Ok so, as the title implies I'm thinking of getting a Sensation on the cheapside (160€) almost brand new. However I do have a few questions:
1. Would you say the phone is worth the price?
2. Do you think it is a good phone? What's your overall experience?
3. I mostly use my phone for multitasking and gaming sometimes, so does it fit the bill? The 512RAM thing scares me, my Galaxy W said it had 512MB but it had like, 378MB. I hated how it ran out of memory.
4. How is custom rom development for the phone?
Cheers and thanks in advance
1) like said before, 160€ may be overprized but if that's the common price in your region, then I guess you're still paying a relative good price. Especially since newer phones are heavily overprized these days.
2) I think it's a good phone. I like to compare my rooted sensation to brand new stock powerhouses like GS4. Even though they're much faster, the self-defined MHZ/euro ratio is much better in my case. I like the fact I can keep up well with brand new devices with my more then 2 yo device. I even outperform some phones in battery life.
the build quality is good, it's the way a decent phone should be build. Decent camera with LED and no plastic.
3) Especially after rooting, I never encountered a situation where I ran out of memory or ended up with bad perfomance. I must say I'm not an extensive multitasker, but I'll have to add that I never felt the need for a taskkiller app or such. And I keep apps running on a regular basis. I think a dual core is more then capable for multitasking, and the phone packs a decent amount of RAM.
4) amazing custom ROM support. There are plenty of flavours for both sense and no-sense ROMs. I myself am running CM10 for quite a while now and I like my former sense phone being a pure google 4.2.2. Many ROMs with a lot of tweaks, UI tuning and themes. I can boost my stock 1.2 GHz to a outstanding 1836 MHz
Since new phones are so expensive, the custom ROM support for this phone keept me hanging in on to it for a additional year. I took a SIM-only subscription because I feel no need for a replacement.
overall, you get more phone for buck wih a sensation compared to new devices.
The speaker sucks.
It gets dust trapped under the screen.
Battery life is pretty bad (mine came with an Anker battery, and battery life is still pretty unimpressive).
Other than that, I've been pretty happy with mine.
Indeed a disadvantage, the sensation is a dust collector. Many models suffer from the little bit of dust under the screen and the speaker needs to be cleaned on a regular basis.
I don't agree with your opinion on the battery. I think you're not being relative in this case. When are you impressed? Don't expect it to last 3 days away from a charger. But 1,5 to 2 days with average use is excellent perfomance. I can reach 2 days when I only use it to check facebook, news, wheater, whatsapp and a occasional call. Don't forget that new devices wouldn't last a day in these conditions because of their huge screens and power-eating quad/octa cores.