HTC Sensation 4G for T-Mobile Reviewed

Vellamo – Web Benchmark (Rendering, Javascript, User Experience and Networking)

Vellamo is a benchmark created by Qualcomm’s QuIC team to help users evaluate the web worthiness of their mobile devices. It was originally created internally for Qualcomm as a good benchmark of performance but was then released to the public for widespread use. This also gives Qualcomm the ability to collect data and to acquire more accurate measurements. Vellamo has multiple tests that it runs in order to create the composite score, which is a combination of some HTML5 rendering, Javascript (Sunspider and V8), Graphical Bandwidth, Networking and User Experience (scrolling, flicking, etc.). Based on our score of 873, we found that the HTC Sensation actually scores higher than itself (on Qualcomm’s benchmark).

Such a result is probably because the device that Qualcomm used as a benchmark was running Android 2.3.3. and not 2.3.4. This means that this consumer device is scoring on par with expectations and outperforming many other competitors’ dual core devices by a significant margin. Some may believe that this test could be Qualcomm biased since Qualcomm developed the test and this phone has a Qualcomm SoC in it. This could be true to a certain degree, but many of the tests in the suite were not even developed by Qualcomm and many of them are agnostic to the manufacturer of the processor. It should also be noted that the fastest device in Vellamo’s benchmarks isn’t even a Qualcomm based device, further casting doubt on a pro-Qualcomm bias.

SpeedTest – Internet throughput, ping, signal strength

SpeedTest itself is not a benchmark but we did combine SpeedTest with a measurement of the given signal strength at that moment to attempt to benchmark the connectivity/speed of the device in terms of HSPA+.
Looking at our speeds and signal strength we see that even at marginal signal strength we were able to attain 7.3Mbps down and 3.3Mbps up. This is all accomplished with a ping of 83 which is still within the bounds of acceptability for gaming. We did not attempt to tether the device to our computer for gaming as this was never touted as a feature, but we may explore it in a future article.

LuaPi –Memory performance

LuaPi is a simple measurement of how quickly the device can compute Pi (amount of digits not known). It will compute Pi as many times as you ask it to and it will continue to create a running average of your speeds. Based on this, it appears to take just under 2.7 seconds to calculate Pi. We will continue to use this benchmark in the future to compare devices against each other when measuring memory performance. This will also be based upon how much memory bandwidth is available which will be dependent upon the frequency of the memory and the amount of available memory. We ran LuaPi 10 times in all of our tests and our HTC G2 got an average of 3.4 seconds which is a little slower than the Sensation, primarily because the Sensation has a 768MB of RAM versus the G2’s 512MB of RAM. This represents 50% more RAM in the Sensation over the G2. However, the Sensation is also running HTC Sense UI which does take up more system resources including RAM.