I am actually against this. Regardless of how nice this is, this goes against the OS nature of Android. HTC is treating android as a free (beer) operating system (bla bla bla microsoft/apple). But when they realize that their phones are not top notch, they still want to proceed like MS did, with vendor-lock-in.
The point of Android is that its open. If you feel its missing 4g, send your impl to the team and it will be open sourced with everything else, if you feel it's missing stylus support, send that too. Etc. This way any phone supporting the hardware reqs will be able to take advantage of it.
Instead HTC is taking many many months to port their POS software to the new Android version. In the end their software sucks and any benefit it has is diluted in the shit. However they could have easily contributed any benefits to the main project and just helped out which is the goal of OS.
I totally agree. Not only is Sense trying to create a different Android environment (visually), it's also not really useful most of the time.
I heard that this improved a lot in the last versions (my last Sense phone was a HTC Hero and no, I'll certainly won't buy from them again). My brother is satisfied. Still - this adds to the fragmentation. Trying to make it available (in a poor form imo, with these code drops) is just a try to strengthen the self-made split in the Android UI world. "Please use this SDK to support our branding".
I was thinking of getting a Samsung Galaxy S II next, but maybe I'll just go with HTC again... Hopefully the custom ROMs will have even better support for HTC phones now.
Considering that Samsung sent a batch of Galaxy SII phones directly to the Cyanogenmod development team makes me think that the SII will have even better support...
I know this is a bit of a nitpick but am I the only one who cringes every time a new developer site like this requires logging in to look at a code sample or download an sdk? If you want developers to spend time and money enhancing the value of your platform you ought to make it a low friction process.
On a cooler note, they're releasing kernel source (as they should (have been/be) doing, but also will be launching a bootloader unlock tool, so that we can actually make use of the kernel source!
These tarballs are usually code drops that happen when device reaches market and are mostly never updated afterwards :(