Another (UI) challenger appears – Sharp now has ‘Feel’

So, I remember my first Android phone.  The HTC Magic.  It was a hard choice over the Dream, but I didn’t like the keyboard.

The Magic, however, got it’s first update and then had this thing called ‘Sense’ on top of it.  It was clunky and had a bunch of stuff you never used.  Luckily, in those days it was easy to get rid of… I could just find “Sense” and remove the defaults from its app, and then set the Android Launcher as the default.

Sure, it didn’t remove the launcher, or any of the crazy widgets/apps that came with it (remember footprint?), but it was a way to put it back to a ‘standard’ feel.  Before we really knew what ‘vanilla’ meant.

From my Magic I went to the Captivate… that had something called “TouchWiz”, and then we saw “Motoblur”, and “TimeScape”.  Even ICS has a name for their new user experience, Holo.

Then there’s the options for just launchers… Go, Nova, Launcher Pro, Launcher 7, Trebuchet, etc…

Not even mentioning the variety of ROMs out there, CM9, AOKP, MIUI (man we do love our acronyms, don’t we?).

With all this customization, it really, truly means that we can have a phone that’s “our own”.  I love that about Android.  Discuss all you want about ‘fragmentation’ or how a UI makes something ‘ugly’, it does help us differentiate phones.  I love when I go to a meeting and people put down their Blackberries or iDevices, and then if they’ve moved around they have to do a fair bit of checking in the device to see if it’s theirs or not.  Kinda funny watching it!

Well, a new offering has emerged for a UI, and this time from a manufacturer who’s been rather silent:  SHARP.

I used to love SHARP monitors.  Good stuff, not as expensive as Samsung, and nearly as good quality.

Sharp announces their “Feel” user interface

The Sharp devices that will have this will most likely be in Japan, or thereabouts, so we may never get a truly native “feel” device.  But, with the developer community we have with Android, it wouldn’t be long thereafter it hits the streets that you could take bits and pieces of it with you on your device.

I like choices, and differentiation.  Plus, who knows … playing with it may feel more intuitive.  It has a very ‘metro UI’ feel to it, with the slideouts and whatnot.

What do you think?

Also, side point – should we have a ‘wallpaper wednesday’ like some other group?  or a ‘desktop dimanche’ where we get to show off each other’s set ups?  I like peeking into other folks’ set up to see how they do it.