HTC's 'Sense' UI is a large part of what makes the HTC Hero such a desirable handset for Android fans. The interface, centered mostly around home screen widgets, was debuted earlier in the summer and was expected to arrive on other "non-Google" HTC Android handsets.
Since there are only three HTC Android handsets, and all of them are Google-branded in the US so far, this meant at the time that the UI was not coming to the States.
As expected, HTC announced this morning that users of the HTC Magic on Taiwan's Chunghwa network will be able to upgrade to the Sense UI for free in the month of October.
Despite the fact that the MyTouch 3G (T-Mobile and Google's version of the Magic) is outwardly indistinguishable from the Magic, it is still unlikely that it will officially be upgradeable.
Sense has actually proven to be quite a resource-hungry UI, what with all of the widgets simultaneously running in the background and MyTouch 3G actually has less memory to work with. Some have speculated that this is the real reason Sense will not be making it to Google phones and not for licensing issues. A side by side comparison of the two devices shows that the Magic has 288 MB of RAM and the MyTouch3G has only 192 MB.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009