The Skin I Live In

I hate HTC's Sense UI. I also don't particularly care for Samsung's Touchwiz, am able to barely tolerate the latest variants of the overlay formerly known as Motoblur and am entirely apathetic to whatever it is Sony and even LG are doing with their Android UI skins.

I don't believe that manufacturer designed custom overlays are any longer necessary on the Android platform, especially since the arrival of the latest Ice Cream Sandwich update. Although I'm sure many of you will disagree I believe that Android should always provide a stock experience for each of their devices out of the box.

Then, if you insist on hampering you phones performance by adding carousel effects to your page swiping and lord knows what other kitsch crap, that's your prerogative and you should be able to do so via the Android Market. It's what makes Android great. Kinda like, I may not agree with what your doing but hell, I'll fight for your right to do it.

The Android Market is where manufacturers should house their overlays (for free of course) or perhaps they could simply have a specific app dedicated to transforming UI of the phone, similar to the HTC hub found on HTC's Windows Phone devices. I don't know, I don't particularly care what they do with them. I would prefer they binned them altogether to be quite frank.

Google acquisition of Matias Duarte, the man who pioneered the webOS interface, has clearly proved a wise move with Ice Cream Sandwich feeling more polished and clean than ever. I just think that this desired stock experience is the one we should all get to enjoy regardless of what hardware it's on.

HTC Sense 4.0

The whole thing that ignited this train of thought by the way were the shots I saw of the leaked Rom Update Utility for the forthcoming ICS powered HTC Endeavour which of course featured the updated Sense 4.0 skin. As you can see by the shots HTC have once again successfully warped the clean stock experience into something unashamedly overbearing which will no doubt lead to lag, force closes and crashes and what I like to call 'battery rape.'. Hey perhaps this is what people want but I for one could quite happily do without.