We sat down with Wayne Tang, Product
Marketing Manager, Southeast Asia of HTC, to get into the groove of HTC’s two
Sensations with Beats Audio.
Wayne Tang, Product Marketing
Manager, Southeast Asia of HTC
Despite bring, in most parts, Quietly
Brilliant, HTC sure knows how to bring the music in. HTC’s acquisition of Beats
by Dr. Dre has been the buzz for some time now, and the result that we can see
(and listen to) today is the HTC Sensation XE and the HTC Sensation XL. To talk
about Beats, the two phones and what we can expect in HTC’s future, here is
Wayne Tang, Product Marketing Manager, Southeast Asia, to give us his two,
perhaps three, cents.
First of all: What can you tell us
about the collaboration with Beats by Dr. Dre?
Today, everybody buys a smartphone and puts
music in them. These professional music artists today, unfortunately, aren’t
very well heard, in the sense that the device itself is not doing justice to
the music and the efforts of the artists behind them. Quality is often lost
when playing music, with MP3 compression and whatnot. That was the original
reason as to why Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine founded the Beats brand, because they
wanted to return the detail lost in music today. In Beats, every single device
is tuned by themselves, to ensure that it portrays music in the way the artists
intended it.
HTC, being a rising smartphone brand,
recognises music as something important – it groups communities together, and
goes through different boundaries and language. People often ask me, ‘So, is it
only now that HTC realises that music is important?’. I’d tell them, ‘No, we’ve
realised that long ago. Bu there’s a difference in realising something, and
executing something.’ A lot of manufacturers out there realise that music is
important, but they rarely have a complete picture, a complete solution to
Music. In HTC, we have a solution – a Master Plan. We recognise the effort and
the importance of Beats to music, and that is why we started the collaboration.
Tell us more about the HTC Sensation
XE and the HTC Sensation XL
The first thing to note is that the
Sensation XE is not a new device; it’s essentially the HTC Sensation with its
4.3-inch qHD display, with the added bonus of the Beats Audio tuning software
integrated into the phone. It comes with a Beats headset bundled along, and
listening to music with it and the phone will provide and optimised experience
only Beats and HTC can give.
The Sensation XL is the next Beats device,
which comes with a larger screen – one of the largest screen in the market.
That aside, our focus on this device is very much on the camera. We’ve given
the camera a larger focus because one of the top three features of a smartphone
that people look forward to is the quality and functionality of the camera. The
Sensation XL, following the HTC Rhyme, is the second device we have that comes
with an improved camera, with a lower aperture size of f2.2 – right now one of
the lowest in the market for a normal camera phone. It also comes with a wide
20mm lens and a BSI sensor, which lets you capture better images in darker
environments. We also have panorama shot and HDR features.
These phones still come with the HTC Sense
3.0 with bits of improvements and menu fine-tuning, and very much catered for
people hoping for a big screen phone for mobile entertainment. You can imagine
now, for the Sensation XL – watching a video on the 4.7-inch screen while
letting the Beats headset provide you with surround sound and solid music.
Oh, and to add: the Sensation XL comes with
the Your Beats Headset, which is very much similar to the iBeats headset, with
HTC’s own customisation. We changed the design to white to fit the phone.
HTC Sensation XE vs HTC Sensation XL
Has there been any hardware tweaking
to make the phones optimised with Beats Audio?
It’s all software tuning – the hardware bit
here are the headsets. It’s the software, the DSP, that is tuned by Beats
themselves, which only works optimally with the any Beats headset, even older
ones, as the software will identify any Beats headset connected to it to give
you an optimal performance.
We notice the HTC Sensation XL still
uses a single-core processor, as opposed to the XE’s dual-core one. Why is it
so? And how would you foresee consumer perception when it comes to dual-core
processor?
It’s really all about number chasing. As a
consumer myself, I would always go for the higher number. That’s from the
user’s perspective. From HTC’s perspective, however, we have to balance the
whole design of the phone and the whole ecosystem of the phone, in the sense
that we have to ensure that the phone has value for money. We did a lot of
tests and trials and we feel that single-core devices clocked at 1.5GHz is
sufficient enough to power the phone to the extent of not experiencing any lag,
as compared to a device from a year ago. From our part, we’ll have to educate
our consumers – the best way is to let them experience the phone themselves.
HTC Sensation XL
But of course; there’ll be customers who go
for feature-first. The way HTC see this single-core versus dual-core thing, is
that it’s really in the positioning of the device. Some are meant for
dual-core; some, like the XL with its screen size, would require us to balance
the price and cost of the phone. That’s why we’ve decided to go with a single
core processor clocked to 1.5GHz, and we can still main the same performance
speeds. My positioning of the Sensation XL is that it’s an entertainment device
– for music and for videos, which doesn’t require much processing power.
Are both phones powered by Qualcomm
processors? Why not explore NVIDIA’s Tegra offerings?
Both phones are powered by Snapdragon
processors. We’ve kept to Qualcomm processors due to our long lasting
relationship with Qualcomm, as well as with our other collaborators. We still
feel that Qualcomm produces good chipsets, and Qualcomm still gives us a lot of
edge in terms of processing and software tuning, as our software is tuned to
Qualcomm’s processors. And moreover, Qualcomm processors gives us good
energy-saving and power management.
So, what can we see next from the
next Beats Audio integrated devices?
Of course, there’ll be lots of exciting
device coming out in 2012. Beats will be part of the DNA on the devices. After
all, we spent a lot of effort trying to build the whole Beats brand and form
this collaboration, so we’ll definitely bring the best out of it. We recognise
the importance of music and we want to drive this whole Music Story out so we
will have a lot of things going on for Beats. I will call it as part of the
whole DNA of the next 2012 devices. High end devices will see Beats, and it
will not be like a sub-genre of devices, or something super-premium. It will
still be part of the whole HTC ecosystem, but more towards the more high-end
devices.
The second step is to bring out the whole
complete ecosystem. Everything is very much into services right now. You have
music, you have hardware, and the next thing that people want would be good
music content. That’s the reason why we’re working with one of out online
services called the HTC Listen, something similar to HTC Watch. We want it so
that once you put music into your phone and plug in headset, you get a good
Music Story, a good musical feel. That is something we want to drive to our
customers.
Ca we expect to see Beats Audio devices in
the mid-range market?
I can’t really comment on that, but we have
plans to bring Beats out as much as possible, into as much handsets as we can –
it only makes more sense to our customers if we do so. We want them to think of
HTC when they think of Music – that’s where we want to go in, and there’s where
we want to grow stronger. We want it so that when people think of HTC, they
think of Music. They think of Entertainment.
Android 4.0. Ice Cream Sandwich. Can
we expect to see that soon?
I can’t officially comment on that, but
judging from HTC’s history, we’ve always ensured that our high-end devices come
wit the latest version of Android. Rest assured: it’s coming.
