HTC Surround Review: A Pocket Boombox

The big design trade off on the HTC Surround is something we’ve already touched on. There’s a big slide out speaker which is unlike anything I’ve seen on a smartphone to date, but with it comes added thickness and heft that makes it feel like a device from a few years ago. Most of the time, that thickness and heft isn’t a big deal because you get the functionality of a real keyboard. In the case of the Surround, you just get a gigantic speaker. It’s sort of polarizing, and ultimately whether that trade off makes sense depends on what’s important to individual customers. There’s definitely a market for a smartphone focused entirely on music playback, the question is whether the Surround is that device. 

In a word, yes. The Surround packs easily the loudest and best sounding speaker I’ve encountered on a smartphone - when the slider is open. With the slider closed, you get muffled, muted sound that isn’t much louder than the rest of the competition. It’s pretty trivial to measure how loud the speaker on the Surround is as well. To do this test, I simply use the same setup I do for speakerphone testing, but instead play an entire music track start to end and average. 

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You can see how with the slider closed, the Surround is almost exactly as loud as the iPhone 4. With the slider open, it’s much louder, easily enough to fill a small room. Subjectively, I’d say the Surround is about as loud as a loud clock radio. 

Audio quality strongly depends on what setting the Surround is in. There’s a button at the top of the slider that cycles through 3 audibly different modes. Cycling through, the modes are Off, Dolby Mobile, and SRS Wow. 

Unfortunately, outside of the HTC Sound Enhancer app in the HTC Hub (more on this later), there’s no immediate visual feedback about which mode you’re in. Distinguishing the off mode is easy, but the other two don’t immediately present hugely different soundscapes until you pay attention to the detail. Inside the Sound Enhancer application, you can set the sound enhancement mode manually for both audio and video playback modes. There’s an additional equalizer setting exposed when you have headsets plugged in. I shot a short video comparing audio playback on the Surround to the iPhone 4 and Nexus One:

On the whole, the audio presets actually do a fairly decent job leveraging the good part of the Surround’s response curve. With audio enhancements off, sound is tinny and sometimes sounds distorted maximum volume, with way too much emphasis in the highs and mids, and no lows at all. It’s what you’d basically expect from a smartphone. With either of two presets enabled, the response is much flatter - there’s no distortion, much less of an insane difference between emphasis on the highs and mids, and just a tiny bit more in the lows. Honestly, the lows are still pretty bad, but they’re still much better than anything else I’ve heard from a smartphone. 

The Surround almost doubles as a sort of modern boombox - maybe a few more dBAs of audio power and I’d feel safe saying smartphones are a modern day analogue. So is the HTC Surround, well, surround sound? No, not quite. One of those audio modes sounds a heck of a lot like a virtual surround emulator, which is exactly what the HTC Surround is doing in software to have so much presence. It sounds good, don't get me wrong, it just isn't surround, er, surround.

The only remaining problem is that the Zune software doesn’t have landscape support. The result is that if you try and listen to music with the kickstand out (like you’d reasonably expect to be able to do with the device on a desk or table), you’ll have to deal with a rotated interface. It’s somewhat frustrating, honestly.

Videos of course play back the right orientation, but it’s still frustrating that WP7 is again a platform with landscape support only some of the time. The most notable exception of which is the home screen. It’s confusing considering how well the rest of the platform (even the settings app) has landscape support. Clearly this is something the WP7 team thought about.