So one of the things I've noticed as I've been kind of browsing round the device, having a
kind of first
look is how little software HTC have kind of bloated this device out with.
A lot of my apps have installed in the background from my previous device,
thanks Google, which can be useful but also a pain when you're trying to
kind of get a feel for a device for the first time.
But HTC have put very little here in the way of kind of bloated out software. It's
quite interesting. Other than their BlinkFeed which is kind of an integral part of the Sense 6 ui
what we have really is all of Google's apps that we've come to know and love, so
Chrome, Gmail, Google+, maps, music and so on
through to Drive, YouTube and photos and Hangouts, but software wise, when we actually look in here,
ignore all of my apps that have unfortunately been installed but
really there's very little here from HTC other than
this toolset. So calculator, a flashlight, weather,
downloads, HTC apps, Parent Dashboard voice recorder, HTC backup and set-up routine,
things that we've seen on previous HTC devices and
doesn't really appear to have changed that much. The only other thing really is
the Zoe app which unfortunately at the moment doesn't work until
around the summertime and that's kind of
it. It's very, very slimmed-down,
which in many respects I really respect. There's not a huge amount here.
I've noticed that obviously there's this fit bid option and kid mode
but some of these things like kid mode we've seen this before
it ties in, you know, as we've seen on previous HTC devices
into the device that allows your kids just to use the apps you kind of
want. We also have the car mode, the TV mode app there as well.
The TV mode app is really useful, it uses the infra red blaster and effectively allows you to
control your
television or your hi-fi equipment directly from your smartphone.
I used this last year on the HTC One 2013 and it was fantastic.
It actually worked, in my opinion, better than the Samsung device even though I think they were using
the same
company to actually provide the software for it. The other options there we have is
media and this kind of rounds up
a few of the Google apps as well as obviously HTC's own stuff, we have the camera
and app which is HTC's, HTC's music app
HTC's fm radio, digital don't know why,
that came with HTC's stuff last year, it wasn't very good.
And then obviously just the Googly stuff like News Stand
movies and TV and photos as well as the play music app in there
as well. We've also got stocks
HTC guide which gives you information on how HTC
kind of work. That's really it. There's not a lot here. Like I say, productivity again we've got
Scribble in there and
Polaris office and the phone and tasks option but these are all kind of
well, feels to me more like re-skins
of existing apps than kind of a massive departure and it's always a bit of a strange thing when
you're dealing with
a company building on top of Android because Google obviously
expects its devices to be carried there as standard.
You're then kind of duplicating effort with the manufacturer then producing its own
versions of the apps that don't tie into Google services as such.
Always a slightly confusing thing. Like I say, this is the Zoe app
and this is really a kind of photo sharing app
which works with the Zoe software as it were on the phone, although I think the idea is it moves to a
cloud-based system.
And the idea there is to be able to share your photos online and so on but
unfortunately it's not on the device as standard
and it won't be launching apparently
it won't be launching apparently until around June time
which is a bit of a shame. It would have been nice if they'd
had this available for launch so we could check it out but for now
it's a curiosity. So don't expect that particular app to do much of
anything until June, I'm afraid.
So software wise, as I say, there's not a huge amount here to kind of crow about from
HTC's point of view
but actually that in itself is something to crow about
because normally we expect these devices to come
chock-full of software, most of the time we are never going to use,
and most of the time it doesn't work very well if we do try and use it.
So it's nice to see HTC simply saying, well look, we kind of have to service
a certain set of users who don't want the Google apps, so we'll put those in
and then it's a case of well, OK, there's certain features that we kind of need because
they're kind of important to make our phone work, like a camera app etcetera that is
designed to work with the new hardware features but
overall here it's very slim and I
like that. I like the option to choose what I want to install
from which particular app developer as opposed to kind of feeling oh great I've got
this
translation app built-in. I'm not even going to use it, and more importantly
if I did want to use it, translation, I wouldn't use that app anyway. I'd want to
pick something myself.
So it's really nice to have a
cut down software suite here, really nice in fact.
In many respects it feels like HTC listened to the market and gave us
what we were asking for. Choice. Thanks for watching.
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