T-Mobile HTC Sensation – A little Introduction, Initial Impressions and plenty of Photos!

It’s was a nice warm summer day as the Fedex van pulled up outside my office with a little packed full of big goodness.  Inside was a brand new HTC Sensation all ready to run on T-Mobile’s high speed network inside the Charlotte boundaries.  People have compared the Sensation to the Google Nexus One and I can see why.  It’s like the Nexus One suddenly grew up and became the device everyone has been asking for.  At least that’s my opinion, as the Google Nexus One, regardless of it’s small quirks, is one of the best designed Android phone to date.  Or it was !!

The sensation features a 1.2Ghz Dual Core processor and it shows.  It’s still not the blazing dragon I expected, but Sense 3.0 running on the qHD display takes a lot of power and uses every inch of that processor.  The results are nothing but amazing.  If you’ve seen the weather forecast in Sense with life like clouds, sun, storms and other conditional animations, it’s a sight to be seen.  The screen is incredibly clear and everything is very easy to read.  The brightness is a little low when using the auto brightness feature, but that’s soon remedied by manually increasing the brightness to your desired taste.

The front of the device looks incredibly clean with the light sensor, speaker grill (which also houses the hidden LED indicator light) and the front facing camera across the top edge.  The bottom edge has the usual softkeys to control your android device.  Missing is any form of touch pad as seen on the Nexus One.  I’m a big fan of these as I find it makes editing text much easier than trying to guide your cursor using your finger on the screen.  I used to say that about keyboards too, but now I don’t think I’d ever use one if I had one.  So like everything else, it’s simply what you’re used too.

The nice feature that you should be ware of is the contoured glass on the front of the device.  Laying your Sensation face down on a table top means that the actual face of the phone is not touching the surface and should help prevent scratching.

HTC Sensation Front

The top of the device has been reversed to the usual HTC standards and the power button is now located on the left with the 3.5mm headphone jack on the right.  I know I’ll get used to it, but I keep going to the left to power the Sensation on and off.  *The picture below is taken from the back so reverse what your seeing here to fit my description.

HTC Sensation Top and Back

The back of the device features an amazing 8mp camera and dual LED flash. The sample photo’s I’ve taken so far are incredible. The real nice feature here is the speed at which the Sensation takes your shots. As long as the phone has analyzed your scene and is ready, clicking the capture photo button was almost instant. This is a huge bonus and one of the fastest picture takers I’ve ever used.  * See the samples gallery at the bottom of the article.

HTC Sensation Back

On the right side edge of the Sensation is the volume rocker and USB connector.  The USB connector can also double as a HDMI output with the appropriate adapter installed.

HTC Sensation Right

You may be asking “How does the Sensation compare to other Android phones as far as weight and size”. You can take a look at the shots below showing the HTC Sensation, Google Nexus One and the T-Mobile myTouch 4G stacked on top of each other and then photographed from the side and the top edges of the devices.

Fronts:

HTC Sensation Size Comparison Front

Sides:

HTC Sensation Size Comparison Side

Top:

HTC Sensation Size Comparison Top

Overall I’m very impressed with the Sensation.  It runs smooth, connects well and the phone calls are as clear as expected.  The volume could be a little louder, but that seems to be the case on almost all phone.

That’s it for my initial impressions, this is by no means a review of the device simply my feelings of the device out of the box and playing around for a couple of hours. Stay tuned for a full review in the near future.

Before you leave, don’t forget to check out the gallery of all the images you’ve just seen and a few other shots I took with the camera.  I got a little carried away playing around with the camera effects as you can see in the gallery below, but it does one picture of each effect taken from the same angle.