HTC Flyer review

Sense includes many customisation options for the homescreen, with Themes that provide different apps and widgets as well as change the operating system’s look. As on HTC’s smartphones, you can pinch to see the ‘helicopter view’, with all homescreens visible on one screen as smaller tiles. In landscape mode, however, the homescreens now wrap around in a carousel, which is clearer. There’s also an extra shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen, with icons for the applications tray, a customisation menu, and three customisable slots for app shortcuts.

In terms of standard apps, Sense’s additions and replacements are hit-and-miss. The People app’s ability to link contacts together from multiple services – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, last.fm, Flickr, Skype, and any other app that adds itself to the Accounts database – is its strongest feature, and the people-focused aggregation of status messages, events and even photo uploads really is an improvement on the standard contact card metaphor.

In other areas, though, Sense duplicates functionality, and it’s not always an improvement. Sense’s Twitter app is poor (though not as bad as Twitter’s official app) and HTC has replaced Android’s Gallery app with a much inferior list view that doesn’t sync with Picasa, even though it does pull in photos from other services. However instead of pulling in photos, it simply lists your contacts, adding an extra layer between you and the images.

For the tablet market, HTC has provided not just apps, but also services. There’s Amazon’s MP3 store, an ebook reader app that offers eBooks from Kobo, a Press Reader app that offers subscriptions to newspapers from around the world from PressDisplay.com, and a Watch app with films and TV shows for rent or purchase direct from HTC.