The Dark Furie

When the Open Handset Alliance introduced the Android operating system to the world the most exciting prospect of the announcement was that any part of the operating system could be replaced by manufacturers. Sense from HTC is the first user interface to deliver on that prospect and it's a quite simply a design triumph.

HTC has a long history of covering their Windows Mobile phones in user interface shells that hide the true workings of the phone behind a pretty good looking and easy to use skin. Their TouchFLO shell is considered one of the only reasons that Windows Mobile devices still sell these days. Unfortunately, the shell has to end somewhere and when it does you're unceremoniously dumped back in to the dated and comparatively Windows Mobile interfaces. Thankfully this wont be the case with the Android version of Sense. Rather than create Sense as a shell for Android, HTC have taken advantage of the open source operating system and created a whole new user interface for the entire phone.

Sense also introduces a new contacts view to Android. Built around the principle that people communicate in a lot more ways than voice or text messages, the Sense contact card shows the latest status updates from Twitter, the last uploaded photos to Flickr, Facebook updates and invitations all alongside the last received e-mails, text messages and call history for the chosen contact.

Having all that present on the one screen (with further online services easily added through firmware updates or possibly a services manager application) streamlines communication considerably.

Sense is built around the core ideas of scenes and widgets. Each "scene" is a user created homescreen that you set up for a particular purpose. Maybe you'll want a scene for work and one for home. Later you might set one up containing all your games, or maybe you're planning a holiday and want to set up a scene in advance with useful applications on it. Once a scene is created it can be customised by defining which widgets are available on it.

Almost every default application is available in a widget form to be placed on scenes allowing you to control any aspect of the phone without delving into menus, and applications downloaded from the Android Market can also have shortcuts placed there. That holiday scene we were thinking about may get a world clock widget with two time zones set and currency converter on it as well as a speed-dial shortcut to call a taxi to the airport, a translator application and a to-do list so you don't forget your passport/luggage/children. The work scene and home scene may have e-mail widgets on each of them but accessing a different address depending on the scene in use. The idea is simple enough and things like this have been done on smartphones before, but never to this level of integration and never with an unlimited amount of "scenes" available to use.

Scenes can be profile, location or time activated meaning your work scene might only come up when the phone detects your position via GPS and deduces you're at work, or the holiday scene activates on the morning you're due to go away. And if that isn't enough customisation for you, how about the fact that HTC is letting users customise the widgets that appear on the screen from several defaults (with over 90 designs mentioned as available for the basic clock alone) allowing you to truly have your phone set up exactly the way you want it for exactly the way you're using it.

The bottom line is that Android just got interesting again. The Sense user experience should pull in more than a few disgruntled iPhone owners, while the extended contacts view should bring over a few people with Palm Pre envy and the customisation and scenes concept will get at least a few Symbian owners foaming at the mouth. Android phones running the Sense UI wont be able to take advantage of over the air firmware updates (at least to start with), but what they gain is far more important. A user interface built on Sense.

The first Sense UI phone codenamed Hero and shown in the images in this article should be released worldwide next month.