HTC Sensation vs Samsung i9100 Galaxy S II

Well, as some of you know I was planning on getting the HTC Sensation although I had completely forgotten about the Samsung Galaxy 2 until it was brought up this weekend. Originally when hearing about the two phones I said to myself that I will wait and see closer to the time although since I am more of a HTC fan as opposed to a Samsung fan I was kind of leaning towards the HTC... Fine, I lied. I was heavily leaning towards the HTC.



My experiences with Samsung phones have been very poor. Had one quite a few years back and it just packed up for no apparent reason. Then have had many family members get Samsung's and majority just did not last long before breaking, had friends who have had Samsung and also they had very little to no luck with them. The only Samsung which has lasted is my aunt's Samsung D600 although she has an HTC which she uses majority of the time anyways.

So back on topic. So the Samsung was brought up this weekend I quickly went and took a look of the phones and compared the two of them. The one thing which I noticed straight away as the page loaded with the specs was the look of the Samsung - Extremely ugly in my opinion! Looks like a bit of a deformed, failed iPhone 4. Then I started comparing the specs which are not tooo different. Here is a brief outline:

HTC Sensation

• Display: 4.3" S-LCD Capacitive touchscreen, 16M colours and has a qHD resolution of 540 x 960 pixels.
• Memory: Internal - 1GB, 768MB RAM - MicroSD card slot upto 32GB, 8GB included.
• Data:  3G HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps, WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, microUSB (MHL) v2.0.
• Camera: 8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus, dual-LED flash. Video Recording: 1080p@30fps, stereo sound recording. Secondary Camera: VGA
• OS: Android v2.3 (Gingerbread)
• CPU: 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm MSM 8260 Snapdragon
• Battery:  Standard battery, Li-Ion 1520 mAh

Samsung i9100 Galaxy S II 

• Display: 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen, 16M colours and has a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels.
• Memory: Internal - 16GB/3GB, 1GB RAM - MicroSD card slot upto 32GB, 8GB included.
• Data: 3G HSDPA, 21 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps, WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot, microUSB (MHL) v2.0, USB On-the-go.
• Camera: 8 MP, 3264x2448 pixels, autofocus, LED flash. Video Recording: 1080p@30fps Secondary Camera: 2MP 
• OS: Android v2.3 (Gingerbread)
• CPU: 1.2GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 proccessor, Mali-400MP GPU, Orion chipset
• Battery: Standard battery, Li-Ion 1650 mAh

So as you can see the HTC has a better resolution, dual LED flash and stereo sound recording. Other than that the Samsung is better. More internal memory, more RAM, better HSUPA supported speeds, USB on-the-go (Very nifty useful feature), the processor is more powerful and even a better battery and it has an AMOLED screen as opposed to the S-LCD. The HTC has an Aluminium "uni-body" construction where the Samsung has a plain, boring plastic body construction.

So the Samsung is slightly better than the HTC and I think it would be a bit silly to go for the HTC over the Samsung if you have a choice between these two phones. I would not sacrifice looks for performance in this case. I would prefer an aluminum body and qHD resolution but will trade that for the other better features the Samsung i9100 Galaxy S II boasts (CPU, battery, screen, memory).

So it will probably be the Samsung i9100 Galaxy S II I will be getting after my N8 and the looks of the Samsung and the fact that it is a Samsung will most likely have me trading it in for something better when I get the opportunity to, perhaps a Windows Phone 7 phone towards to the end of the year - we shall see what the hardware and software is like at the time.

Here is a video comparing the two phones which show you the difference in screens and the person runs a benchmark showing that the Samsung has a more powerful processor.



View on YouTube