They say music soothes even the savage beast. In the case of the HTC Sensation XL, it just makes it cooler. The Sensation XL shares its design and mammoth 4.7" screen with the Titan, but the XL is part of the Android squad and packs a lyrical iBeats headset.
The Sensation XL uses almost exactly the same hardware as the Titan - the major difference is that the XL packs four Android capacitive keys and there's no hardware shutter key, but that's about it.
The single Scorpion core in the Snapdragon chipset runs at 1.5GHz again and the camera is an 8MP unit that records 720p video. Even the screen is the same 4.7" WVGA S-LCD unit, not the qHD resolution of the Sensation XE.
Here's the list of pros and cons to sum up how well the merging of Titan hardware and Sensation software went.
Key features
Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
4.7" 16M-color capacitive S-LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread with HTC Sense 3.5
1.5 GHz single Scorpion CPUs, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 chipset
768 MB RAM; 16 GB storage (~12.5GB user accessible)
Beats audio enhancement and premium Monster iBeats headset
8 MP autofocus camera with dual-LED flash; face detection, geotagging, HDR mode, image autoupload
720p video recording @ 30fps, slo-mo videos (2x at WVGA)
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
GPS with A-GPS
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Accelerometer, proximity and ambient light sensor
Front facing camera with video calls
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v3.0
Smart dialing, voice dialing
Office document editor
DivX/XviD video support
HTC Locations app
HTCSense.com integration
HTC Portable Hotspot
Ultra-fast boot times (if you don’t remove battery)
Retail box
The Sensation XL comes in a big box, befitting a big phone. When you open it up, you see the phone in the middle with the earplugs of the iBeats headset on its sides. The headset is courtesy of Monster and is slightly different than the retail version: it has a set of three chrome-plated music controls instead of a single button. The middle Play/Pause button doubles as a call key.
The S-LCD capacitive unit of the HTC Sensation XL has WVGA resolution and not qHD, which has been a common sight of late in HTC phones. It was obviously not an option for the Titan (WP7 supports only WVGA for now) but Android scales happily to higher resolutions (720p resolution would have been amazing on the XL's screen).
To put things into perspective, the HTC Sensation XE's 4.3" touchscreen has a pixel density of 256ppi, while the XL manages only 199ppi.
Yes, the screen size is quite a stretch for the resolution. This is most embarrassingly visible when reading text (e.g. in the web browser). Text is as good as impossible to read at max zoom-out - you need to zoom in, but that means you lose some of the real-estate advantage that the large screen gives you.
Resolution aside, the screen is one of the best we've seen by HTC - it has brilliant viewing angles (there's some minor contrast loss, but that's it) and colors are very vivid.
There's a patch of plastic at the bottom, which houses the wireless antennas. The antennas are well isolated and don't suffer from the death grip. The only downside of this solution is that all wireless signals are cut off when you take the back cover off.
Anyway, underneath you'll find a 1600 Li-Ion battery and the SIM card compartment. There's no microSD card slot here.
The battery could have been bigger, for reference the Sensation XE packs a 1730mAh battery (though it needs it to feed its dual-core CPU).
We performed a detailed battery test on the HTC Sensation XL and it lasted 40 hours when subjected to general usage. The battery lived long in 3G calls - 9 hours and 30 minutes, longer than the advertised 6 hours and 50 minutes. The Sensation XL lasts 5 hours and 20 minutes of web browsing over Wi-Fi and 6 hours and 10 minutes of video watching.
Those numbers compare favorably against the competition, except the video playing performance, which is 2-3 hours behind the leaders of the pack.
The HTC Sensation XL fits well in the hand in most pockets. Still, the sizable screen means you'll have trouble reaching the top items on the display, at least at first. You get used to it but still isn't the most comfortable thing in the world.
This aside, the build quality of the XL is great - the large slab of aluminum on the back gives the phone a premium feel and even the white plastic for the antennas is great. The phone is a bit on the heavy side, but it's not too much of a burden.
Beats Audio enhances the music player
The music player has been updated a bit - the initial screen has two big buttons for My Library and My Playlists, with links under them to help you discover new music (album and singles chart, newly released albums and singles and so on).
The standard view for My Library is the Artists section, but you can easily switch to one of the other six categories (Albums, Songs, Playlists, Genres, and Genres) through a drop-down menu.
Another dropdown at the top of the initial screen lets you switch between the music library on the phone and DLNA media servers.
The 8MP camera is better than Titan's
The HTC Sensation XL packs an 8MP camera that does stills of up to 3264x2448 pixels and records 720p video @ 30fps. There’s a dual-LED flash / video light too.
The camera interface is very space efficient - even more so after the Sense 3.5 update. Most of the controls are on the right side of the viewfinder, with the virtual shutter in the center. The still/video toggle and front/back camera toggles have been combined in a single menu and the Effects button has been moved to the top left corner - this freed up space for the Scenes and Settings button.
