The challenge
The Samsung Galaxy R comes as a downgraded version of the Samsung Galaxy S II with a slightly reduced price tag to the market. The Galaxy R has a fairly similar set of features as compared to the Galaxy S II along with a pretty metallic finish which actually sense better to the Galaxy S II’s plastic feel and an included NVIDIA Tegra 2 CPU which gives it a boost to its processing power. The counterpart to the Samsung Galaxy R in this category of high performance smartphones is the HTC Sensation. The HTC Sensation is claimed to be the world’s first 4.3 inch smartphone having a qHD resolution. It also serves as a debut platform for HTC’s Sense 3.0 UI customizations and Watch movie streaming service. So here we compare Samsung Galaxy R with HTC sensation.
1. Operating system
The Samsung Galaxy R comes packed with Google’s exciting operating system, the Android 2.3 popularly known as Gingerbread and TouchWiz user interface. The HTC Sensation is also powered by the Android 2.3 operating system and HTC’s Sense user interface. So as far as the operating system is concerned, both the devices appear to be at par with only the proprietary user interface differentiating between them.
2. Camera
The Samsung Galaxy R features a 5 megapixel camera with auto focus, LED flash and has video recording capabilities in 720P. The camera captures colors quite accurately with a lot of detail in the shots.There are plenty of shooting modes and the camera serves pretty well for casual photography. The videos taken with this camera in daylight look satisfactory but with indoor lighting conditions, the videos look grainy. It also offers a secondary front facing camera.
The HTC Sensation offers an 8 megapixel camera with dual-LED flash and auto focus. Like the Galaxy R, it also offers a lot of shoot options. The shutter speed is quite swift and allows users to take quick shots. There is not a lot of image distortion when it comes to low lighting conditions.The front facing VGA camera is also very acceptable with good image quality.
So overall, the HTC Sensation definitely has an edge over the Samsung Galaxy R in the camera department.
3. Battery and storage
The HTC Sensation fares off better in the battery comparison as it offers a li-ion 1730 mAh battery which gives a battery backup of 8h 20 min in 2G and 6h 40 min in 3G while the Samsung Galaxy R offers a li-ion 1650 mAh battery.
Samsung galaxy R is the clear winner when it comes to storage since it has 1024 MB of RAM and 8 GB of internal storage as compared to the 1 GB of internal memory in the HTC Sensation which allows for storage of 8x more music, photos and videos on the Galaxy R.
4. Ergonomics
The Galaxy R is smaller and thinner as compared to the HTC Sensation. The Former has dimensions as 125 mm of length and 66 mm of breadth, along with a thickness of 9.5 mm. On the other hand, the HTC Sensation is 126.1 mm long, 65.4 mm broad and 11.3 mm thick. Additionally, the Galaxy R weighs lesser at 135 g when compared to the Sensation’s weight of 148 g. The Galaxy R offers an SC-LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. The Sensation has a 4.3 inch display and has better resolution than the Galaxy R. Both phones have displays equipped with multi-touch input method, gyroscope sensor, proximity sensor to auto turn-off the display and accelerometer to auto-rotate the user interface.
5. Price
The Samsung Galaxy R is priced at $560.61 while the HTC Sensation is priced at $582.15. Hence, the Galaxy R wins in the price section though many users may still prefer the HTC Sensation as the price differs only by a marginal amount.
The verdict
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy R is a very impressive phone priced nominally and offers a sufficient amount of processing power, all packed in a trim and stylish body. It differentiates itself with the amazing 4.2 inch display and excellent in-call sound quality and makes it stand above the average smartphones. On the other hand, the HTC Sensation may feel to be a little bit on the expensive side as is the case with most HTC phones, but it is definitely not a phone that you will regret buying with its brilliant camera, graphics and a whole lot of loaded features. On the whole, the Samsung Galaxy R may just emerge to be the winner!