review You’ve probably heard of Beats By Dr Dre by now. What you may not have heard is that HTC recently invested several suitcases worth of cash into the company, to the tune of a reported $300 million, for the rights to use its audio technology in HTC smartphones. The HTC Sensation XL and XE are the first fruits of that labour, and they’re both available today exclusive to Vodafone.

The first one we’re reviewing is the HTC Sensation XL, a music-oriented smartphone with a jumbo-sized 4.7” display, 16GB of internal storage, and bundled Beats Solo headphones. It’s a strong mix of features that results in one of the most appealing smartphones that HTC has released to date, but is it impressive enough to take on the iPhone 4S and other top-shelf smartphones? Read on to find out.

Design
“A 4.7” screen? Surely that’s too big for a smartphone?” That was our first thought when we heard about the Sensation XL, but turns out it’s not as wide as we thought it would be. It’s actually quite nice in the hand thanks to the smoothly rounded edges, giving it the illusion of being a lot narrower than 70.7mm. Of course, it doesn’t have the perfectly-proportioned hand-to-screen-size ratio that the iPhone supposedly has, but it’s not that much wider than phones with a 4.3” display. Off-hand, we couldn’t tell the difference between the width of the Motorola RAZR and Sensation XL, although the former is slightly narrower at 68.9mm.

The Sensation XL is the best-looking HTC phone we’ve seen, and we’d argue that it’s up there as one of the most attractive Android phones as well. The pure white front is reminiscent of the iPhone 4/4S and iPad 2, with silver accents that wrap around to the back to take up the majority of the rear casing. The extra space afforded by the larger display has enabled HTC’s engineers to spread the internal components thinner, and the Sensation XL is actually the company’s thinnest smartphone yet at just a hair under 1cm. It’s also surprisingly light at 162g – the 4.3” HTC Evo 3D is heavier at 170g.

The rest of the phone’s design is pretty standard. On the front, there are four capacitive buttons below the screen, an indicator light above the screen that flashes green when you have a new notification, and a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera. The top houses a 3.5mm headphone jack and the sleep/power button, and the volume buttons (housed underneath a thin silver slab) are on the right. The microUSB port is on the left, and the rear houses the dual LED flash, eight-megapixel camera and speaker. Behind the rear casing, you’ll find the 1600mAh battery and SIM card slot, but sadly no microSD card slot.

Features
The earphones that come bundled with smartphones have gotten a lot better in the last few years, but the Sensation XL bumps it up several notches with the inclusion of Beats Solo over-the-ear headphones. These are a special edition that have been tuned to specifically match the Beat Audio sound profile on the Sensation XL, but if you were to buy the regular Beats Solo headphones, you’d be looking at an RRP of $300. They’re smaller than a regular set of headphones, so even if you’re not usually the headphone-wearing type, you may not mind wearing these out in public. Of course, it helps that they’re seriously stylish, with a white paintjob to match the Sensation XL, red-on-silver Beats logo on each ear, and a distinctive red cable.

While these come free in the box, HTC has had to cut some corners in other areas to compensate. The XL is less powerful than the original HTC Sensation, opting for a single-core 1.5GHz processor (with the same 768MB of RAM) and a lower-res 800 x 480 screen. This is the same display resolution that HTC uses on its mid-range 3.7” smartphones – a pixel density that looks normal on the smaller screens but results in extra-large text, buttons and other GUI elements on the Sensation XL. The up-side is that if your eyes aren’t what they used to be, this is something you’ll actually appreciate, and it makes the on-screen keyboard easier to type on.

The Sensation XL runs the latest version of Android (2.3.5) as well as the latest HTC Sense 3.5 graphics, and HTC has announced that it will be providing an upgrade to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) next year. It also supports Vodafone’s new 850MHz 3G network, along with the standard 900/2100 UMTS bands. Among other things, the HTC Sense adds a few tweaks to the Android interface that makes the phone better to use as a music player. There’s a custom Music app that lets you browse through tracks from the Now Playing screen by swiping the album art, download cover art directly from Gracenote, set tracks as ringtones and share them, and there are music widgets in the notification window, homescreen and lockscreen. The Sensation XL also comes HTC Sync desktop software (PC and Mac) that lets you sync music and playlists from iTunes.

HTC has also made some strides in the camera department. The Sensation XL is the first HTC phone (that we know of) to offer a backside-illuminated sensor, similar to the one found on the iPhone 4/4S. The camera app is fast to startup and snap a photo, and there are dozens of settings to tweak, along with a variety of scene modes and fun special effects that you can apply before or after the shot is taken. We were able to get some nice shots from the camera, including some interesting depth of field (albeit with extremely unattractive bokeh), but the auto white balance isn’t particularly good at judging the lighting (you’ll have to set the white balance yourself for best results), and we noticed a distinct red bias in all our shots.

Performance
The big question is, does the combination of the Beats Solo headphones and the Beats Audio sound profile on the HTC Sensation XL really make a difference? We listened to the same songs on the Sensation XL and an iPhone 4S through the Beats Solo headphones, and while there wasn’t much of a difference for many tracks, the Beats Audio sound technology (a mixture of hardware and software enhancements) springs to life whenever you chuck a little bass at it. Electronic music and R&B/Hip-hop tracks is where you’ll hear the difference most – on the Sensation XL, the bass was a couple of notches boomier compared to the iPhone 4S, with a not unpleasant throbbing in each headphone cup whenever the bass gets especially deep.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that the Beats Audio enhancements apply to sound out of the headphone jack only. Output from the external speaker, which is located on the rear next to the camera, is very ordinary. At maximum volume, it’s actually not that loud, and it’s almost completely lacking in bass. Similarly, the speakerphone and earpiece could do with a couple of extra levels in the volume output, although what does come out is clear.

If you’re wondering whether Vodafone’s 850MHz network is any better than its 2100MHz network for 3G data, our tests (which are by no means comprehensive and only slightly scientific) showed that there was a little improvement, but it still trailed behind the Optus and Telstra networks by a wide margin.

The Sensation XL also performed remarkably well in our benchmarks. Its Quadrant score of 2030 is only slightly behind the score of the original HTC Sensation (which has a dual-core 1.2GHz processor), and it actually beat it in GL Benchmark (which tests a phone’s graphics performance) and Rightware Browsermark (which measures browser performance using a range of JavaScript and HTML rendering tests).

Battery life was a pleasant surprise. The 1600mAh battery isn’t especially large, but with medium usage (consisting of five text messages, five photos, 1.5 hours of web browsing over Wi-Fi, 1.5 hours of browsing over 3G, five phone calls of five minutes each, 30 minutes of playing music, and intermittent email checking throughout the day), we were able to stretch the HTC Sensation XL’s run-time to an amazing 34 hours and 22 minutes. This is an extraordinary result that outpaces every other smartphone we’ve reviewed recently by a good 10 hours.

Conclusion
To say we liked this phone would be an understatement. The HTC Sensation XL gets so many things right – the gorgeous hardware design, awesome Beats Audio technology (and bundled Beats Solo headphones) and excellent battery life – that it makes its shortcomings (namely the low-res screen, lack of microSD expansion and weak external speaker) easier to forgive.

Still, the limitation to 16GB of internal storage is a big strike against it that may be a deal-breaker for many music lovers. We’d love to see a version of this phone with either more internal storage or microSD expansion (and ideally both), and at the rate that HTC is churning out smartphones, we wouldn’t be surprised if just such a device was announced within the next couple of months.

The HTC Sensation XL is available exclusively from Vodafone for $5 per month for the handset on the $59 Cap over 24 months.

Jenneth Orantia turned her back on a lucrative career in law to pursue her unhealthy obsession with consumer technology. She’s known for having at least half a dozen of the latest gadgets on her person at a time, and once won a bottle of Dom Perignon for typing 78WPM on a Pocket PC with a stylus.

Image credit: HTC

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1. Aryan
   Posted 09/11/2011 at 2:02 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Another very nice, succinct but thorough review. Thanks Jenneth, and it’s also nice to see feedback taken onboard so quickly!

   Just out of interest, considering the number of reviews you’ve been doing recently, how long do you use a phone before writing a review? And do you use it as your primary/only phone during this period?

2. Jenneth Orantia
   Posted 09/11/2011 at 3:48 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Thanks Aryan. I try to use phones for at least a week before writing the review and usually use it as my primary phone as well.

3. Jenneth Orantia
   Posted 09/11/2011 at 3:53 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Also, I’m not sure how accurate BrowserMark is? I’ve just tried running it again twice on the HTC Sensation XL and got two very different scores: 67076 and 85319. And it’s giving me different results on other smartphones as well!

   • Aryan
     Posted 10/11/2011 at 10:00 am | Permalink | Reply

     This is strange. I haven’t personally observed it. I’ll run BrowserMark a few time today on different devices and see if I get any discrepancies.

4. Grant
   Posted 09/11/2011 at 4:08 pm | Permalink | Reply

   I think the article should have said 900/2100MHz bands. 1900MHz UMTS isn’t used in Australia.

   • Jenneth Orantia
     Posted 10/11/2011 at 10:04 am | Permalink | Reply

     You’re right, that’s a typo, should be 900MHz

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 14/11/2011 at 1:06 am | Permalink | Reply

     Fixed :)

5. John
   Posted 09/11/2011 at 7:50 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Does the phone get warm after a while?

   • Jenneth Orantia
     Posted 10/11/2011 at 10:05 am | Permalink | Reply

     No, I haven’t noticed that.

6. Ngoc Dao
   Posted 14/11/2011 at 12:05 am | Permalink | Reply

   my phone gets a bit hot after using a short time, i don’t like the keyboard and its a bit complicated for me. i think the iPhone is way better since it has simple and friendly design.

7. Ash
   Posted 28/11/2011 at 2:24 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Any idea if this phone will become available on other networks?

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 28/11/2011 at 2:42 pm | Permalink | Reply

     It’s not scheduled to, but you can probably get it unlocked from a third-party retailer.

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