HTC Sensation XE Review
HTC’s recent acquisition of Dr Dre’s Beats Audio company has produced this arrangement – the highly modified HTC Sensation XE with Beats technology. The phone is set to bring the wonderful bass heavy sound of Dr Dre’s headphone’s brand to the phone market. Previous companies have created technology for PCs including Altec Lansing and Beats themselves, though this is the most high profile expedition into the phone area.
The Sensation does have a number of tweaks in the phone’s aesthetics that make it one of the best HTC phone deals around at the moment. The device is noticeably darker than the original Sensation and has the beats logo on the rear of its aluminium chassis. The other thing to make it stand out is the red strip across the front, where silver was there before.
Inside the phone is a different story, the device has gotten an upgrade from a 1.2GHz dual core to a 1.5Ghz dual core chip – an ungodly amount of power for a phone and one of the things that makes HTC Sensation XE deals so alluring. RAM has also been increased for 768mb to a full 1GB, meaning the phone dwarfs the Samsung Galaxy SII in the power stakes. The device also gets a better battery and now has a decent 1730mAH battery which will hopefully solve longevity issues. And we noticed it to be faster in browsing than the sometimes very slightly slow Sensation.
HTC have left the device with the latest 2.3Gingerbread Android OS which is covered with its own Sense user interface. The phone also comes with either 8GB or 16GB of SD memory and the same 8mp of camera that is in the original Sensation. The screen is also the same and is an excellent 540x960p display that produces lovely images.
The Beats Audio is the selling point of this phone, so how does it perform. The phone comes with a pair of Dr Dre beats headphones that automatically turn on the bass heavy Beats effect when the device is turned on. This does provide lots of bass and the sound has an excellent timbre, though treble and vocals can lack a little. The software on the phone also allows nice mixing of sound preferences and the effect can be turned off with the press of the notification bar. Though we would say the Beats Audio certainly adds to the phone and we really liked it.
The device has gotten something with Beats that will differentiate it from the generic Android market and so will more than likely do well for HTC.