After the launch of HTC Hero and seeing how perfectly HTC’s new UI works has left a lot of present owners of Android looking at their handsets with a lot of disappointment. Peter Chou the CEO of HTC has said “HTC Sense will be available on some other existing devices.” Most number of people are speculating that either the G1 or Magic or might get the slick new interface.
It may not be so clear-cut, however. What HTC failed to make entirely clear during their press conference yesterday – and then took pains to point out in the aftermath -
HTC Sense refers not only to the new UI on the new HTC Hero but to each of HTC’s latest UI work, that includes TouchFLO 3D on Windows Mobile phones. Last night at a dinner event in London speaking to an executive of HTC, it was made clean and clear that HTC Sense is the culmination of 3 long years of development, since the original HTC Touch device.
There’s also the question of what ties HTC had to break with Google in order to make their modifications in the Hero. We already know that there are different levels of Android involvement that lead to different types of branding – i.e. whether you can have a Google sticker on the back of your phone – and that branding is conspicuously missing from the Hero. We don’t yet know enough to say whether HTC’s new UI sits entirely well with Google’s “Android Experience”.
What that could mean is that the existing devices Chou talks about might not, in fact, be Android-based, but could be newer models from the company’s Windows Mobile range. The recently-launched Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 might be two potential candidates. It certainly seems more likely that HTC would do a straight port of the latest Sense UI to models in its Android line-up, but until it announces definite plans we can’t be certain.
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