HTC improves Sense with latest offerings

With HTC's announcement of the Legend and Desire comes a new and improved version of its Sense user interface.

The biggest change is the addition of "Friendstream," HTC's new answer to social networking, aggregating your Flicker, Twitter and Facebook friends in an elegant and easy-to-use widget. The Peep Twitter client is on board, and you can upload video directly to YouTube, par for the course.

And that pinch-to-zoom we've seen on video before? It's there.

Toss on top of that improvements to the e-mail and calendar widgets -- better account management in the inbox and an agenda view as well -- as well as full-screen weather on the clock widget, and Sense is rocking harder than ever.

But wait, there's more. HTC has upped the ante with improvements to the Android browser, bringing the ability to long-press a word or paragraph and look it up straightaway in a dictionary, or send it for translation to another language via Google.

All in all, a worthy update to an elegant user interface, and one we'll look forward to seeing on as many devices as possible.

Phil Nickinson