Taiwanese mobile manufacturer HTC has been living up to its company slogan, "Quietly brilliant", over the last three years, delivering some of the world's finest mobile telephones during a period when smartphone technology has become a fully-fledged part of everyday life for many people. HTC's market share in the hugely lucrative global mobile industry has gone from nothing to 2.6 per cent in just three years and the company's growth is set to receive a further boost following the launch of the HTC Sensation.
Arriving as the successor to the HTC Pyramid, the Sensation is the latest HTC phone to carry Google's Android operating system - the current platform of choice for 29 per cent of mobile users. With Apple launching the iPhone 5 later this year and a number of manufacturers pushing the Windows Phone 7 platform, HTC are one of the major flag bearers for Android, and Google will be hoping the Sensation lives up to its name.
Available from mid-May, the HTC is arriving considerably earlier than the iPhone 5, which is expected around September time. However, the Sensation will only be available to Vodafone customers.
The specification of the Sensation is impressive. A 1.2 GHz dual core Snapdragon processor powers the handset, which boasts a 4.3 inch QHD contoured glass screen, with a 16:9 aspect ratio. HTC has become known for offering mobile users plenty of on-screen space and the Sensation is no exception.
A hefty four gigabytes of on board memory should be more than enough for most users but HTC have thrown in an extra eight gigabytes on the Sensation’s memory card, making it highly unlikely that you’ll ever run out of space on which to store pictures and movies. Which brings us smoothly onto one of the Sensation’s specialities – video.
An 8-megapixel camera on the rear of the device is capable of taking 1080p, high definition videos, while a 1.2 megapixel camera on the front makes the HTC video call ready. A number of brand new features make the HTC Sensation really stand out from its peers and one of them is the video editing capability of the phone. With a simple slide of a finger, you can trim sections off videos you have taken in a matter of seconds and share them with your friends via social media.
It’s not just your own videos that you’ll be enjoying on your HTC Sensation, should you choose to buy one. The HTC Watch on-demand film service is included with the phone, making it easy to purchase, download and watch movies from all over the world in the palm of your hand.
All of these features are easily accessible thanks to HTC’s revamped user interface, HTC Sense. The new version allows users to drag and drop applications at their leisure to re-arrange, open and close them, and the interface as a whole feels that bit more 3D than it did on earlier models.
If the HTC Sensation is to fail to continue the manufacturer’s superb run of popularity this year, it will take a mammoth effort from the likes of major competitors like Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Apple.