HTC Sensation vs. Samsung Galaxy S II comparison review

It's not an exaggeration to say that the HTC Sensation and Samsung Galaxy S II are two of the most interesting Android handsets of the year so far. These premium smartphones offer the latest dual-core processors, impressive displays and outstanding access to the internet, apps and multimedia.

Is there a winner, though? Could we take these two phones, pit them against one another and decide which one is best for the majority of people?

Price
When it comes to financial matters, there isn't much to choose between these phones. SIM-free they both sit at the very top end of mobile handsets. Only the iPhone costs more out of contract.

The HTC Sensation is £461 at the time of writing and the Galaxy S II is £424. Both are available on any UK network (the HTC Sensation was a Vodafone exclusive for the first month or so).

To get these phones for 'free' you'd need to sign up for a 24-month contract at around £30 per month. So excluding any out-of-tariff extras, the total cost of ownership would be £720 on a contract (one great reason to buy a SIM-free phone, and get a cheap month-by-month tariff).

Purely based on the current selling price on Amazon UK, the Galaxy S II is the winner here. It's also got slightly better specs, which we'll go into next.

Technical specifications
Both phones use dual-core processors. Samsung's is an A9 Cortex and HTC's is a Qualcomm Snapdragon. Both also have GPUs to speed up graphics-heavy applications. In terms of RAM, the Samsung leads again, with 1GB and HTC trails with 768MB.

For internal storage, we noted in our HTC Sensation review that HTC supplies a pretty mean 1GB. This is where your apps are stored, so we are a little concerned that heavy users might fill this to capacity.

While there is now the option to move apps to an SD card, not all cards support it and it can still cause a problem. On the plus side, HTC does provide an 8GB MircoSD card with the phone, which is the same size as Samsung's, although with the Galaxy S II you also get 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage. Much more generous.

Both phones run Andoid 2.3. It's likely to be Christmas before any handsets running Google's new OS, Ice Cream Sandwich, show up and even longer before we find out whether either of these phones will support this new and potentially exciting operating system.

There's always a hope of an update, but the handsets will be rushing toward their first anniversary by that point, and it is likely that HTC and Samsung will have refocused their efforts on newer models.

As always with Android, we say buy it based on the specification at launch, rather than what it might or might not get as an upgrade at a later date.

Nothing to choose from here really as both phones have a similar spec, but the Samsung wins for having more internal storage and a shade more RAM.

Android customisation
Although the HTC is inferior technically, it has no performance problems that we noticed. It also has a superior custom user interface, with Sense being a much nicer-looking skin to Android than Samsung's TouchWiz. This one is a clear win for HTC.