HTC Sensation XL Initial Impressions

When HTC bought into Beats by Dr. Dre, they announced two smartphones that were integrated and bundled with Beats earphones. The first was the HTC Sensation XE and the second one was a bigger (and whiter) HTC Sensation XL which has a massive 4.7″ screen. We currently have a review unit of the HTC Sensation XL with us. We’ll share first our initial impressions as well as photos and we’ll follow this up with a full and comprehensive review after a week or so of heavy use.

It’s big…

One thing you’ll notice the moment you see this in the flesh is that it’s big! Here’s a photo of the HTC Sensation XL beside the HTC Desire S. The 4.7″ screen really stands out.

But it’s not as big as the…

Samsung Galaxy Note. The Note has a 5.3″ screen so it’s bigger by half an inch.

The HTC Sensation XL’s 4.7″ screen has 480×800 pixels resolution which translates to ~199 ppi pixel density. It boils down to personal preference but I really would have preferred better resolution especially since I got spoiled with the iPhone 4’s Retina Display (~330 ppi pixel density) and later on with the Samsung Galaxy Note’s Super AMOLED (~285 ppi pixel density). Don’t get me wrong though — it still looks great. I just wanted more, hehe 😛

In terms of hardware design the HTC Sensation XL looks beautiful. The clean white with the metallic silver accent gives it a premium and elegant presence. It’s not your usual black smartphone. This is definitely one of those phones that was made to attract attention.

In terms of software the HTC Sensation XL runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread with HTC Sense 3.5 UI. It runs pretty smoothly and fast thanks to the 1.5GHz Scorpion CPU. It also has 768MB RAM.

Beats!

The real selling point of the HTC Sensation XL is that it comes bundled with earphones from Beats by Dr. Dre. The phone also has a customized sound profile that gets activated when you use any Beats product. When you plug-in the earphones and go to the music player the Beats logo appears at the top of the screen.

We’ll write more about the sound quality when we get more time listening to different kinds of tracks this week. Obviously though the earphones, phone, and sound profile are meant for bass-heavy and driven songs like Hip Hop and RNB. And yes, there’s a massive improvement compared to the usual stock white earphones that you get with your iPhone or iPod.

The iBeats also have an in-line remote control and mic.

Full review coming soon

Please do watch out for our full review this week. We really do need more time with it to come up with a fair and good review. Lastly, I’ll edit this post tomorrow when I get the official SRP as well as availability (on where you can buy) from HTC Philippines.

If you have any requests for the review, please leave a comment below.