Android Decoder Ring: Android 2.0 vs. HTC Sense vs. Motoblur

In case you hadn’t noticed, Google’s Android OS has a lot of momentum right now. With eight Android smart phones available in the U.S. this holiday season—most of them new–there’s a lot of excitement around this open and highly customizable platform. But there’s a difference between the stock Android interface on devices like the new Motorola Droid, and others like the HTC Hero and Droid Eris (Sprint and Verizon) and Motorola CLIQ (T-Mobile).

That difference is a custom user interface that delivers more screens for you to customize and smarter ways of managing contacts and tapping into your social networking feeds. HTC calls its experience Sense, while Motorola dubs its service Motoblur. But what kinds of features do these skins on steroids offer, and how do they compare to the stock Android 2.0 OS?

HTC Sense
Available Phones: Sprint HTC Hero, Verizon Wireless Droid Eris

Pros:
Seven home screens
Ability to save and choose preset home screens
Custom HTC Widgets
Tight social network integrations

Cons:
Not yet running Android 2.0

HTC’s major focus in creating its Sense user experience was on customization. HTC likes to identify Sense by its three pillars: “Make it Mine, Stay Close, and Discover the Unexpected.” HTC spent time rebuilding and perfecting Android’s stock widgets, and even added a few of its own to help you customize the home screen.

The Mail widget, for example, lets you flip through and view messages at a glance from the home screen. With seven different screens, there’s plenty of space to add handfuls of widgets, too. Moreover, you can save different home screens and quickly switch between them. So you can customize seven screens, save it for Play, and then customize another seven and save it for Work.

HTC’s ‘Stay Close,’ pillar means stay connected with your friends via social networks. The address book social network integration is deep: You can link contacts to Facebook and Flickr to view status updates and pull down their respective profile pictures for your caller ID. If you click a contact, you can also view photos that contact has recently uploaded to Flickr.

The final pillar is about discovering some of the fun features HTC has built into its phones. The weather application has a windshield wiper flow across the screen if it’s raining out. And you can turn HTC’s Sense phones on their face to silence them when a call comes in and you need to quickly silence it.

HTC has said it will upgrade its Sense devices to Android 2.0 and will update Sense so that it adds more functionality to Google’s latest OS.

Motoblur
Available Phones: T-Mobile Motorola CLIQ 

Pros:
Tight social network integration
Five customizable home screens
Universal Inbox
Motoblur Backup

Cons:
‘Happenings’ a bit buggy
Address book can feel clogged
Doesn’t yet support Android 2.0

Blur is all about social networking, and that can be a good or a bad thing, depending on who you are. Motoblur focuses on two primary tasks: keeping you in touch with friends via your favorite social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, and also letting you customize the phone to your heart’s content. Instead of having seven different home screens to customize, however, there are only five, but that’s still better than the three different ones Android gives you by default.

Motoblur offers a few customized widgets, and the primary one is called ‘Happenings.’ Right now it’s a big buggy: most of the status updates it displays cover the actual photo of your friend. If you click the widget, you can flip through the most recent updates. For some, Motoblur might be a bit of a social network overload. You can’t control who gets pulled into your address book, so if you log into Facebook, all 400 of your friends will show up whether you want some of them to or not.

We do love Blur’s universal inbox, however. It lets you view all of your e-mail, SMS, and Facebook or Twitter messages all in one place, if you want to. If not, the separate inboxes are still available.

Bonus feature: Motoblur lets you sync all of your phone’s settings and contacts in the cloud, so if you lose and replace it, you can simply restore again by logging in to your Motoblur account.

Unfortunately, Motorola hasn’t provided a timetable as to when it will roll out Google’s Android 2.0 update.

Stock Google Android 2.0
Available Phones: Motorola Droid

Pros:
Free Google Maps Navigation Beta
Multiple Gmail account Sync
Combined Inboxes
Quick Contact

Cons:
Bland user interface
Available on single phone (for now)
You get only three home screens

The latest version of Android—available currently on the Motorola Droid–has a few key improvements. While there are a few UI enhancements, including a new unlock swipe screen and an improved Android Marketplace menu, most of what has changed is below the surface.

First, you can combine multiple e-mail accounts inside the e-mail application. This app is separate from your Google inbox, and is for your POP/IMAP or other e-mail accounts. Messages are color coded with a small bar so that you can tell which e-mails came from which account.

Another noteworthy change is that you can now sync multiple Google accounts at once, instead of being limited to just one. The biggest drawback, however, is that if you want to delete just one of those accounts, you have to reset the entire phone to its factory defaults.

Android 2.0 can also save you money. It comes with Google Maps Navigation Beta for free, which offers voice guided turn-by-turn directions. Other GPS navigation services typically cost $9.99 per month.

Another welcome addition is the Quick Contact feature. Inside your address book, you can click a friend’s avatar photo and then a small ribbon menu pops open from which you can choose to e-mail, call, text, or chat with that person, as well as view their location on Google Maps with Latitude and visit their Facebook profile. This eliminates the need to dig through menus just to fire off a quick text message.

Android 2.0 also adds the ability to search through saved SMS and MMS messages, and adds new enhancements to the camera like white balance and color effects. The onscreen keyboard is also slightly improved. Inside the browser, you can tap to zoom now instead of simply pressing one of two zoom buttons.

CHEAT SHEET: Android Interfaces Compared