I love it, had a guy the other day notice my g1 next to the lap top, i was streaming pandora inthe park. We got talking about phones and he braged about his droid and his wifes eris. I lit mine up, showed him my settings screen, jaw dropped when he saw widgets then …….. 2.1! Whats this his new droid was suddenly old news. Lol. I laughed as i explaned i was tethered wireless, streaming pandora, oh, and did i mention i could still make/take calls. Yep theres a map for that to……

Old school!

But htc Sense is not just pretty looking widgets. There are underlying frameworks which enable multitouch, social networking syncing etc. and apps which add functionality (even if Footprints looks like an answer to a question which nobody has ever asked).

So, even if they are going to market their widgets at the wider Android world (or at least those widgets which don’t rely on Sense frameworks), it doesn’t mean that they will market Sense itself. Unless they have an Apple-style control freak mentality, I would imagine that they will market the bits which are basically pretty Android widgets while keeping the underlying Sense crown jewels to themselves.

Alternatively they may have decided that the amount of development work required to keep Sense up to date with Android is too much, so they are considering a whole new way of working.

@damndirtyape

Greedy? I wouldn’t have thought that expecting financial return for work is greedy. It’s more like… work.

If you want to work for free, that’s fine. If you want to spend time and money designing software so that someone else can make cash out of it, that’s fine. If you *expect* other people to work for free, then you’re a freeloader, and that’s not fine. And if you pirate software, you are a thief.

So unless you’re totally happy with working unpaid and having things stolen, I’d reconsider your philosophy.

For those of you complaining about no enuf screen real estate for Sense UI-type apps, try Home++ Beta app. It’s free, and I think works better and smoother than Open Home and the other pay Home alternatives. Home++ has up to 7 screens, and is fully user selectable. The Dev is updating and improving the app constantly.

Google is possibly releasing the HTC Nexus/Passion/Dragon/Bravo aka Nexus One early next year…

Google seems to have added at least five(hope this is changeable 7 is better.) desktops to it + lots of other visual UI enhancements… But, it won’t come with Rosie aka Sense UI…

Right now HTC takes forever to update new versions of Android thanks to the full Sense UI porting & upgrading… Imagine what HTC could do to move units if they would just stick Android 2.1 & higher on their phones & use the market to exclusively sell Sense UI as a widget… Once Adobe flash & multi-touch are central part of the main Android release(without the manuf. of the phone needing to add it themselves)… Sense UI is just an awesome(Love Rosie) collection of widgets… & now with the 1Ghz CPU’s the tweaking is not as hard for great soft. speeds.

I bet this will only available for HTC phones(manuf. by HTC) that don’t come with Sense UI.. Like the G1, MyTouch on TMobile & a few other markets…. Although of both of this probably only MyTouch will probably see it… And the main reason for this is Nexus One… This is for the non-rooting crowd… If they price it right… This should be a good intro into soft. sales for HTC…. And will probably be a better market then snap on back front covers for the Tattoo… Right now after a phone is launch & bought by a good number of peeps, there is very little incentive for the manuf. to upgrade to the latest Android… Remember some phones are coming out next year with Android 1.x … WTF… The Nexus One suppose to be Android answer to the fragmentation of it’s OS… HTC seems to be trying to help google show others how to handle it better.. Also Sony/Ericson said a few months back that it was open to selling their UI too…

After news of the HTC Dragon come out… I remember some one going around the forums saying that Dragon did not mean a phone but the software…. I wonder if this the end product…

While testing the Eclair Sense and adding widgets to my home screen i saw the option for “Get more widgets” with a little download link next to it…

clicking leads to another screen that says connection failed. So ya i think the 2.0 with sense is coming sooner than expected if theyre already putting up their widgets for tests in the market..ofcourse i can be full of it but its just my 2 cents.

Some of the widgets that Sense UI currently has implemented wouldn’t work on Vanilla Android anyway. Take the Twitter widget for example: It has scrolling implemented, which is prohibited by the widget SDK in standard Android. That only works with HTCs own widgets on their own Home Screen app.

I’m not sure, though, why they sent the C&D letters then. Maybe they stumbled upon Beautiful Widgets just now. Or they want to sell their own widgets so Sense UI devices at a higher price and don’t want the users to get a cheaper alternative. I don’t know :D