In the early days of Android, HTC Sense was welcomed with open arms. Since then, however, companies such as Motorola, Samsung and others have drastically improved their own skins. As we said in our review of the HTC Rezound, it’s almost as if HTC’s Sense offers too much customization — and apparently this is a sentiment that HTC’s own chief product officer shares. Read on for more.
In an interview with Pocket-lint, Kouji Kodera said the company’s user interface has become too cluttered and complicated. “From the original Sense up to Sense 3.5 we added too many things,” he said. “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.”
The company’s new One smartphone series ships with Sense 4.0, which brings the user interface back to its roots. “There where too many things in there,” Kodera continued. “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 again.”
HTC’s newest version of Sense promises to deliver a “good balance” of Google’s stock Ice Cream Sandwich interface and HTC’s 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,” Kodera told Pocket-lint. “We haven’t tried to change everything here. We have kept a lot of the ICS element but still added the Sense flavour on top of it.”
