HTC’s recent release of the HTC One M9 with Sense Seven, brought about a number of new features to their launcher including Themes, a new contextual Home Widget and new updates to the functionality of Blinkfeed. Now HTC has updated the name of the launcher to HTC Sense Home and it could possibly expand beyond HTC phones.
The update to the HTC Blinkfeed launcher, which was launched onto Google Play last year ahead of the HTC One M8 launch, changed the name to HTC Sense Home, and it also brought the functions from the HTC One M9, though as HTC points out in the description, some of the features may require the latest version HTC Sense.
The description in Google Play describes the new features :
Discover what’s around you and read more of what you love from one elegantly arranged, constantly updated place on your Home screen.
Stay in the know with the content you care about—social media updates, calendar events and news, including your own custom topics, in BlinkFeed. Offline Reading mode lets you save articles to read later when you’re on a plane, travelling abroad or just on-the-go.
You’ll also get recommendations for nearby restaurants, cafés and bars from BlinkFeed or on your lock screen around meal times, and ideas for fun places to visit appear when you’re close by.
HTC Themes
A one-of-a-kind appearance gives your phone a personal touch. With HTC Themes, your phone’s style is as infinite as your imagination.
You can create your own theme from scratch. Start by selecting a favorite photo or by taking a new picture for the wallpaper and the Themes app automatically creates a coordinating color palette. Choose a style to change icons, sounds and fonts all at once, or mix and match theme elements individually. It’s never been this easy to apply wallpapers across your phone.
In addition, high quality designs are published in the app’s catalog. Follow your favorite theme designers to receive instant updates when they post new material. While you browse, be sure to bookmark, comment on and rate themes you really love.
Sense Home Widget
Beauty isn’t much without brains. Thankfully, HTC’s intelligent Sense Home widget makes it effortless to access the apps you use most frequently.
Whether you’re at home, work or out-and-about, it auto populates a set of frequently-used apps based on your location, provides quick access to your recently-downloaded apps and offers app suggestions based on your location.
At the moment, the update is still only available for HTC devices, with the update only available to the HTC One M8 and HTC One M9 in my list of devices. But it could be going further afield. HTC hacker @llabtoofer has thrown a few tidbits out there – but bear in mind that these were posted on April 1st, so grain of salt etc. – which says that HTC Sense could be going to Samsung, LG, Sony and Lenovo at the very least
HTC sold Sense 7 license to Samsung. Next software update for sgs6 will bring Sense experience on Samsung devices. 1/2
— LlabTooFeR (@LlabTooFeR) April 1, 2015
Some other manufacturers (LG, Sony, Lenovo) are close to sign the same license agreement with HTC as well 2/2
— LlabTooFeR (@LlabTooFeR) April 1, 2015
If you have a HTC One – M7, M8 or M9 – you should be able to install the update fresh from Google Play. Head on over and make sure you’ve updated.
The manual update works. However, BlinkFeed’s Facebook feature will not work until you manually update the HTC BlinkFeed/Facebook Plugin. Used my wife’s M7 as a test machine and almost got sent to the doghouse for destroying FB on BlinkFeed.
I received the HTC Sense Home update this morning on my M8 and I was expecting to have more themes available under the Personalise menu. Is this not how it works?
The problem was that I was using Nova.
The themes aren’t particularly exciting…
I think LlabTooFeR simply reposted an April Fools by HTC.
Considering that HTC never actually made Blinkfeed for Sense 6 work on non-HTC devices, and it’s now over 12 months on from the Ausdroid article with the headline:
HTC Blinkfeed and Zoe Apps will become available to other Android devices ‘soon’
and it still takes the skilled regulars on XDA porting the app to other devices, to do for real what HTC said they were going to do.
I think HTC were playing a prank on non-HTC users wanting to see Blinkfeed on their non-HTC devices.
I got it on my EYE Desire today 🙂