Does HTC Sense add anything good?

[desura]

Looking at it, it adds some crap from news republic which is basically random TMZ-esque stories. Otherwise, it seems kind of crappy. Any point to use it other than the google now launcher?

 

[core2slow]

No, just more junk to drain the battery on an already poorly optimized device. I'd rather use stuff on demand than just letting apps run wildly in the background.

 

[cronos]

Short answer is no. Google Launcher or any of the popular third party launchers, if it's your thing, is more than enough to get you all you really need in a launcher.

Btw, Blinkfeed (left most screen) can be easily removed, if you don't like it. It also isn't really random. There's a set of default news sources already configured, which is what you've seen with the 'TMZ-esque stories' but you can change them to whatever you want, including setting it up to exclusively show your Facebook and/or Twitter feed, if you like.

Having said that, I have been putting Nova aside and been using HTC Sense for the last couple of months, almost solely because of the freestyle theme. This is the feature that allows you to have app icons spread out throughout the home screen, instead of being strictly ordered in a grid. The fun thing about this is that theme makers can create icons in all kinds of shapes and sizes (they can overlap as well) that blends in with the wallpaper, so they don't look like icons. This is 100% gimmick, of course, but I always hated that my home screen is filled with icons in a grid (I have posted before my super clean home screen without any icons at all, with shortcuts all through wave launcher), so I was happy to try this. This allows me to have icons in the home screen, although it doesn't look like it.

 

[stayawayfromthey]

No; it's a lot better than in years past but there's nothing really great that it adds.