The HTC sensation – HTC’s new flagship smartphone

Today at a press conference in London HTC have officially announced their latest flagship smartphone, the HTC Sensation. The Sensation will be HTC’s first dual-core smartphone.

I’ve been lucky enough to play with the HTC Sensation already and can tell you it really is an awesome phone. The screen is a 4.3" super-LCD capacitive touchscreen running at QHD, 540×960 resolution. This is a true 16:9 aspect ratio which is great for watching movies. The screen is slightly recessed with interesting curved edges. This doesn’t just look good but also protects the screen when the handset is placed face down. However, the screen is made from Gorilla Glass so damage should not be a big problem.

The Sensation has an ultra thin form factor and despite the 4.3" screen is physically slightly smaller and lighter than the Desire HD.

The processor is a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 running at 1.2ghz, this coupled with 768MB RAM, 4GB ROM and Gingerbread 2.3.3 should keep things running pretty smoothly.

The latest version of HTC Sense, 3.0, has new 3D and cube-like widgets. This is a great effect and really adds some visual interest to the home screen. It certainly helps to show off the QHD screen too.

There’s a new 8 megapixel camera and an all new ‘enhanced camera experience’. The main new feature here is the instant capture function, the photo is taken the instant you press the button so that you don’t miss those precious moments.

Thanks to the improved power of dual-core video can be captured in HD at 1080p resolution while the live touch focus allows you to get creative by touching on the area of the screen that you want to be in focus while recording is in progress. HTC also include a basic video editing application so that you can crop/trim you video before sharing via YouTube etc.

HTC have made enhancements to the lock screen too. Rather than just simply unlocking the phone and opening at the home screen there’s a new feature that allows you to unlock and launch one of four specific applications. You can customise which applications live there but you could for example unlock straight to the camera app or maybe to your email account.

Also on the lock screen you can place live widgets so you can have Twitter updates, email or weather updated live on the lock screen if you so desire.

HTC Watch is HTC’s movie delivery service. You can buy or rent movies from within the Watch application and once download starts you can commence watching the movie within 10 seconds while the rest of the content downloads in the background. In practice I guess this will be dependent upon connection speeds. Movies will can either be purchased in-app or via carrier billing depending upon the carrier setup.

There’s obviously so much more to talk about with the HTC Sensation so I hope to have some hands on video online shortly after the press conference finishes.

The full specification and more images can be found below. We’ll have our HTC Sensation Review online as soon as we can get our hands on one. I can’t wait!

HTC Sensation specification:

Processor: Qualcomm MSM 8260 1.2 GHz dual-core
Platform: Android Gingerbread 2.3.3 with HTC Sense
Memory: Internal phone storage: 1 GB
RAM: 768 MB
Dimensions: (LxWxT) 126.1 x 65.4 x 11.3 mm
Weight: 148 grams
Display: 4.3-inch touch SLCD screen with 540 x 960 resolution, Gorilla glass
HSPA/WCDMA Europe/Asia: 900/AWS/2100 MHz Upload speed of up to 5.76 Mbps and download speed of up to 14.4 Mbps
GPS: Internal GPS antenna
Sensors: Gyro sensor, G-Sensor, Digital compass, Proximity sensor & Ambient light sensor
3.5 mm stereo audio jack
Bluetooth 3.0 with FTP/OPP for file transfer, A2DP for wireless stereo headsets, and PBAP for phonebook access from the car kit
Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11b/g/n
DLNA for wirelessly streaming media from the phone to your TV or computer.
Micro-USB port with mobile high-definition video link (MHL) for USB or HDMI connection
Camera: 8 megapixel colour camera with auto focus and dual LED flash, 1080p HD video recording
VGA front camera
Audio supported formats Playback: .aac, .amr, .ogg, .m4a, .mid, .mp3, .wav, .wma (Windows Media Audio 9)
Video supported formats Playback: .3gp, .3g2, .mp4, .wmv (Windows Media Video 9), .avi (MP4 ASP and MP3), .xvid (MP4 ASP and MP3)
Battery: Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery Capacity: 1520 mAh
Talking time: Up to 400 minutes for WCDMA and up to 495 minutes for GSM
Standby time: Up to 400 hours for WCDMA and up to 350 hours for GSM
Expansion slot: microSDT memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)