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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Please, HTC, no more ad-libbing your own user interfaces They suck and are hard to remove. We all call it nonSense for a reason. Stick to making hardware, and let Google handle the software. It's cheaper and your users will be happier. (Just once I would like to buy a phone that I don't have to reflash as soon as I bring it home. Should have gotten an N1, I guess.)

Hardware-wise, this concept is not too compelling. Needs physical buttons. Needs the trackball. I don't want to pay for stereo sound or the ability to turn into an alarm clock. Give me battery life and a higher-res screen instead. I don't want gimmicks, I want a solid phone that always works and doesn't get in my way.

I agree that they should make their "premium" phones out of metal, though. I think Apple is leading the way here (with a metal case and a very high-res screen), and that HTC is just going to copy. But that's fine, an Android-based iPhone 4 clone with WiMax will be phenomenal.

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HTC had high-res screens WAY before Apple did. The Touch Diamond had a 286PPI screen in June 2008, which is a month before the 3G came out, with it's meager 163PPI screen. The Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch HD, Touch Diamond2, Touch Pro2, HD2, Evo, Desire, Droid Incredible, and Nexus One ALL had >200PPI screens before the iPhone 4 was even announced.

Meh, the "cool" point is >300PPI.

> Please, HTC, no more ad-libbing your own user interfaces They suck and are hard to remove. We all call it nonSense for a reason.

No, people on XDA developers (phone nerds) use the tern 'NonSense'. HTC sticks to common UI principles, ie:

* Identifiable icons (eg, using a globe, rather than a blue and white sphere, for a web browser)

* Known color schemes, eg, black, green, and white, versus Googles white, blue, orange and green.

* A home screen which can host animations. Google's can't, which is why the widget selection is poor and those that exist don't do as much.

* Always visible phone function, something Google themselves did in 2.2

* Widgets that don't waste space, compared to the default 2 x 4 widgets for Twitter and Facebook with the massive stip between.

I could go on. HTC have UI designers. Android clearly don't - it's not a matter of personal preference, it's a matter of basic design principles.

Edit: Fixed 'Apple' rather than 'Android'.

> HTC have UI designers. Apple clearly don't

Wait, what?

Pretty sure he meant Google, which wouldn't be true either...

Well per the post, there's more evidence of Google either not adopting or ignoring well known UI design principles throughout Android, in terms of making common functions widely available, consistency in UI, not using a color scheme with two colors directly sitting across from each other on the wheel.

They famously eschew design ideas from design "dictators", favoring data-driven design (e.g. choosing a blue that yields more ad clicks); I wonder if they do this in the Android development cycle or once it is in users' hands.

Oops - wrote 'Apple' when I should have written Android. Corrected.

Actually, HTC's icon for the web browser confused me. It said "Internet", not "Browser", so I thought it was some dumb app that Sprint put on to show me how amazing a phone with "Internets" was. Nope, it's actually the web browser. Why not just call it that?

Do people like HTC's random animations? Do I really need to see lightning flash when I unlock my phone because there was a thunderstorm at the airport an hour ago? I much prefer Google's more tasteful weather widget -- a simple icon representing the weather and the temperature. Then I don't have to use more than half my screen for an extra clock and a huge picture of a cloud. Looks great in advertising materials, looks terrible in real life. (Of course, you can just remove the widget, so that's not a big deal.)

But it does show you the overall idea behind sense -- stupid gimmicks to make phones more exciting to people that can barely afford the monthly contract fee for a smartphone. Good for them, not good for me. So I kill it.

My biggest beef with Sense is that they put so many gimmicks on the keyboard that there isn't any room for the letter keys. I want to type on the keyboard, not be impressed that they have half-working text-to-speech. On the stock android keyboard, I can get a fucking comma without having to go to the alternate keyboard. On the sense keyboard, nope.

If HTC wants to see how to improve, they should look at the Droid X keyboard. That thing is great. (And it's what I use now :)

Anyway, "basic design principles" my ass. "Basic bling principles" maybe.

Unfortunately, most people don't know what a browser is. Google's shown that in their own research for Chrome.

> But it does show you the overall idea behind sense -- stupid gimmicks to make phones more exciting to people that can barely afford the monthly contract fee for a smartphone.

Sense for me gives me instant access to my friends activities (via FriendStream, which won't work on normal Google home as animation isn't allowed in widgets - see the vanilla Facebook and Twitter one-at-a-time widgets), my investments (same thing), and a visually driven music player that takes advantage of the fact I can find a picture a lot faster than I can a word.

I can do all of these without leaving my home screen. On regular Android, I can't.

After removing sense, the only thing I missed where the widgets. It detects vertical scrolling in widgets, which works well with twitter.

Also agreed on space efficiency - their weather widgets are much better done (fortunately tons of alternatives exist in the market).

There are plenty of things that annoyed me though. 1) The UI is slower and any of its minor gains is not worth this trade-off. 2) I dislike the iPhone style time select (android's key input is quicker to use, though it too has flaws (not selecting the existing text automatically)). 3) The clock that is a direct rip off of the iPhone. Its features are quite lacking (a stopwatch without laps, etc.)

By "we all" you mean a tiny number of hard core nerds who hang out on obscure forums. I know several people who own HTC android phones, and not one of them has re-flashed their phones or expressed any desire for removing Sense.

Do any of them know there is any other way? Ignorance is bliss.

If it wasn't for HTC's horrendously slow release cycle (not as bad as Sony Ericsson's though) I wouldn't care if it's nonSense or not.

I've had an HTC Incredible for a couple of weeks now. The Sense UI has felt better-implemented than the Moto Droid UI, to me at least.

I've also had (and still have) an iPhone 3G/S for a couple of years. While I still think the iPhone is overall a better UI and better app store, the HTC phone is the first Droid-based phone I've owned or played with that didn't come across like an unfinished experiment in cellphone design.

I'm vaguely aware there are other options to the Sense UI, but I do not dislike it enough overall to warrant an investigation into any of the other options.

> Needs physical buttons. Needs the trackball.

No. Really, no.

Physical button = tactile feedback. I was wholely unimpressed by the soft buttons on the Nexus One and Moto Droid.

As for the trackball? Still the best precision text selection device I've used on a mobile.

When it comes to text selection, how often do people use it? I ask that in sincere curiosity. I know personally that I only select text once, maybe twice a week on my Palm Pre. Holding shift and dragging through the text works great for me. Perhaps you meant in terms of positioning the cursor? Anywho...

Tactile feedback from keyboards/button has always been an issue with me, but I find that a slight vibration from the phone when a softkey is pressed does the job just fine.

> When it comes to text selection, how often do people use it? I ask that in sincere curiosity.

I do that pretty regularly to quote in mails and forums on my iOS device. But I think the issue isn't about how often it's used, but how seamless it is. If you can do it without thinking about it, it's good. If you have to stop when you need to select text, it's not.

I like the incredible buttons. Flush, but the phone vibrates a bit when you hit them.

One problem is that they all vibrate in the same way. If they had a bit different vibration patterns, you could simulate the type of feel you get with actual push buttons (e.g. you might feel that there's a right edge on the right button)

> Still the best precision text selection device I've used on a mobile.

I've had no problem with the iOS method so far, and haven't been longing for the return of the trackball at all.

This is why I cannot use my G1 as a music player in the car. I cannot manipulate it without looking at it, which I really do not want to do while driving.

My Sansa E500 thing is easy to manage by touch only (except if I want to see the name of the song playing); my eyes don't leave the road if I want to skip or repeat or pause a song.

Likewise, if I need to make or take a call while driving, and pulling over isn't an option, I want to be able to do a much as I can by touch, and not worry that a misplaced tap or glide on smooth glass has triggered some unwanted behavior.

Yes! I tried using my iPhone as a music player in the car and... useless. But it extends to more than that, I could make calls on my late-90's cellphone call friends with a flip and a button hold without looking, and mashing end-call always worked because it's a real button.

Now it's squint at the damn phone and tap around. Hanging up is just the tiniest bit more annoying without a hardware button (yes, I'm aware that many smartphones have a physical end-call button).

You should use the included headset or get a car dock. Either solution would give you the controls you need to use it as either a phone or music player without needing to look at the screen.

This is a problem best solved by the car UI, rather than phone/music player. Steering wheel controls (and/or voice commands) are FAR less distracting than any ipod sized device.

No, because the car is just one example of where I really do not want to have to look at a device in order to use it.

Well as a counterpoint, my father returned his Droid for a Droid Eris because he liked the Sense interface much more than the stock Android one.

>Please, HTC, no more ad-libbing your own user interfaces They suck and are hard to remove. We all call it nonSense for a reason.

SenseUI is an excellent interface. I say this as a fairly hardcore user. It's a bit of a UI stepback using my N1 instead of my Magic+. I'm a fairly hardcore user so I like it vanilla for other reasons, but I guarantee that doesn't matter at all for about 95% of consumers.

> I think Apple is leading the way here (with a metal case and a very high-res screen), and that HTC is just going to copy.

HTC Legend was out before the iPhone, largely composed of a single piece of aluminum. HTC has absolutely kicked Apple around when it comes to screen resolution. So how, exactly, is HTC copying Apple? Quite the opposite.

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