[Hero CDMA General] LiquidSolstice:
Rewritten to tone down unintended hostility.

I did my best to get used to CM6, and I was sad to find that a lot of people, especially on the IRC channel, were not quite tolerant of my ex-Sense habit, and sadly, I ended up leaving CM6 because of that. It's not just the people on IRC, there are a few reasons why I think Sense is superior, so agree with them or not, here they are :)

The 9 reasons I use Sense UI; keep in mind this is a comparison between stock AOSP and stock Sense UI. No alterante launchers, mods, widgets, apps, or themes.

1. The Sense clock app just looks far better to me, and is also far more functional. I have not had a good experience with AOSP's clock app at all.

2. I don't like Ubuntu. I never liked the way it looked; it had and always seems to have this "accessibility over design" look to it. When I see AOSP android, that's exactly what I see. Ugly, unrefined Android. Just my opinion, maybe not the best of reasons, but it's just what I've come to find from experimenting with both.

3. The Lockscreen is simply elegant; and I prefer not to have any sort of slider or buttons on my lockscreen. I also do not like the way the font is displayed on the AOSP one. It looks a bit tacky and does not match the rest of Android.

4. The Sense Launcher has something that so far, I can't seem to find from any other launcher; G-Sensor screen switching. No matter what screen I'm on, I just give my phone a quick shake, and I can see them all. AOSP doesn't let you do that, as far as I know. Believe it or not, I prefer this more than hitting the menu button; I do not have to take my thumb off the side of my phone.

5. The AOSP keyboard; in all honesty, it's just too slow and feels very flat. The text prediction gets to be too confusing, and using the space bar only helps until you don't mean to add a period after a word and then typing becomes a chore. I also do not like how I have to hit a seperate key to show all the alternate letters and punctuation. The sense keyboard allows me to simply press and hold to get that lettter.

6. The Sense Widgets: Simply put, I don't WANT to pay 2.99 for BW when I have excellent widgets already available to me. The Clock widget is a must, as is the messaging Widget. Why should I have to pay for Launcher Pro Plus when I already have these (I bought LPP before coming to this realization). Perhaps if TweetDeck ends up introducing a proper widget that can compete with Friendstream, then I can consider switching.

7. The Sense Dialer; When I turn on my phone, and I want to quickly dial a contact, all I have to do is open up the dialer and start spelling the contact's name out through the dialpad keys. Does AOSP's dialer let you do this? Sadly, it does not . Instead, I have to go through the phone app to get to the Contact list, then press search, wait for the search bar to appear, and then start to type out the name on the terrible on screen keyboard, and then click again to get to a contact's page, and then press on the dial button. Again, I know about DIaler One, I have not had good experiences with it, nor am I including it in this comparison.

8. Contact management; One of the things that you can't do with AOSP and have to do in the GMail interface is being able to add contacts into groups other than just Favorites. With Sense, I can have as many groups as I want, which is useful, since I can have widgets of just one group of Contacts. It also helps me discern phone numbers from people who I only temporarily need to have, such as Project A, Camping Group B, etc etc.

9. The Calender app: The Sense Calender sorts my different details about a calender date into little sections, the AOSP one just bunches all the details up together, making it far more annoying to discern different things.

All in all, no my phone performs extremely well and runs quite fast (Zen-Rom Alpha 5) and gets terrific battery life. I can even use JIT on it, whether or not it really is noticeable. It's elegant, it's clean, professional, and just a joy to use. Sense is to Android as Apple is to Software; refinement and polish.

This is by no means a jab at you CM6 themers and skinners, your work is amazing and gives Stock Android what it needs. I'm just here to share my experiences as to why I use and love Sense, and when we manage to get it ported to Froyo, I will be happy to switch up to 2.2 :)