Sunday, 8 March 2015

HTC Sense 7.0 - Sense Home with Smart Folders

HTC "Sense Home" system is one of the greatest HTC Sense 7.0 feature I found so far. It's basically a widget where you can place apps and games icons from your app drawer or even create a new typical folder. "Sense Home" widget is connected with locations service and it automatically detects the location of your device, changing in a real time the content of the widget to "Home", "Work" or "Out". Want to know more? Keep reading!

To activate "Sense Home" you need to either long press on the screen of the device and choose "Add apps and widgets" or navigate to Settings / Personalize / Add apps and widgets. Once done you will see the first widget on the list called "Sense Home". And this is what we are looking for.


Now just drag & drop it like with any other Android widget on the empty space of the screen. The minimum size of the widget is 4x2 but it can be resized to 4x3 or even 4x4. So basically you can fill your entire screen with the Sense Home widget if it's how you like to organize your apps and games on the screen.

Sense Home

The "Sense Home" widget has 3 main categories - "Out", "Home" and "Work". You can choose between them by pressing the corresponding icon on the top left side of the widget. In each location - Home, Work or Out you can place up to 16 icons or 16 folders (depending if you choose a 4x2, 4x3 or 4x4 widget size). Each folder can store up to 16 icons.


Precise location

Of course it wouldn't be very handy if you have to choose manually between these 3 work-spaces. To help you with that HTC paired the "Sense Home" widget with a location service. Once you set up the Home and Work locations, the content of the "Sense Home" widget will change automatically.



Smart Folders

In the "Sense Home" widget you can place 2 "Smart Folders" - Downloads and Suggestions. Downloads folder will contain all apps and games you downloaded from the Google Play and Suggestions folder will store suggestions for nearby restaurants, apps, websites, games, news and other kind of personalized stuff, based on your usage data. 


If you don't want to use Smart Folders you can easily disable them by pressing 3 dots menu in the top right corner of the "Sense Home" widget.


Additionally, you can also disable sharing precise location or personal usage data. That depends on how much you care about your privacy.


Pin & Unpin

Additionally there is a Pin and Unpin option and you can use it on ever icon inside the widget or a created folder. The process is very simple, just long press on the element and wait until it's pinned or unpinned.


Personally, I find this new "Sense Home" very interesting and unique. I am sure that HTC will extend its features in time, adding more categories or even lettings users create their own ones.

If by any chance you haven't yet read previous HTC Sense 7.0 related articles here's a short reminder:


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