Hi everyone. So let's talk a little bit about
the Sense 6.0 ui. Now, as you might be aware
when we get our Android devices from any of the big manufacturers, what we don't
get
is a pure Android experience, Not unless we buy that device direct from Google.
And so we, in some respects, have to put up with what the manufacturers decided they want
their device to look like,
from a software point of view at the very least anyway. Now,
one of the things that has always been a major criticism really of a lot of the
manufacturers when it comes to their
launchers, their skins, is that they tend to break the design language from
Android quite a bit and end up adding a new design language that doesn't quite mesh
with the underlying operating system too well.
You end up with things that, you know, in one particular app you might have to
access settings in one way and in another app it will be a completely
different and foreign and alien experience.
And a lot of this comes down to Samsung I'm looking at you.. producing apps
without an idea as to
how you're going to have everything fitting together. Too many different
little developers working on things in their
own particular way. Now HTC doesn't really suffer from any of that,
to a certain extent because it doesn't really put a lot of software on its
devices,
So what we have to kind of look at is well, what have HTC done here from
the point of view of Sense ui
to kind of improve Android or to help the design language along
with their things that they want to include? Now primarily
everything here is pretty much standard Android but re-skimmed.
So when we actually come into things like our media apps, our
let's have a quick look at, oops, where's it gone?
The music app for instance is very similar to the Android music app,
So, you know, design language wise, nothing much has changed, they're saying
that things like calendar and mail it's all kind of similar.
The one thing I really like with Sense ui 6 this time around is it's a lot faster.
It still looks ugly I'm afraid. I really dislike the icons in Sense ui 6,
I think they just look old-school now.
And in many respects our design language has moved on when it comes to iconography
and things like that.
HTC kind of needed to progress and things have just stayed the same
really there. You know, these icons they've improved a little bit but they're
still
ugly to look at and in some respects still
not the right size. If you notice they're all slightly different sizes
and this is something that actually Android as an operating system has tried
to eliminate
over each iteration. We have a globe there
for a browser which is a completely different size, taller effectively than
the camera app
which likewise seems to be smaller than the messaging app
and if you look over here on the telephone icon
it's considerably bigger than all of the apps icons.
It just doesn't quite make sense and it looks a little weird
and it's just one of those little things that Android is itself
as run by Google are trying to eliminate, this slightly weird situation we have
different
funny sized icons. HTC kind of needed to solve that, it's a minor niggle.
It's an irritant once you know it's there but ultimately it doesn't impact
massively on, you know, the quality of the device overall.
But it's a little thing and I would love to see HTC kind of take the bull by the
horns on that one and fix it.
One of the things I do really like is how the app drawer itself works.
This ability to arrange icons and to hide particular icons you don't want to see,
and your grid size and manage the apps as well, all from one handy location.
This is something which a lot of the other Android manufacturers can really do
with doing. It adds so much functionality and it makes things so much quicker when you're
working in the app drawer
generally being able to hide the apps especially, or access which apps you would
like to uninstall
makes a big difference to the kind of functionality and flexibility, how quick and
easy it is to do things on this device.
Overall, Sense ui 6 is a
upgrade over previous editions. If you hated Sense 5
then you're probably not going to be overly in love with Sense 6.
It's an improvement but there's still some of those rough edges that I'd really like to see
improved in future editions.
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