I call this a momentous occasion because the phone, despite all of its shortcomings, has finished its tour of duty honorably. That is to say, it didn't die before its time and is retiring in perfect working order. Both the phone and I breathed a collective sigh of relief. Because frankly speaking, this happy ending isn't at all expected.
I confess that I am partially to blame. I dropped it on hard asphalt at least half a dozen times. What can I say? If my hands are dry, this phone becomes as slippery as an eel in my palm. But to its credit, the phone takes a licking and keeps on ticking. Not once did the enclosure crack open or fly apart as it hits the ground. Samsung and Apple users WISH their phones could take this kind of punishment.
But, despite the toughness, the Sensation just isn't a good smart phone. Its main rival at the time, the iPhone 4S, will eat it for breakfast, spit it out, then eat it again for lunch. This is highly unfortunate, because things don't have to be that way. If Peter & Cher went the extra mile during the design stage, the result would have been very different.
Fast foward to 2013. HTC is now neck-deep in dog doo doo. Looking at its flagship device from 2011, it's easy for an armchair CEO like myself to point out that the Sensation marked the beginning of the end for HTC. Before Sensation, there were no defeats. After Sensation, there were no victories.
Knocking the Sensation is easy, so let's start with Sense. Sense is bloatware. Pure and simple. It harks back from the dark days of Windows Mobile, and by the time it evolved into its form on Ice Cream Sandwich, it had become an elephant. It's nice to look at, but is about as responsive as a dead fish. For some odd reason, HTC just can't lock that piece of software in memory. At a certain point, the process will be booted out of its memory space, as some other DRAM-hungry apps take over.
The result of this is dire. If you hit the Home button after a heavy browsing session, Sense needs to be restarted. Every time this happens, and it happens all the time, 45 seconds of my life is flushed down the toilet. I cannot effectively convey in words how annoying this problem is. Worse still, this issue is neither new nor isolated. In early 2012, Engadget ran a scathing article and asked HTC to fix it in a not-so-polite fashion.
HTC's response? Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis.
But that's just a start. After a few months of ownership, I discovered that the phone would reboot itself for no good reason. This behavior is completely random. Sometimes, 3 times a day. Sometimes, none. I was so baffled by this problem, I took the time to examine every single process running in the background and tried every possible software fix under the sun. Nothing helped.
In the end, I managed to overcome both of these issues. Sense sucked, so I installed another launcher (Go Launcher EX). As for random reboot, I came across the "final solution" after a all-night Google session.
Yeah. You gotta love HTC quaity
And so, HTC has commited two mortal sins. One, HTC demonstrates zero intention to fix its own problems. Second, HTC fully expects its users to find solutions to these problems on their own. It's a wonderful strategy and works great for Microsoft. Unfortunately, no one other than Microsoft has ever gotten away with committing these sins.
But wait, there is more. The Sensation comes with 768MB worth of RAM. Its main Android rival, Samsung Galaxy S2, has 1GB. 25% may not sound like a whole lot, but when Google rolled out Ice Cream Sandwich, the deficiency in RAM began to rear its ugly head. If you have more than few widgets running, the device would run slower than a comatose slug. No browser, be it Chrome or AOSP, could run quickly or smoothly. This facilitated my decision to remove virtually all widgets and limit the number of home pages to two.
And therein lies the third mortal sin. The obvious motive behind the decision to not equip the device with proper amount of RAM was to shave a few bucks off material cost. And in my humble opinion, this decision has extracted a toll way beyond the initial savings. The user experience just isn't very good.
HTC's next big product refresh was the One X. By then, the habit of shortsightedness and general laziness had settled in nicely within the company. The One X was plagued with a plethora of quality issues. Samsung's Galaxy S3, a very apologetically plastic phone, slapped the One X around like a cheap hooker in the market. A few months later, Apple rolled out the iPhone 5. Things just couldn't get any better.
So now, thanks to its former sins, HTC is fighting for its very survival. While I find the New One to be an extremely desirable device, my mind cannot get over the general suckiness of its predecessors. So this time around, I decided to take my business elsewhere. But I can say with a fair degree of certainty, had Peter & Cher stuffed the Sensation with 2GB of RAM and loaded it up with stock Android, things might have turned out differently.
Very differently.
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