Even though HTC makes some admirable phones, there has long been one common complaint about its handsets: Sense. The UI, that the company insists on plastering over the Android OS, is bloated, slow and a pain in the arse. Turns out HTC agrees, and it’s changing it.
Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, HTC’s chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, conceded the point to Pocket Lint. He explained that:
“From the original Sense up to Sense 3.5 we added too many things. The original concept was that it had to be simple and it had to be easy to use and we had that philosophy, but over time it got cluttered. Even on the home screen we had four or five icons before consumers got a chance to add things themselves.”
Now, with the release of the HTC One range — which looks pretty sweet — things are changing. Not only is the company stripping back Sense to its bare bones, it’s also ensuring that the best features of Ice Cream Sandwich actually shine through, as opposed to being trampled by the UI.
“What we’ve done right now is a good mixture of keeping Sense and Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich element in a good balance. We haven’t tried to change everything here. We have kept a lot of the ICS element but still added the Sense favour on top of it.”
While the HTC interface will struggle to be as slick as that of the iPhone, at least this, and the fact HTC is concentrating on fewer, better phones, are steps in the right direction. [Pocket Lint]