The Sense 6 OTA for my TMO One m7 caught me by surprise

[Bateluer]

HTC's Software update page had the Sense 6 update for T-Mobile in Development state while the other carriers were at Certification status. Then suddenly, Bam! It went from Development to Certification to being pushed. 693MBs, and behind a WiFi wall.

I'm not a huge fan of Sense. The App drawer being locked to a 3x4 grid is still irritating, the HTC Gallery app is still completely unusable, and Blinkfeed is still meh.

But, I have noticed improvements in radio & signal strength, as well as GPS lock time. This morning, before starting my run, I noticed it had a solid 4 bars of HSPA. Usually at this park, I get only a single bar, if it gets signal at all. GPS locked almost instantly as well, previously, it would take a couple minutes to bounce the location from various points around town successively closer to me. Very anecdotal evidence though. I've only had the update since last night, I'll get a better feel for it over the next few days.

Our office at work has very weak TMO signal, and I'd previously drop signal in there entirely, if I was able to get any HSPA at all. Looking forward to seeing if there's any improvement in there.

 

[Accord99]

I'm not a huge fan of Sense. The App drawer being locked to a 3x4 grid is still irritating,

The M7 has always been able to use 4x5 in the App drawer by changing Settings->Grid Size.

 

[Crono]

You should run GPe on there if you really don't like Sense. Or run dual boot GPe/Sense.

 

[Bateluer]

You should run GPe on there if you really don't like Sense. Or run dual boot GPe/Sense.

I've thought about softmodding it into a GPe m7, but never have the motivation. The Sense camera is pretty good, and the Sense 6 redesigned it. Haven't had much time to play with the updated app though.

Running Nova Launcher takes care of 95% of my complaints.

Definitely can confirm radio and GPS improvements though, in multiple places.

 

[cronos]

I've been on custom ROMs on my HTC One for a while so I never did get the joy of being surprised by OTA. I'm still staying on Sense 5.5 for now though, although I've downloaded all the stuff I need for installing the Sense 6 version and getting ready for a fresh install by doing backups, etc. Maybe next weekend or the following. I'm curious about Sense 6, but I'm not in a rush.

It's funny that you mentioned the Gallery is unusable while in my case HTC Gallery on this One is the first time on an Android phone I didn't feel the need to install third party gallery like QuickPics. It wasn't too intuitive at first but as soon as I got the hang of it, it's been working really well for me. The app drawer is pretty clunky (helped a bit by Sense Toolbox the XPosed module), and Blinkfeed grew on me, although I didn't miss these two at all when I decided recently to just use Nova Launcher.

I have tried GPE-based ROMs as well, and while everything was pretty solid and just need a bit of getting used to, strangely enough the thing I missed the most from Sense that I couldn't live without is the camera. I just couldn't stand the Google camera. Granted this was before they decoupled it and put it on the Play Store, and this new version seems to be much better, but I still prefer the Sense (5 and 5.5 version) camera. I heard most people hated the Sense 6 camera though, which is probably one of the reasons why I'm not too eager to update.