Among the seemingly thousands of Android-powered HTC handsets rumored for the first half of 2010, little is known of the mysterious Espresso -- the codename was
found in a 2.1 ROM and a sketchy report claims that
it'll have a QWERTY keyboard for an MWC announcement, but other than that, we're in the dark. Anyhow, Italian site
hdblog.it now claims to have some shots ripped off the Espresso's display, and at a glance, you can tell this isn't quite the Sense we're used to from the Hero. The bar along the bottom now features direct access to People -- a feature we'd already heard would be revised for HTC's next round of Android phones -- and app icons have apparently been graced with translucent surrounds that are... well, not exactly pretty. We've got to keep our opinions in check until we actually see a shipping ROM, of course, so hopefully those talks of an MWC unveiling in February pan out.
posted December 21st 2009 3:22AM
Eww... looks like every other menu interface. Please keep the old one HTC.
@samleung
I think they took Apple's Cocoa, and added.. Aqua, or... Cum, or something...
Espresso anyone?
*vomit
As a graphiv designer I'm going to go ahead and call bluff on this.
For one thing, there's no way the label on "ProximityTo" would fade away so clearly when the app next to it (QuickOffice, which has the same amount of characters) does not.
Also, the width of some of the icons are off by just one or two pixel, and I have no idea why the header of "All Programs" would be larger when you're scrolled all of the way up, and smaller when you're scrolled down, which, if you look at the scroll bar, some of those apps should be overlapping. And they don't.
It also looks like they merged a layer together between the bottom bar and the last row of apps, because they differ from the first screen and the second.
Just saying, faaaake.
@Sketh
Whoa, typos, don't hold them against me.
@Sketh
Why would Android have a Java icon ?
This is nonsense, it's either WinMo or KIRF
No. Gray. Black fine, multi-colored fine, just no gray or brown.
HTC...No need for change for the sake of change. Take those lame icon frames away, it buys nothing, adds clutter and looks horrible...direct link to people I like! Never really cared for the '+' icon on the menu bar, especially when that option is in the menu pop up.
@R V
Strange my Hero has never had any problems.
I personally think they're fake. If you look at the bottom icons, it looks like a skin for GDE.
http://www.androlib.com/android.screenshot.app.zwAp-qqit.u.aspx
Hate to burst your bubble HTC, but your bubbles just burst my bubble.
Yuck.
looks too feature phone-esque
im pretty sure the stock android 2.1 showed on the droid a few days ago is much more pretty than this!
no surprising, it's looking more and more like the iphone UI :)
wow...this is pretty gross.
The slider bar at the bottom looks like it could work in landscape... maybe this is just a qwerty version?
@R V
You need to get in on some custom MoDaCo ROM action
I'm a Hero user and I like this...
It looks to me like this is only the app tray, so i really dont know what everyone is getting worked up about. If anything, Sense UI will be IMPROVED, not DEvolved. I trust HTC. They havnt pulled crap out of their hat just yet
crowded, ugly, def. not HTC
i think my HERO just blinked in this tragedy of a ui.
@HERO relax. It's just shots of the app drawer. Notice the "All Programs" at the top of the screen. I'm sure the rest of the UI looks nice and clean. Who cares what the app drawer looks like? It's just a place to store all your shit anyways.
Let the iPhone be an iPhone and just be yourself HTC!
Where's the iPod icon?
I first used Android on the HTC Hero, and to start with I liked the while Sense thing it had going on. Nice black notification bar with better-looking notification icons, some nice widgets going on... it seemed worthwhile.
But eventually you realise that this sort of manufacturer skinning breaks many things, including the visual consistency of the OS... Android 2.x is much more usable and more consistent. And if HTC (for example) decide to bastardise the OS like this, it makes it that much harder for you to receive timely updates too.
I do still like the look of some of the widgets, but most of the stuff they skinned on Android is just a direct knock-off of the iPhone OS (seriously, looking at the clock settings screen, for example, on both side-by-side actually made me laugh out loud).
I have a strong feeling that a large part of what Google is trying to do with the Nexus One is to get people back to using the latest cutting-edge version of Android, and not some freakish offshoot. And if you make sure that all the best phones on the market are doing just that, well, you remove a lot of the perceived incentive that HTC and others had to create these skins and tweaks that potentially damage the whole ecosystem by causing fragmentation and app complexity.
whatever happened to htc superstar or htc and tegra chips???
this is clearly just the app drawer. Looks better than the app drawer on my Hero. People just need to relax, I'm sure the full UI looks much nicer. Who cares what the app Drawer looks like anyway? It's just a place to store all your used/un-used apps. No biggs.