It looks like that investment of $300 million that HTC put into the Beats Audio company is already starting to pay off. HTC will launch their HTC Sensation XE with Beats Audio and Beats by Dre headsets as soon as this month in Europe, Asia, Africa and Middle East.
The HTC Sensation XE will have, besides the Beats Audio, a dual core 1.5 Ghz Qualcomm processor, which is a first in HTC’s phones, a 4.3″ display with a qHD 960×540 resolution, a large 1730 mAh battery, which is also a nice trend for HTC, because they’ve historically put small batteries in their phones, and a 8GB internal storage, along with a 16 GB SD card. It obviously has a lot more storage than HTC’s usually devices because you’ll need it to store your music. Last but not least, it will come with Android 2.3 on board.
As I mentioned, its most exciting feature is the Beats Audio and the Beats by Dre headsets. Once these headphones are plugged in, the phone will automatically activate a Beats-optimized sound profile that, according to HTC, will deliver fuller bass, sharper vocals and broader range.
It’s nice that HTC isn’t completely falling behind Samsung, and they try to still innovate and bring interesting features to market, and give people real reasons why they might want their phones over the phones of the competitors.
Lately HTC’s phones have become a little stale, their designs looking almost the same, although their build quality is always solid now, but still a bit uninspiring. HTC needs to go back creating exciting products, and not just to improve costs and sell basically the same phone all over the world and in multiple colors. If they release a white version, it should always be in the same time with the black one, and not a few months later, with the same specs, just to boost the sales a bit more for that phone.
I figure HTC Sensation XE’s main competition for audiophiles will be Sony Ericsson’s Live with Walkman Android smartphone, because Sony has always had the Walkman phones that have been great for music.
The price for HTC Sensation XE hasn’t been announced yet, and neither has its availability in North America, but I figure it will be named something different there anyway, depending on the carrier.