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As is normal with HTC’s Sense UI the skin goes much deeper than just the homescreen, application drawer. It has been a few months since I’ve played around with stock Android 4.0 but it is my belief that virtually everything I encountered has been modified by HTC to some degree. The lack of which actually pained me deeply when I reviewed the Samsung Galaxy xCover a month ago.
The Sense integration is very deep, and what it adds is for the most part very useful – from the famous weather widget to the settings menu. We won’t go into too much depth, rather giving an quick overview of the rest of the applications.
HTC is keen to point out its much improved car dock application. It gives you a few big buttons and quick access to phone calls, Google Maps Navigation, your music library and the internet radio service tune-in radio. Going into one of these menus offers up a largely blown up version of the stock application.
There is also a movie editor present, which is actually pretty functional. Sure you can’t add in custom titles and such (I believe you can do this on the stock Android 4.0 one) but you can add in as many videos and pictures as you feel like. Once you’re done creating your cinematic masterpiece you can save it in any of the widescreen 720p, 540p or 360p formats. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJQkQpsBYs']
Above is a little something I put together in about five minutes after getting to know the app. The quality isn’t amazing but its impressive coming from a phone.
The other bundled HTC applications not mentioned elsewhere in the review include:
- Calculator
- Calendar
- Clock
- Flashlight
- FM Radio
- Friend Stream
- HTC Hub – app store with games and Sense themes
- Locations – HTC’s (not complementary) offline navigation app
- Mirror
- News and Weather
- Notes
- PDF Viewer
- Polaris Office
- Show Me – includes many tutorials advising new users how to do common tasks
- Stocks
- Task Manager
- Tasks
- Teeter – a basic marble tilt game
- Transfer
- Voice Recorder
- Watch – HTC’s movie rental and purchase service
- Weather
- Wi-Fi Hotspot
Percentage of above applications I will perhaps never use: a whopping 67%. Luckily with Ice Cream Sandwich you can disable (but not uninstall) system applications that you will never use.
Other present applications (Google+, Maps, Youtube etc) are baked into Google’s Android experience and aren't mentioned in the above list.
wow thats a lot of information for a phone. I need a new one, but had been thinking about an Apple iPhone due to store support. What do you think? bad move?
Looks very nice indeed. never owned an HTC phone before as my friend had one a year ago and it just stopped working for some reason, he got it replaced buyt the battery life was terrible.
Neil, do you mean support in terms of customer/returns or the app store? If you’re in the US then Apple will likely have superior customer support, can’t speak for other regions. If you mean the app store then both iOS and Android are on the same level
Joseph, HTC hasn’t exactly been known for brilliant battery life to be fair! The One X’s battery life is a bit average – especially after getting a Galaxy S III as a comparison
it’s a fantastic phone,wonderful apps,slim style overall excellent telephone sound is beautiful but there’s few points that are difficult to manage so if they’re able to handle that within the software it will likely be great but overall an outstanding phone