Blink and you’ll miss the feed
One of the more prominent parts of HTC’s new handset experience under Sense 5, the latest iteration of the Android overlay, is a homescreen that you can’t remove called “BlinkFeed.”
This is a screen that endeavours to loosen the stranglehold on news-reading apps you might already be using, such as Flipboard and Pulse, which pull in various news and RSS services from your online world and turn them into a glossy style of reading.
We mentioned Flipboard not just because the concepts are similar, but because the look of BlinkFeed has more than a passing resemblance to Flipboard, with rectangular blocks that open up to show the story you press.
News and topic services can be added to BlinkFeed, but these are quite limited.
In fact, in Australia, your selection of sources can include AAP, NYFP, news.com.au, Lifehacker, Bang Showbiz, HitFix, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Tech Radar, and a few other sites we’ve never heard of.
Interestingly, there is no possible way (at least at the time of publishing) to add your own websites and news feeds to the system, meaning if you like reading a dose of GadgetGuy on your phone or maybe even a news source like ABC News, you can’t use BlinkFeed for this.
We did a little more looking into this and found that the whole BlinkFeed system appears to be managed from a different location, and even noticed that occasionally the news feeds were delayed on the weekend, with no “new” news coming in, even though the website had been updated.
You don’t just have to rely on news sources, though, as you can send your Twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn, and calendar information to the rectangles that make up the BlinkFeed screen, with these often working better than the limited news service selection HTC has provided.
Also of note is that BlinkFeed will always be the left-most screen in your homescreen list. It doesn’t have to be your main homescreen, but it will always be there.
But wait, there’s more!
It would be doing HTC a disservice not to mention everything else packed in here, such as the slight changes to HTC’s Android overlay that make the main menu easy to read with a smaller grid (3×4), or for those people that like more icons, there’s a larger one too (4×5).
The inclusion of Beats Audio technology is still relevant, and HTC has doubled the speakers by throwing up two on the front of the device, both of which help to make this handset a portable audio factory, producing loads of sound, whether you’re jamming to tunes or switching the loudspeaker on during a phone call.
Used with headphones, the Beats sound has a little more “oomph,” which is more than just a heavier hitting bass, as the mids and highs are also affected.
We wish you could tweak the equaliser in Beats, compared with HTC’s switch of just “on” and “off,” but it does make you feel like you’re listening to a decent sound-space, and it works across any time you’re listening to audio, not just HTC’s music app, including Pandora, Google Play Music, and even YouTube.
Not too bad of a review, but seriously the power button is not an issue. And neither are the soft buttons at the bottom….so many of you keep copying other peoples remarks about these buttons and making them into negatives when in fact it’s a non issue.
We weren’t copying remarks, we were reviewing the phone.
For what it’s worth, my hands were small enough to find the power button annoying, but someone else in the office with larger hands had no issues at all.
The soft buttons at the bottom are a little finicky when it comes to pressing, and even today (as I’m about to pull the SIM out and start reviewing another phone) I was having the problem where I was pressing the screen when I was actually pressing the soft button.
I can accept both– i mean the button and the review. Takes some time to adapt, not a deal breaker though.
The power button should be standardised somehow.. BlackBerry Z10 has it in the top middle. HTC One on the top-left, iPhone on the top-right. GALAXY S4 on the middle-right-side 😐
For the Back button, HTC design actually makes more sense (on the left – like in browsers). But I guess we are so used to having it on the right + the Home button in the middle