Well, HTC have told us recently that we should expect Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the HTC Sensation XE (as well as many other HTC phones) by the end of this month. This is great news for me as I’ve been looking forward to it since I got my phone back in November last year. But what are you to expect? Here’s a round up.
- New(ish) home screen – HTC haven’t really changed it massively themselves, but with ICS some changes have been brought in. The famous rounded bar that shows at the bottom of the screen in Gingerbread (with the big phone button) has been replaced with the ICS equivalent. You can now set four shortcuts on the bottom bar. You can also specifically set how many home screens you want (up to 7), rather than being stuck with empty home screens.
- Face unlock – the new software brings in face unlock – so you can use your camera to unlock the phone. Handy, I guess.
- Updated web browser – the web browser has got a couple of minor new features – like being able to force websites to load desktop pages.
- Other new stock ICS features – Whilst some ICS features aren’t added in (probably for compatibility reasons), there are some new things like data cap settings which could come in handy. You can tell the phone how much data you get per month, and the phone will moderate itself accordingly.
- Better app organisation – you now get app folders (finally). In addition, the recent apps feature has been overhauled to give you a much better preview of what is going on in the background.
- Access to notifications from the lock screen – pretty self explanatory, but this will be useful.
- Updated Google apps – some Google apps like Gmail and Google Maps have been updated somewhat.
- Sense 3.6 – An update to HTC’s Sense software.
That’s the main key feature update. I’m looking forward to it – but I would have liked to have seen HTC working on some of their own apps – such as the Music app which, I feel, needs some fixes and updates!