Why TouchWiz and Sense UI sucks

[G+_Marlon Thompson]

Why TouchWiz and Sense UI sucks

 

A lot of times you hear people complain about TouchWiz and Sense UI and if you haven’t played around with these phones you don’t understand why stock android is so coveted. Well I have been thinking about it for a while and then I saw the review by “Kellex” over at Droid Life of both phones and he said exactly what I was thinking, so I have paraphrased his top 5 for both overlays but trust me there is more.

 

TouchWiz

 

1. Creating folders is a mess as it almost always has been with TouchWiz. In order to create one, you need to grab an app and then drag it to the “Create folder” option that appears at the top of the screen. This was fine in pre ICS days but oh my does this frustrate me. 

 

2. The standard TouchWiz keyboard is the worst in the business. If you buy this phone, install Swiftkey or Swype or whatever other third party keyboard you like as soon as you can. And Samsung also has the annoying feature where there keyboard never truly goes away, many times even though I have Swiftkey enabled, the Samsung Keyboard just pops up instead.

 

3. For this one I am going to directly quote Kellex cause this frustrates me, “the dialer application which is attached to contacts is essentially two separate apps, yet they appear to be one. What I mean by that, is as you enter the dialer, you’ll see tabs (which I’ll get to in a moment) for Keypad, Logs, Favorites, and Contacts. Should you press the Contacts tab, it actually opens up the Contacts app rather than a new tab, so there is a delay before it shows you anything as it takes time to process and open the Contacts app. Once in the Contacts app, the top tabs change to Phone, Groups, Favorites, and Contacts. That’s right, the tab that used to say Keypad, now says Phone. Can we get some consistency? Again, tapping “Phone,” then opens up the dialer app and takes an additional few seconds to load. It’s slow, clunky, and pretty damn ugly.”

 

4. With Samsung come customisability out of the wahoo, but it also means that you get a confusing settings menu. In the S4 you get four tabs and their own categories for settings, which are mostly a jumbled mess. Even within their core apps there are tons of settings that can be difficult to understand, the good thing is it gives you the opportunity to learn something new everyday.

 

5. Samsung still designs apps and menus as if they were built in 2010 for Gingerbread rather than Jelly Bean. From the color scheme to the non Holo UI, Samsung really needs to step it up.

 

Sense UI

 

1. . On the HTC One, all notifications start out collapsed and can only be expanded with a two-finger swipe. On stock Android, your most recent notifications tend to always be expanded by default, while older ones will slowly start to collapse on you. Should you want to expand them, a single finger swipe will do the trick.

 

2. On any other Android device, the app dock is a separate entity from the app drawer. What I mean by that, is you can drag and drop items to and from it with ease. There are no tricks. On the HTC One, you can only add or remove items from the dock when you have the app drawer opened up. Then, once you add an app to the dock, it is removed from your app drawer. Should you want to remove one from the dock, you have to manually open the app drawer back up and drop it inside

 

3. HTC decided long ago that the simple long-press-to-wallpaper-change on a home screen wasn’t intuitive and killed it off. Instead, they decided to embed a “Personalize” menu in the device’s settings section which includes ringtone, wallpaper, and theme edits. Organizing all of those things into one area isn’t a bad idea, but forcing users to enter settings and then navigate through a separate Personalize menu seems like far too much to me to change a wallpaper.

 

4. Navigating photos is a pain. The initial gallery menu includes sections for My Photos, Friends (assuming you attached social networks), and Camera Shots. If you tap on My Photos, you get into any number of views for Events, Albums or Locations. Why there are two separate sections between My Photos, Camera, Friends and then Events, Albums and Locations is beyond me. It’s an extra level of navigation that is completely unnecessary. But beyond navigation, try sharing multiple photos on any HTC device. They killed off the simple long-press-to-multi-select that comes with almost every other Android device, and instead ask that you press a share button, choose a service to share to, and then return back to the gallery to decide which photos you want to share.

 

5. Their contact management continues to be a disaster after all these years. HTC fully understands that you have multiple accounts plus a SIM card that may contain contact information and have done their best to try and manage them all. Unfortunately, it’s a task they haven’t yet figured out. From recommendations to link this account with that account, to deciding which accounts should even be included in your contact list, are beyond confusing.

 

Now there are things about the two UI’s that I like and I can cover that in a separate post if the interest is there. Jason Howell 

[G+_Chris Quinn]

Wow, lots of info there. Lol. I read it all. I am sure most of the issues that you mentioned could be fixed in some way with 3rd party launchers and apps, that's the beauty of Android, you can change what you don't like, you could also just not buy these phones as well. :) Cheers!