It’s safe to say that the consumer world has something of a love hate relationship with HTC’s proprietary Android skin, Sense. Some people love it, and others hate it.
Regardless of how you feel about it, HTC continues to improve upon Sense with each new generation of flagship devices. The latest version of Sense, 5.0, will be arriving with the HTC One, the company’s latest flagship which has actually been in the spotlight quite a bit lately.
Along with Sense 5.0 comes some pretty interesting features and improvements. The most striking feature is the new HTC BlinkFeed.
BlinkFeed is essentially a comprehensive home screen, or what HTC calls a “live home screen.” It collects updates from various social networks, news sources and other targets and then crams them all onto a single home screen. It’s apparently HTC’s way of keeping you up to date on all the latest news and social happenings.
While it is a pretty neat feature, and there are many out there who would use BlinkFeed, one particular question comes to mind. What about those of us who have no interest in using such a thing? It’s obvious this will take up system resources, which could potentially be used elsewhere.
Obviously, the community was interested in the same issue because HTC’s blog is littered with people asking about disabling the feature.
This prompted HTC to explain how BlinkFeed works. It’s the default home screen in Sense 5.0, but as with any other home screen, it can be customized to suit your taste. According to HTC, you can set up your own default home screen, shift the position of BlinkFeed, and even remove it altogether. Additionally, if you decide to use BlinkFeed, you can disable various elements that you don’t use. I take this to indicate that BlinkFeed itself is customizable.
Now if only there were a way to disable Sense altogether, wouldn’t that be something? At least HTC is trying to make their software better. Still, it’s completely understandable that the community is interested in disabling BlinkFeed. This wouldn’t be the first time a manufacturer bogged down the Android OS with unnecessary bloatware.