HTC Sense Ruins Android

I recently bought a HTC Wildfire to replace my ~5 year old Sony Ericsson W910i, primarily because I wanted email and social functions to be available when I was commuting to university. And because my old phone sucked.

Why I picked Android

I figured Android was the way to go. Its popularity and market share have been gradually increasing, and an open source phone OS with an unmoderated application market appealed to me - especially as I could dabble in development for the platform if I wanted to.

HTC Sense

I will summarise my issues with HTC Sense in bullet points:

• It has an entirely inconsistent UI
• It slows down the phone considerably
• The HTC Sense browser is much slower than the stock Android browser
• For me the HTC music player didn't work properly and would consistently crash
• Android platform updates rely on HTC to update their version of the phone software, my Wildfire hadn't been updated with Froyo (released in May, at the time of writing it's November)

I see HTC's motivation to include such an interface with the phone: product identity. Android looks awesome, but it is generic — consumers wouldn't associate the stock Android UI with HTC, so when the time came to buy a new phone they may not pick a HTC phone again because they'd feel familiar with another brand.

Clearly HTC felt that the entire interface needed re-writing, not only to make it stand out but also so they could label it as a feature and use it in the advertising of their devices.

OpenFire

I was getting tired of the music app breaking, and couldn't stand the HTC messages app any more as when I tried to delete an 800 SMS message thread the phone froze, and I had to remove the battery. Five times.

So, I set about researching new and community built ROM for the device. The beauty of Android is that it's open Source- anyone can grab a copy of the code, edit and compile it. So, there are a number of custom android builds available for Android capable devices.

One example of these that caught my attention, OpenFire, doesn't contain the HTC Sense applications and restrictions and (because it's the current version of the Android OS) allows WiFi tethering and other awesome stuff.

OpenFire 2.3 Release thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=783024

My phone is now running OpenFire, and it's much faster than the bloated HTC firmware with sense.

One issue I have with this firmware is that if you leave the USB cable plugged in when you shut the phone down, the orange notification LED will remain on even when the cable is disconnected and you will have to remove the battery in order for the phone to boot. Not really a problem for me, I usually have mine on when charging.

Apart from that though, the above has been the only problem with OpenFire that I've had (apart from delayed SMS messages, although this is more likely a network issue), so if you have a HTC Wildfire and hate the UI, I'd advise you to have a look at the forum post.