All Sections

HTC Sensation Ice Cream Sandwich hands-on video

After hearing about the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) having been leaked for the HTC Sensation, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it, so a quick trip down to XDA Developers later and we’re holding an HTC Sensation in our hands with the latest, greatest version of Android, 4.0.

With Sense 3.5 spread thick on top, a lot of the front end experience hasn’t changed from what we’ve come to expect with HTC’s Sense 3.5. That said, dig a little deeper and you’ll see the dock now houses a set of 5 icons as in stock ICS, Roboto (typeface) crops up in menus and settings are divided across 4 categories.

The main dock has gone down the route of many custom launchers, the ICS launcher and TouchWiz, with customisable shortcuts to your most used apps. In the centre is a sticky shortcut that pulls up the apps drawer. We’re personally glad to see the back of the “Personalize” shortcut and hope the new dock makes its way through to the final build. The homescreens, lock menu and apps drawer haven’t changed much, though there are some additional widgets and apps found pre-installed such as Google+ and Movie Studio.

The features we’re most glad and sad about are found in the settings. Starting with the glad – developer options are present and allow users to force GPU rendering to improve visual performance and there’s also Wi-Fi Direct on-board too. That said, one feature we were worried would be switched off looks like it has – the ability to hide apps from the apps drawer.

Still, nothing too definitive can be drawn from this beta build, though we’re excited and happy to see Ice Cream Sandwich cropping up in leaks so soon after the source code was released in November – bring on 2012, the official release and lets hope when Sensation owners update to ICS, it will be with HTC Sense 4.0 for a real front-end re-fresh.

Source: XDA Developer forums
 

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *