It's been a year for my phone, and I've always recharged it when the battery hit about 45%, so I decided it was time to do a full discharge/recharge cycle. It's good for the battery to do that now and again.

So I had the phone down to 14%, and then I got a notification that Verizon wanted to roll out a patch. Oh, dear. Am I about to be bricked?

Fortunately for me, they recognized the danger of trying to install a patch when you have low battery, and gave me an error message. So I popped the phone onto the wireless charger and, eventually, let it install the patch.

Patches. Two of them.

The first one upgraded my phone from Android 4.1.1 to 4.2.2.

The second one implemented something called "Sense 5", which turns out to be a redesign of the GUI. Which wasn't broken, and didn't need to be fixed.

I haven't played with it much, but I've already noticed a couple of things. First, the look of the icons has changed. Weirder, it handles multiple screens differently than before.

I had five, and it used to be that you could scroll around the circle as many times as you wanted. When it reached the last one it would wrap around to the first. It doesn't any more, and I have no idea why they decided to change it.

They got rid of the ring, by which I mean the thing you sweep to confirm that you want to turn on the screen. Instead there's a version of the clock at the bottom of the screen, and you sweep that. ??

The camera app looks strange; they changed the look of all the controls.

Are they trying to make it look like an iPhone? In some cases it almost looks like Windows 8.

What was HTC thinking?

UPDATE: The new Accuweather app is ugly. And what is "Blinkfeed"?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 03:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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