HTC?s New Software Vision Might Actually Make A Little Sense

HTC’s floundered of late, with a less-than-impressive 2012. Much of that can be attributed to Samsung and Apple, which chomped up even more marketshare last year than they did the year before. Plus, HTC put a lot of focus on Windows Phone 8 last year with the Windows Phone 8X and 8S, which put the Taiwanese handset maker even further behind. However, HTC’s insistence on packing its phones full of Sense software has never helped. Users awoke their phones to a number of various bubbles and widgets that did nothing but confuse and clutter. But Sense 5 and the new HTC One has a shot at changing all that. The list of features in Sense 5 is incredibly short: there’s BlinkFeed, which acts as a live feed of all your social network and news content, and there’s Zoe, a Vine-esque app that creates highlight videos from static photos and videos. There is also a revamped navigation menu for SenseTV and some new Music player that pulls in song lyrics directly into the player for you to sing along with. One of these features will be a significant value add, possibly setting the stage for HTC’s future vision of Sense. The others will be used once or twice by each new HTC One owner. Can you guess which is which? BlinkFeed does something HTC has never done, which is streamline. Rather than have a social widget, a news widget, a weather widget, and a dozen customized clock faces, BlinkFeed puts all the important stuff in one place. Each piece of content is accompanied with a large photo, Flipboard-style. BlinkFeed, in essence, takes what used to be three or four different and separate features of HTC Sense and pulls them all into one, useful feature. BlinkFeed takes up residence right on the home screen, and has over 1,400 content partners including the AP, ESPN, etc. Users can filter by type of content, choosing to only see social updates or only see sports news. It’s a true hub for smartphone content consumption, better than BlackBerry 10′s Hub, Android and iOS notifications, and potentially even Flipboard itself. It’s the first time that HTC has actually taken a step back and pared down Sense, rather than beefed it up. But of course, even with this huge stride in the right direction, the company clearly couldn’t help itself when posed with the opportunity to add gimmicky

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