If you’re an HTC user then you may have found your self complaining about the bloated sluggish feeling of HTC’s customized Android build Sense 3.5. PocketNow has gotten their hands on a nearly finished build of HTC Sense 4.0 and the good news is they report that this update is a step in the right direction.
Here is a quick list of some of the up grades you should expect to see
- HTC has put an emphasis on improved typography and reduced visual clutter. All sliders in Sense 4.0 will be gray with buttons that have rounded square edges, instead of the bubbly circular icons found in current versions of Sense. Also, all buttons contained within the Sense sliders are labeled with the button’s function.
- Finally support for landscape mode on the home screen
- New task switcher features a card-like three-dimensional view of your open tasks
- Notification access from the lock screen
- The email has also gotten a complete revamp to compete for the top mobile email client on the market, but we want to see this in person before we actually believe it.
- There are some really interesting battery saving features incorporated, Smart Sync will intelligently predict your usage habits so that, for example, mail isn’t synchronized during long stretches of time when you don’t usually use your phone. Smart Sync will appear as an option in the Exchange settings screen.
- The browser has gotten an update with a reader mode similar to iOS5. There’s also a new Read Later and Watch Later function that works with a widget on your home screen.
- Guest Mode, which is great! This mode lets you decide what apps and features can be seen when you decide to pass your phone off for others to ogle.
- The camera has been pimped with a few really cool features, when you take one shot 5 are actually taken and the best is actually chosen and displayed. We have to wonder if this slows down your photo taking experience at all, we assume it would, the question is by how much.
- DropBox is being pimped big time, in fact, when you set up the phone for the first time, you’ll get 50GB of space for free. Then, DropBox storage will be handled like another drive on the phone. When you attach a file to an email from DropBox storage, the DropBox link will be added to the email and not the actual file, as to save data.
- PocketNow also noted that a trusted source informed them that HTC Sense 4.0 devices will not have on-screen keys as found on the Galaxy Nexus. Also, devices in the near future will go with a 3-button configuration for Ice Cream Sandwich devices, instead of the current 4.
We won’t have long to wait, Mobile World Congress kicks off on February 27th where we can take a look at the UI for our selves.
Via PocketNow Via NetbookNews.de
