HTC Sensation XE Review

Presenting the Sensation XE, HTC’s attempt at reviving the former''s name and this time they’ve come with reinforcements from Beats Audio. To give them some credit, at least they haven't thrown in a faster CPU and called it a day unlike some (yes, I’m talking to you, Xperia Arc S). The original Sensation was HTC’s first dual-core phone and amazing build quality aside, it was plagued with death grip issues and many people had their screens fail on them a few months down the line, not something a company wishes for their flagship handset. With some tweaks under the hood and above, the XE takes the spot of the former but is this new avatar a worthy change? Let’s find out.

On video: The HTC Sensation XE

The XE has packed on a few pounds due to the larger battery and now weighs 151g. All the ports are where you expect them to be, the power and 3.5mm audio jack sit on top while the volume rocker and USB port are on the sides. To insert the SIM and battery, the entire outer chassis snaps off, speaker grill and everything.

Red capacitive buttons go well with the screen

The screen also has a lacquer finish which makes the colours pop a little. HTC have gone with the same S-LCD screen with a 960 x 540 pixel resolution so it’s not ‘retina’ sharp but better than say, the S II.  

Features
Interface
The Sensation XE comes with Android 2.3.4 and rather disappointingly, Sense 3.0. Given this is a brand new product, we were expecting Sense 3.5, like the Rhyme, which is a lot better. Hopefully HTC will release an update for it along with ICS. The XE uses the same Qualcomm MSM8260 chipset, only this time, it runs at its default 1.5GHz instead of 1.2GHz. That, and coupled with 768MB of RAM, the phone is incredibly quick and fluid. AnTuTu gave us a score of 4738 whereas Linpack revealed a single threaded score of 55.3 and a multi-thread score of 72.2.

Sense UI never fails to impress

There isn’t too much of a difference in the interface between the old phone and this one since it’s more or less identical. It would have been nice had HTC thrown in a Beats skin or theme to go with the rest of the phone, but they haven’t. Thankfully, we didn’t face any death grip issues or trouble with the screen this time around so we’ll take for granted that HTC has sorted out the Sensation's problems.


Media
This category is the main focus of the XE, audio playback, and it does live up to that in a way. The stock earphones are replaced by the iBeats from Beats Audio with a slightly redesigned in-line control system. The in-ear phones are quite comfortable and manage to block out most of the ambient noise thanks to high quality silicon ear tips. A small side effect however is that you can’t wear them for hours on end as you will inevitably get a headache with all that pounding bass. Compared to a Creative EP630, they sound louder as the treble and bass gets a boost. Along with the Beats earphones, there’s a Beats enhancement in the music and audio player that automatically kicks in once you start playing. The rest of the player is the standard one you get in Sense 3.0 so we won’t go too much into detail on that.

Let the 'beat' rock

The video player also gets the same Beats treatment and along with MP4, it also reads AVI files. Unfortunately, we found that some SD AVI files didn’t play smoothly. This is an issue with Sense 3.0 since the very same file played butter smooth on the Rhyme. 1080p MP4 and AVI play back just fine but the stock player won’t read certain audio codecs so that can be a problem. Overall, the Beats preset adds good spatial separation to the sound which is most apparent in videos.