HTC: We Got too Fat, We Got too Many Phones, Let’s Revise
HTC phones have been an icon of Android phones for a long time. They are primarily known for that iconic HTC Clock and weither widget that has been duplicated and mimicked numerous times over the years. HTC makes a great phone with more beautiful widgets than you can shake a stick at, but at what cost?
Many have labeled HTC widgets as “Bloatware” and in many cases I can agree with them. Although these widgets are wonderful, there is just so many that it actually impacts performance and battery life. HTC has caught on to this.
“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. 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 again.”
What a big worry around the forums has been for the past couple months, is that when HTC phones get updated to ICS, you may not notice it. Some older HTC phones such as the HTC Desire series, when they were updated from Froyo to Gingerbread, there was very little change at all, and the fears carried over to the pending ICS release. HTC has also caught on to this.
“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 flavor on top of it.”
I’ve always been a believer of the ‘K.I.S.S’ method (Keep it simple stupid). I think the dream senario would be during the Setup process when the user starts their HTC phone for the first time, be presented with a list of checkable boxes so they can decide how much, or little of HTC goodness they want. If you are a rooter like myself, you will see a large number of “De-bloated roms” which the rom cookers cut out all HTC stuff and release the rom as stock. This delivers an amazing speed boost for those who can live without the 101 widgets.
Less phones from HTC.
On a side note. HTC has also mentioned they planned to slim down their future lineup of phones, and try to focus more on quality releases rather than quantity.