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[q] Pros and Cons of Sense and No-Sense on Desire?

Hi all!
As per topic, actually.
I hope this is the right section to ask for this, as I want to make it specific for the Desire ROMs and not all the ROMs with Sense or No Sense.
I plan on getting an HTC Desire and having a custom ROM right away (that is, after going through all the required process of rooting etc.).
My question is the following:
What should I ask myself when choosing between a Sense and No Sense ROM(other than the UI experience)?
While doing a research through the forum I found some answers, however nothing was too informative. E.g. I found out that if one wants to play games in a custom ROM he should go for a No Sense ROM.
Is it because Sense ROM affects the performance or is it because of the way its settings are that does not interact with games well.
Does this happen to other kinds of applications as well?
Is there anything else that one needs to keep in mind when chosing for a ROM when it comes to Sense or No Sense?
Why go for Sense and why for No Sense?
I realize this is too much to ask, but as I searched through the forum and did not find anything specific, I believe that this will be helpful information for Desire newbies like me.
Thank you!

This may not answer your question in the depth you asked but from my own experience after using roms with and without sense I prefer the ones with sense.
Did not find any appreciable difference in speed but prefered sense roms from a purely aesthtic point of view.
Best idea is to get the phone and try different roms to see what you like. There are so many roms and everybody has their favourite that you will not get a definative answer.

The fun part is, once you are rooted you can test all ROMs and see which work best for you.
You can either spend hours trying to find an answer to this particular question or you can just try a couple of them and see what works best for you.
Sense comes with a couple of wonderful apps, which you lose (like the FM-radio) when you use a non-Sense ROM.
I don't need them per se, so I am currently on WhiteXperience, which is non-sense.
This ROM is extremely fast with low battery usage, which makes it great for playing games.
New ROMs come out every day and they get better and better each day.

A Thread with a question I also want to know since several weeks
If I get a no Sense ROM do I lose all HTC specific programs.
Widgets, ok, no issue. I don't use them either. Use Launcher Pro.
But programs, especially the mail client, how's that? Do I have to search a new one from the Market? I don't think there is one available as powerful as the HTC one.

I prefer using the sense roms cause I get the sense dialer which I much prefer over the stock Android dialer, including the contacts manager. However in using adw launcher as it feels much faster than the sense interface
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

Rymon said:
E.g. I found out that if one wants to play games in a custom ROM he should go for a No Sense ROM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've not heard that one before! I've no problems playing games with a Sense ROM.
Regards,
Dave

I love sense and can't do without it now. Sense-less roms feel really empty and boring to me now.

Doesn't really answer your question, but there are a couple ROMs that have the UI portion of sense (i believe its called rosie) removed and then had the dialer/contacts/etc ported to work with stock or alternate launchers. Iirc Cyanogen is one like this... might help you out going that route too..
As to the actual question.. I have noticed that non-sense roms do seem to be a noticeably faster, but its usually cause most are highly tweaked for increased performance and usually include a2sd+. A lot of the sense roms are also tweaked as well, but usually include the froyo a2sd, which doesn't seem to be as much of a performance boost. Onto of which most of the tweaked to the sense based roms are for UI improvements, themes, etc. And not as hardcore performance based...
Just my 2 cents... IMHO... Take it as you will
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

sbdags said:
I love sense and can't do without it now. Sense-less roms feel really empty and boring to me now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had a Motorola Milestone previously so I'm used to the stock Android.. if you want something with a little more umph, I really recommend LauncherPro (and LP Plus). My fav launcher by far!
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

mikeandjaimie said:
Doesn't really answer your question, but there are a couple ROMs that have the UI portion of sense (i believe its called rosie) removed and then had the dialer/contacts/etc ported to work with stock or alternate launchers. Iirc Cyanogen is one like this... might help you out going that route too..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just an fyi, but CyanogenMod is most assuredly *nothing* like this.
CyanogenMod is based on AOSP Android, but has been significantly customized from the original source. It owes nothing to the Sense frameworks that HTC have built into their own version of Android.
Regards,
Dave

foxmeister said:
Just an fyi, but CyanogenMod is most assuredly *nothing* like this.
CyanogenMod is based on AOSP Android, but has been significantly customized from the original source. It owes nothing to the Sense frameworks that HTC have built into their own version of Android.
Regards,
Dave
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry yeah I worded it wrong.. I should have said sense-less ROMs that have some of the sense components ported. My bad, but thanks for pointing it out.
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

Thank you everyone!
I will follow your advice and try out different ROMS of both UIs (Sense and non-Sense) and see which of the two I prefer.
I will most probably start with a Sense ROM and if I stumble upon any issues I will try the other one as well.
Can you please point me towards two or three ROMs of each UI that I should definitely try out?
As for the battery efficiency of the ROM I do not worry. I have stumbled upon a couple of threads that IMHO give the best advice I could get when it comes to managing several phone settings in order to reduce power drainage.

Try this one, you can remove Sense very quickly if you want, but Sense Dialer will stay, which is better anyway.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=741661

You wouldn't go wrong trying the Cyanogenmod ROM, its a non-sense one, but as stated before, very tweaked.
As regards one of the other posters, an excellent replacement for the mail app is K-9, you'll find it in the market, and its been my mail app of choice since I owned my G1, it handles IMAP very well, though I've not tried it with an exchange server, so can't comment there
Hope that helps

Tried many sense and non-sense roms. This is what I found:
HTC Sense roms have:
- Better Gallery, faster and with better zoom
- Better Dialer, faster, sleek and functional
- Better and nicer graphics for contacts
- Better camera application. Touch focus (coming to non-sense), better autofocus
- Better integrated Clipboard and selection mode
- Some other HTC applications for News, Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, Weather, etc. But these can be replaced more easily
- Some nice widgets for the above applications. They have a very nice graphic appearance
- (subjective) better memory management, I find AOSP builds too aggressive in some regards
- Nice touches like usb-plugging choice, Bluetooth FTP, etc
- Medium-high auto brightness levels
For Non-Sense roms you get:
- many kernels to choose, OC, UV, etc. At least until htc froyo source is released
- crazy high benchmarks if you OC
- much more configurability, mainly for the interface
- configurable Auto-brightness
- system wide equalizer
- some stuff I don't use (so I don't know well) like OpenVPN
- WiFi N ?
- Cyanogen Renders (in some)
- many new tweaks and releases every week
personally I really don't mind the bugs and quirks you sometimes get in AOSP roms, but I can't really live with the available alternatives to the HTC Gallery, Dialer and Camera.
Anyway these are some of the possible replacements for HTC stuff:
- Email client -> Maildroid
- Dialer -> Dialer One
- Gallery -> .... uuuuhmmmm .... errrr..... either Stock 3D Gallery or Just Pictures. They are both crap in my opinion
- Camera -> Vignette or just use stock Nexus One
- Home Launcher -> Many to choose
- News -> Feedr
- Twitter -> official client

HTC sense (or similar), sane interface for the Galaxy..

Hello all,
I have my Galaxy for almost 2 weeks and the more I use it the more I realize that the Samsung interface is nothing short of idiotic. Today I compared it with an HTC device some colleagues at work and what I thought were just pure Android OS stupidity it turned out to be Samsung's
Just an example: In the dialer application, if I start typing a contact name, I get a match ONLY if I type the first letters -- I get no match in the middle of a word.
Also, when a match is found, I am not presented with all the phone numbers for that contact, only the first one.
That's _really_ bad -- even my old Omnia running WM6.5 can do better than that.
Needless to say same thing worked as expected on the HTC running Froyo.
So, the question is: Is there any custom ROM (ideally 2.2) that doesn't suffer from this stupidity ? Or -- even better -- is HTC Sense (or a similiar, sane interface) ported to the Galaxy ? Or maybe even a vanilla 2.2 GUI ?
Thanks...

do a market search on 'launcherpro'. it's as good if not better than htc sense (with all the built in widgets), at least until the newer version of htc sense from desire hd comes out.
this is not really android rom dev, is it?

As this seems to be a dialer problem for example, check out the alternative ones from the market, one may cover what you miss...
For example dialer one. It's at least way faster than the stock one...
Oh, and +1 to LauncherPro (Plus), unless you use Touchwiz widgets.

zenkinz said:
do a market search on 'launcherpro'. it's as good if not better than htc sense (with all the built in widgets), at least until the newer version of htc sense from desire hd comes out.
this is not really android rom dev, is it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the tip, will look into it.
Well, I'm not so sure it's not rom dev since I'm not sure how much TouchWiz is embedded with ROM, if there are "vanilla" ROMs without TouchWiz or other cooked ROMs with other (better) interfaces, etc. etc.
So you tell me if it's rom dev or if it's not
P.S. And yes, "HTC Sense" was just an example, maybe not the best. Maybe I should have said "a saner interface than TouchWiz"...

the dialer found in froyo rom will be able to search in the middle of the name, instead of just starting.
you can run launcherpro over touchwiz although you probably want to remove the touchwiz widgets as they are not accessible outside of touchwiz. (which means you need to have your rom rooted). But you can't remove touchwiz completely (unless things has changed in the last 1 month) as it's integral component to feature/function beyond shell interface (e.g. you need this if you want to use kies to connect to your galaxy)

zenkinz said:
the dialer found in froyo rom will be able to search in the middle of the name, instead of just starting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not sure which Froyo you are talking about, but the test above is on the XXJPH I have installed off this very forum (and seems "ho-hum" in terms of stability on my device).
Anyway, will take a look at LauncherPro -- maybe it will alleviate some of the issues with TouchWiz

zenkinz said:
the dialer found in froyo rom will be able to search in the middle of the name, instead of just starting.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately, it isn't. Is there a way to hack it?

Theres already a Bounty for porting HTC Sense/the full ROM to our phones. Search, got around $1000+ between both threads (one over in the other subforums), but we need someone to port it. There is someone who has semi done it, just need him to release it publicly.

if you really want something similar to htc sense then check out this awsome mod from JAguirre1231 here , its the closest thing to sense (at least for now) with azreils sense theme. Or if you want stock android, you can check this which includes stock everything but only 2.1 (no its not a port, it still has touchwiz framework but everything is stock even the phone app) . Hopefully devs are working on cyanogen and once thats out, you will get what you want. until then you can use these
Hope i helped

HTC Sense is consider warez on XDA if it is not on an HTC device. HTC already threatened to sue acouple of developers on the Motorola Droid for porting it.

When I start typing 626 the equivalent for "mam" I get more suggestions.
first is "mama".
I also get a girl with the name "oana" because 626 numbers also equals "oan".
And I get some random guy that it happens to have a number like 07 626 3xxxx

If we had the freedom of choice for Sense 2.0 ...

Hello fellow XDA members!
Following yesterday's news about the working camera on the Desire HD ROM ports, I started thinking about the infamous official Sense 2.0 update for our Desire.
In particular, I was thinking about which features of the new Sense 2.0 could be left out for our Desire since we have limited NAND storage to store the whole ROM as is. Unless HTC manages to compress the ROM, there is no other outcome for us than to have a feature or two less than the Desire HD and Z owners.
And here comes the question for all of you guys..
Which of the features of Sense 2.0 could you live WITHOUT?
Personaly..
1) I could live without the themes which I suppose take much of the space needed by the ROM, or at least have a limitation as to how many themes we can have on the ROM.. unless HTC decides to put them on the SD card.. Same goes for new/existing backgrounds..
2) I could also live without the camera effects too.. we have Photoshop on our Androids now so I see no need to have it on board the camera UI...
Keep it on topic.. keep it clean.. and let the discussion begin!! (not intended rhyme here... )
*NOTE* Since I havent posted on the appropriate threads.. I am therefore saying a great thanks to "snq-" for doing his magic on the camera module and "robocik" for creating the wonderful RCMixHD ROM and making our dreams come true

Gingerbread sense is out - who will be the first to port it to our devices?

The version for HUASHAN (HD2ish Chines phone from what I briefly read...) is out and I came across a thread where you can actually download the dump files...
Here's the thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=955919
I'm really wondering when the first modded ROM will be available for our beloved Desire
Right now I can't decide whether to use a Froyo Sense ROM or a Minimal AOSP Gingerbread one... This would be the ROM that would make it a lot easier for me. I lev how Gingerbread is behaving (Right now using redux). It's darn quick.
A video about the new sense and its features. Not a big deal but gingerbread beneath it would be a big deal...
http://phandroid.com/2011/02/15/htc-sense-2-1-gingerbread-overview-video/
Hopefully someone is or will be working on this.

Already had a look at the file and although some HTC apps are there there are no widgets so don't know how complete it is. It's a test build so likely to be buggy anyway
Plus this is already in a thread in General

HTC Desire owners to wait long for Gingerbread 2.3

Hi Folks,
May be you know already but here you go:
"HTC Desire owners face long wait for Android 2.3 Gingerbread update"
Read more:
crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/htc-desire-owners-face-long-wait-for-android-23-gingerbread-update-50002752
Edit: I did search forum before post but couldn't find it hence posted. No offence, ignore it if you find it not interesting.

Old news. Do a forum search before posting. Thanks.

Indeed old news. Get a 2.3 custom rom then you don't have to wait

I'm using gingervillian and its fast and stable. Not bad on battery with the right kernel

Imagine 2.3 with SENSE. Wow.
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App

mayad79 said:
Imagine 2.3 with SENSE. Wow.
Sent from my HTC Desire using XDA App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, Wow
I've had my share of Sense and I'm seriously considering another brand just to avoid Sense (although Moto Blur and Samsung's skin isn't really better)

Please define how sense tired you? I hope that aren't just widgets?
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

- ROM takes up valuable internal space
- more RAM usage
- launcher is a joke (3 shortcuts, one of them is to put on shortcuts and widgets? yeah like i do that every 5 minutes)
When you see that the most presented features about newly announced HTC phones are "notification bar power control shortcuts" and "drawer that scrolls per sections", then you know they're just fiddling about. So Sense, please **** off.

I thought they said that they'll have gingerbread out for the desire around Q2 of this year?

vjmcdonnell said:
I'm using gingervillian and its fast and stable. Not bad on battery with the right kernel
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
do inform me how to do this. would like to have a change.

erklat said:
Please define how sense tired you? I hope that aren't just widgets?
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sense (in my opinion) is just bloatware. The widgets are a nice extra but the overall graphic make-over is unneeded in the Android revisions currently rolling out.
It may have been needed in 2.1 and 2.2 but 2.3 really doesn't need a new graphic layer.
The social network integration into the contact system is nice but nobody uses it the way HTC intended it to be used (I.e. someone calls you, you check the social network status and have a topic to talk about).
Facebook as a standalone app can also add pictures to your contacts.
I'm terrified about what HTC is going to do to Honeycomb! Imagine them throwing a Sense layer on top and adding that ridiculous pen input.

You don't have to use the pen with the tablet if you don't want (that's how I understand it anyway)
In some instances it would probably be good - i.e. drawing pics in paint or whatever - or for handwriting notes - I find it frustrating on notes on my desire at the moment, where on my Touch HD it was easy with the stylus!
It's nice to have the option anyway...

Would be nice to get the official update asap. I tried the gingervillian rom but it got stuck on the villianrom boot screen

Quit *****ing about Sense and buy an Nexus S! HTC has Sense and I love it! I'm really looking forward to get Gingerbread with Sense, but I really hope they skip the 2.3 and go straight to 2.4 Gingerbread

Agreed! , I have only had the desire for a week now and i love the sense ui. Just wanted to have a look at gingerbread

"Great news for HTC Desire family owners – it has been reported HTC will be releasing the Gingerbread (Android 2.3/2.4) update for the HTC Desire family after the new Desire S goes on sale.
Wow it hasn’t been officially announced by HTC, the information was apparently coerced out of an HTC rep at the Mobile World Congress this week. While it’s no confirmation, HTC has been proven to be pretty reliable with their Android updates and there should be no reason to why it won’t stay that way. The HTC Desire family includes the HTC Desire, HTC Desire HD and HTC Desire Z (hopefully this means the G2 as well).
With no other phones announced to have official Gingerbread updates and the Nexus S remains the only phone to have Gingerbread, it’s about time some phones started getting Android 2.3/2.4. At least Desire users aren’t still stuck on 2.1."
Not what Ubergizmo is saying. Keep the faith, people - HTC have been good to us.

eddiemerckx said:
Sense (in my opinion) is just bloatware.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use Sense roms only. No one forces you to use sense launcher if you don't like it, every sense rom has default Android launcher too. I tried a few aosp roms until I found out that sense doesn't have to be used, but you still get the rest of the great stuff like name prediction when making a call, or a slight vibrate when call connected for example. Only thing that sucks is that we are stuck with 2.6.32 kernels at this moment.
About memory consumption they are equal or sense even more efficient, and the same goes for speed. You don't get aosp related bugs either.
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

Basically not 1 plus over AOSP (T9 dialing apps on market, vibrate when connected is in CM), EXCEPT you get more internal space with using a AOSP ROM. Now extra 200MB+ over a crappy interface ? Anytime.

Is there an ASOP rom that has face detection or touch to focus though? I am a heavy user of the camera and video and so far have been pretty disappointed at the lack of those in the 2.3 roms.
I would say that the email and text widgets are better thought out than the standard 2.3, or market ones.

thed0g said:
Now extra 200MB+ over a crappy interface ? Anytime.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Heard about a2sd+ scripts? Data2sd?
Internal memory size is more than irrelevant with either of those. And the epickest are those who resort to changing partition tables to get moar internal space. Kudos.
Hope you didn't do that
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk