HTC 2011 event coverage: A new Sensation

HTC Meetup event

We also attended the HTC Meetup - the consumer event held by HTC to get fans together to showcase their latest dual-core Sensation. Best of all, everyone was invited.

HTC Meetup April 2011

Besides mingling with the present HTC fans we also used the opportunity to spend some more quality time with the HTC Sensation. We even ran the Quadrant benchmark on it but the poor thing obviously was not up to the task (probably due to the pre-release software which still referred to the device as 'Pyramid'). We'll obviously have to wait for the Sensation to hit retail status to get a meaningful and comparable result that truly reflects its performance. And it is a snappy bugger.

HTC Sensation runs on Android 2.3.3 but doesn't fare well on Quadrant at this stage

As previously mentioned along with the HTC Sensation, HTC also announced their new HTC Watch service. It's essentially an on-demand video service for renting or buying films to watch on your HTC device. It comes complete with a full video marketplace where you can browse items, watch trailers, queue downloads and of course watch movies via an interface that's fast to use and good to look at.

HTC Watch service

Here's the HTC Gallery app. Looks a little more like stock Android, funnily enough; at least when browsing whole albums.

HTC Sense Gallery

The greatest novelty of HTC Sense 3 is the active lockscreen that can show real-time information regarding weather, stocks, friends and so on.

The new HTC Sense 3.0 lockscreen

Other than that, the HTC Sense homescreen and it's Weather and Friends Stream apps are not that different from before.

HTC homescreen • Weather widget • Friends Stream widget