HTC Sense 7 out for many HTC One M8 ROMs
HTC Sense 7.0 was available as of last week for custom ROM users on most of the carriers the M8 is on. I’d been holding off on writing much about Sense 7 as I was having some problems with my build (and still am), which have somewhat soured the experience for me.
Sense 7 brings a new theme manager which allows you quite a bit of customization in how the whole experience looks. It’s more than just wallpaper as you can swap out icons and give the whole sheebang the color feel of your wallpaper.
There’s a new widget called Sense Home (pictured below), which is basically a smart folder that brings up applications you use based on location currently. There’s no time-based that I see, which I can imaging a series of uses for, but this works.
The idea with Sense Home, which I think should be called Sense Locations, is to provide one folder with access to applications you commonly want at home, work, or when you’re out. Don’t need Mini Warriors while you’re at your job, there. Gone. No temptation.
There’s a redesigned camera with more interesting photo editing options, but they’re aimed at a different audience than me. For a phone it’s neat, as I usually do editing on the computer I find it kind of maddening.
Under personalize there’s an option to manage navigation options. My ported hacked version of Sense 7 doesn’t allow me to touch this, so I can’t comment much on it other than I found it detailed on Pocket-Lint, which oddly is not part of the Pocketables family.
Navigation options allow you to reposition things in the nav bar, and add buttons such as turn off screen, hide nav bar, and disable auto-rotate.
Overall Sense 7 looks pretty, it’s an update from 6, but not something I’d drop everything to grab. They’ve made some fine improvements, but it remains to be seen whether your ROM developer is going to be able to iron out the buggies, or whether your experience is going to be meh.
You’ll need to check with your favorite Sense-based ROM developer/team to see if they’ve gotten Sense 7 into their mix yet. It appears that it’s on most of the carriers the M8 is now, at least on a brief search on XDA.
Alternately I believe this will be released for the M9, if not at launch date shortly thereafter. If you want to just go ahead and purchase it.
