got that checkerboard pattern that would show up for pinch-to-zoom wouldn't be all that fast so I'll let all the flash contact continue to load here you have the option of course to turn the flash content off and you get quicker load times and a bit better battery life as I scroll here there is no problem with this phone keeping up with it at all in fact on limitation is how fast I can scroll my finger pinch to zoom is really quick very elegant and just works about as well as I've seen on any mobile phone so from a browser standpoint absolutely outstanding speed on this phone is a screamer so this is a 4G phone and I'm quite a speed test junkie so I ran a decent amount of them you can see what my results were here and this was on the 4G network with about two to three bars in my area ranging from about 1.2 megabits per second down all the way as high as about 5.8 generally hovering on average between the mid to high twos with about one and a half megabits per second up so you're not getting lightning fast network speeds unless you're in a faster 4G area this is just subject to where I am but I found it to be plenty quick for what I needed to do so next let's talk about apps application here launched extremely quickly as you would expect from device of this raw horsepower so I want it open up something like Angry Birds Rio which who doesn't want to open up Angry Birds Rio I think Angry Birds are downloaded a million times per day I just loads very quickly for things you're gonna do on this device and go ahead and get your Angry Birds on you are not going to have to worry about speed at all and not really even going to have to worry about application management oftentimes some of the issues novice Android users have a complain about crashing is due to their application killers so whether or not you are what applications are killing or essential to the court processes I got have to worry about that so much here of course gingerbread has that option built in but you're not gonna have to do much app management because this thing is just an apps beast beast beast of a cellphone all right so let's talk a bit about battery life because being a beast of a cellphone you're going to get a bit of a drain on battery so we're looking at a 1520 milliamp hour battery life and if you never using this phone but knew the specs and you were to guess with battery life wasn't going to be on it I'm guessing like me your first thought would be it's probably gonna be between normal suck and super suck and the answer is it's much higher on the super suck bad of your life here is not very good so let me give you a summation of real-world usage generally take it off the charger around 7:00 7:30 in the morning about an hour and a half of phone calls sometimes connect the Bluetooth sometimes right up to my ear sometimes isn't that fancy speakerphone we talked about where you just go ahead and flip it over on its screen regularly checking to exchange servers for emails and doing some pretty decent web browsing I was dead battery completely shot by about 4:30 so if you are a heavy user user of your phone if you got a phone like this chances are you're going to want to take advantage of it or if you play a lot of games you're gonna need to pick up an extra battery or make sure you always have some sort of charging mechanism handy battery life was just not that good and one of the big contributors to battery life is of course and this screen which is a 4.3 inch s LCD and it's an four Super LCD the resolution of 540 by 960 I was not overly impressed the screen on the phone when you look at some of the Super AMOLED options from Samsung or the retina display on the iPhone 4 you can certainly see a difference in screen quality let's go ahead and jump in let's look at some text here so I'll go ahead and back open in the browser it's probably not to load up the website in we're super zoomed in so text looks fine it's not that the text looked bad but it just doesn't pop the way it does on the Super AMOLED screens now if you ever looked it to buy a television you go into Best Buy or your big-box retailers and you see two TVs next to each other tricks are you can always see a difference but if you pick up the lesser TV bring it home and hanging on your wall that's the only TV you're looking at and to you that chief he's gonna look fine and that's very true with the sensation this is the only phone you're looking at the screen is going to look fine to you but having the benefit of seeing a lot of screens come through here this is just definitely not one of the best so if you look at some images for example let's go ahead and check out some wallpapers it's going to be tough to see to translate from the phone to the camera to YouTube we can take my word for it the screen just doesn't pop the way I would like it to especially with some of the Samsung devices out there so look at some HTC wallpapers you can see what some images are here just isn't that right or vibrant now of course I've got the auto dimming sets here so it's doing all of its auto thing one of the things that HTC is known for is their tremendous build quality and that certainly holds true here with the sensation build quality device is absolutely outstanding I always love phones that have the battery almost flush up against the back of the phone here you don't get that sort of hollow feeling that you get from a lot of phones get that really high quality feel you've got that metal feeling it loads plastic in the middle soft touch on the top and bottom sort of whooshing display right there phone just feels really really high-quality interestingly enough the battery cover which is generally just the back it's actually this entire side of the Vice if I pop this up here I can show you just quickly battery covers tremendous pain to get off just an FYI go ahead and pull this off a little bit you can see where it's pulling off from right in the corner and that's where this thing comes off from so you are going to have a very very very solid build quality here the camera was average 8 megapixel camera it can shoot in 1080p the usual disclaimers here apply don't leave your point-and-shoot at home if you want to take a shot of your kids at your grandma or your date to send your friends camera is going to be fine here the front camera right there is a 1 or actually is a VGA point 3 megapixel so it'll shoot average stuff if you want to do your quick video chat you know it's going to get the job done so overall in a curve encompassing this into a big package this is a tremendous phone is definitely one of the best on the market when you look at a phone especially it's stablemates built HDC you bring something like the evo 3d your match pretty close spec to spec with the exception of the camera however a lot of phones that are going to be coming out in the future are going to have the stereoscopic 3d displays the sensation does not have that now 3d is generally a gimmick on phone so it's not going to be a deal breaker but it's something to keep in mind if you are a t-mobile customer or you're looking for the latest and greatest Android phone that's available that's still going to be nicely SPECT in a two year period and even when quad cores coming out it's still going to be a fast phone this is going to be a wonderful choice for you and if you're on t-mobile I can't recommend this phone enough absolutely outstanding experience you're going to get some of the best that Android HTC has to offer and that really is a killer combination so guys what do you think about the HTC Sensation is it your next phone does deserve a spot in your pocket curious what you guys have to say I am John Rhett enger' from TechnoBuffalo and I will see you in the next video