If you buy any Android smartphone these days you can expect the manufacturer to slosh together a custom skin to overlay the stock Android experience. Samsung has TouchWiz, LG and Motorola has their own nameless skins, while HTC has Sense.
In recent times HTC has gone against what made them one of the largest Android manufacturers by releasing endless amounts of phones, however they are now admitting their Sense UI may have caused some of this hardship to strike the company as well. This comes after poor sales and financial results in the latter stages of 2011.
“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. 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.”
HTC's chief product officer, Kouji Kodera, also admitted that “there where too many things in there, even on the home screen we had four or five icons before consumers got a chance to add things themselves. For the HTC One range we have taken it down to Sense 2.0 again.”
HTC have also said that they will focus on product quality not quantity in 2012. The new, less cluttered Sense 4.0 skin will be seen on HTC's recently announced One trio of smartphones that will be begin global launches before summer rolls around.
Kitguru says: A global company that speculates possible mistakes in the public eye, bravo to you HTC.