Tim
In 2016, a designer who we assumed was hired or employed by HTC at some point, accidentally posted a video of Ocean. At the time, it was an unknown device, but what was exciting about the phone was Sense Touch.
Sense Touch was supposed to be a group of sensors on the side of the device that could control the device’s volume and other navigational controls with swipes and slides of the finger. What we ended up getting as consumers was Edge Sense, followed by the abomination that was Edge Sense 2 in the U12+.
At launch for the U11, Edge Sense could open apps and start tasks by squeezing the sides of the device. Edge Sense was purely a pressure sensitive sensor, not a strip along the phone that could feel swipes or slides. That is where the disappointment began. With Edge Sense 2 on the U12+, the phone that replaced actual buttons for pressure sensitive nubs, Kellen described using it in his full review.
Edge Sense 2 has led HTC into one of the worst manufacturing decisions I’ve seen on a smartphone in quite some time. They decided to remove the mechanical buttons from the side of the phone and replace them with pressure sensitive nubs for power and volume controls. I cannot even begin to describe how big of a mistake this was.
Tell us how you really feel, Kellen.
While Sense Touch or Edge Sense never turned out quite the way we had hoped, where we could simply slide our finger along the side of a device, it did give us squeezy sides to activate Google Assistant, which isn’t the worst thing ever. HTC just tried to complicate the feature too much.
Did you ever have the pleasure of trying Edge Sense out for yourself?
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