HTC’s chief product officer Kouji Kodera sat down with Pocket-Lint this week to admit that their Sense UI had gotten far too complicated and cluttered in the last couple of releases. From the time Sense originated, HTC had always wanted to keep things simple and easy to understand, but as their skin grew with features, so did the bloat. Going forward with Sense 4.0 and their new One Series, they will attempt to slim things back down:

“There where too many things in there,” Kodera continues. “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.”

And in case you were wondering, they are attempting to keep Ice Cream Sandwich as untouched as possible. While I find that sort of an overstatement after seeing a couple of Sense 4.0 videos and screenshots, we should at least expect to see less in your face 3D transitions, spinning wheels, and other performance decreasing UI tweaks:

“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 flavour on top of it.”

As someone that was once a fan of Sense, but found it less appealing in the 3.0+ phases, I’m actually pleased to hear this news. HTC needs to go back to their clean and easy-to-understand UI. Looking forward to the One Series or whatever it is they plan to release on Verizon to try to compete with it.

Via:  Pocket-Lint

A month before Mobile World Congress kicks off and we have the first mega-leak to drool over. The HTC Ville was caught in a lengthy video this morning, showing off its official spec list, Sense 4.0 over Ice Cream Sandwich, and an ultra thin body. This is a device that we have covered for a while now over at Android Life as it is rumored to be heading to T-Mobile, but with this being one of the first polished sightings of Sense 4.0, we wanted to make sure that everyone saw it.

So what is the Ville? It’s HTC’s thinnest smartphone ever at roughly 8mm thick, but will rival some of the other players for the “thinnest smartphone in the world” tag. As you can see from the front, HTC is moving to a 3-button approach to match up with Android 4.0, however, they are still using hardware soft keys instead of on-screen soft keys. The design itself looks like most of HTC’s previous work, but again, this sucker is ultra thin.

Hit up the break to see the full spec list and a quick run-through of the device.  

Up until now, we have seen XDA provide us with ROMs that have Beats by Dre cooked into them for your music listening pleasure, but the problem still stood, what if you liked your current ROM? Well we now have a fix for that.

There is a flashable zip a the source link below that will allow Beats to work with any Sense 3.0 and up-based ROM. The installation is as easy as booting into recovery and flashing the file and rebooting. User smokin1337, who came up with this file warns you that the first boot might take a while and as always, make a backup before you flash something like this.

Via: XDA

In addition to the free 2GB of storage that users receive when signing up for popular cloud storage service Dropbox, owners of new HTC Sense 3.5 devices – like the Rhyme – will get an additional 3GB for free. There are a variety of cloud services tied to other operating systems and phones, so this newly formed partnership between Dropbox and HTC simply makes sense.  While it’s not the 25GB that Windows Phone 7 users get with Skydrive, it’s at least a step in the right direction.  Our lives are revolving more and more around cloud storage these days; it’s about time an Android phone manufacturer did something on this front.

And not that we have confirmation on this, but it’s pretty unlikely that older phones like the Thunderbolt or Incredible 2 will receive this added bonus or Sense 3.5.  HTC definitely hasn’t show that it is the type of company to work backwards with its Sense skin.  The funny thing is, Sense 3.5 is clearly able to run on lower-end phones (single-core processor, 768MB of RAM, etc), but will likely only see it on new phones going forward.

Via:  Pocket Lint

Two of HTC’s newest phones – the Bass (Runnymede) and Rhyme (Bliss) – have been fondled for long enough by the Android developer community to release ROM ports from each.  Since both of these unreleased phones run HTC Sense 3.5 (full walk-through), owners of the original Incredible or Incredible 2 get to be some of the first to give it a spin.  The Runnymede Sense 3.5 is the newest and truest to form, but the Bliss builds will likely have a lot less bugs since devs have had more time with them.

Links to each thread can be found below.  

Most of the time that fragmentation is discussed it is in direct reference to different versions of Android running on different handsets. The cause of this fragmentation is usually identified as the sundry skins that manufacturers develop in order to differentiate their devices from others and create brand awareness and loyalty. Though critics and users have often called for stock Android to be at least an option on Android handsets (if not the standard), manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, and Samsung have continued to create more and more invasive and intricate skins on the devices they offer to consumers. Though a lack of updates is certainly reason enough for users to be upset, a more important issue may be the very different experiences that are presented to consumers because of these skins.

If the average consumer were to pick up the HTC Sensation and then pick up the DROID Bionic, they might be inclined to believe that the phones run totally different operating systems. And in a sense (no pun intended), they do. A phone made by HTC and running Sense offers a completely different experience than a Motorola phone running Blur (or “Android with Motorola Enhancements” as Motorola inclined to call it these days) or a Samsung phone running TouchWiz.

These manufacturer skins have altered Android so much that something as simple as unlocking your screen is a fundamentally different experience on different Android phones. On a stock device like the Nexus S I simply slide the lock tab to unlock the screen, but on a TouchWiz device I push the lock screen away or complete a puzzle, on a Sense device I slide down the lock bar or slide the lock ring upward, and on a Motorola device I slide the lock tab which also varies in location from device to device. In other words, the first screen that a consumer sees in a store when looking at an Android phone can be completely different from the Android phone next to it.  

It was only a matter of time, right?  Last week we saw a version of HTC’s Sense 3.5 ported over to the Desire, so forming a team to work on bringing it to the DROID Incredible just seemed like a logical next step.  And after looking at these screenshots, you can see that the team has made some progress by getting it booted and then fixing a ton of initial bugs in just a short few days.  You won’t find a test build to flash at this time, so try as best as you can to remain patient.  The 13-man team is working hard to get this out to the masses as soon as possible.  

A first look of HTC’s new Sense 3.5 that is expected to come loaded on both the Vigor and Bliss, made the rounds last week thanks to XDA.cn.  Today, we have a full 5-minute video walk-through of it thanks to that same brave Bliss tester.

So what’s new in version 3.5?  A lot.  We have a ton of fancy new animations, lock screen tweaks and enhancements, a new dock bar that includes shortcuts to just apps and phone, ability to add and remove home screens, more interactive widgets, and a sweet way to adjust the volume.

While Sense is clearly one of, if not the most polished skins of all, it can be a little overwhelming.  It really transforms Android for the most part, but after looking at HTC’s record profits each year, you can tell that people are interested in something like that.