Let’s Take a Walk Through TF3D 2.5 (Sense) VGA

We’ve already gone through TF3D in detail which we updated when TF3D 2 was ported and now that TF3D 2.5 (a/k/a Sense) is out, it’s time to provide a little more info. I want to note that I’m running the Energy Akeo ROM (Nov 13) on my Fuze which includes the Akeo and Amarulz Manila packages.  I’ve never been a huge TF3D but I have to admit, this version has enough shine to really make met like it again.This version of TF3D does not have landscape mode (except for music and photos).

I won’t bore you with tons of photos from tabs that are essentially unchanged, but let’s get to it.

Here are the launch screens and as you can see they do refer to this build (Manila 2.5.19202525.0) as HTC Sense.

Starting at the beginning, here’s the new sweet home tab that sets your weather based on your current location (based on Google Weather – not GPS). You can see the animated weather appears as well and the next upcoming appointment is visible. Tappin the clock goes to your time settings, tapping the alarm goes straight to alarm settings and hitting an appointment goes to the calendar tabFlicking up gives shortcuts which can be applications, contacts or shortcuts. It’s all really easy to changes as well. One thing missing is a missed call/voicemail notifications so you need to rely on the HTC Notification popups and top bar for those.

Next up is the People tab which by default can have 15 shortcuts to call your contacts. The old animation is gone and replaced with super large/finger friendly buttons.

The text messaging tab itself looks the same but once you start to use it you’ll see that’ it’s been refined quite a bit. The ‘all messages’ tab is a better overview. Overall it’s a little prettier and functionally easier to use.

The email tab is essentially the same except that the envelope has been removed so you can see a lot more of the email in preview mode.

The internet tab has also only had cosmetic changes. The search bar appears at top and otherwise the shortcuts are a lot larger than the previous build. As you can see, the top image is so large that you can’t see the name of the shortcut without slightly scrolling down.

Next up is calendar and there are some nice improvements here. When viewing a daily view the weather will appear (this was in some prior builds of TF3D). There’s now a yearly, monthly and weekly overview and the best is an agenda view- it shows you everything for the next week in one page. And check out the pic that shows what adding a new appointment looks like – all finger friendly and everything.

The stocks tab is essentially unchanged.

The photos tab is actually really fast and responsive to flicking through photos. While Sense currently lacks a landscape mode (the Leo doesn’t have a keyboard so there’s no reason to rotate the phone otherwise) but photos do automatically rotate when you turn the phone and it actually does some fancy animation as it turns and puts the pics in line. There’s also animation when you select a photo – it orients itself the right way and enlarges until it gets to full screen. If you flick fast you go through more pics than a slow flick. I like the way this works a lot, especially in landscape.

Similarly, the music tab has landscape enabled by using the gsensor. There’s also an added page where you can see the songs in the selected album with an overlay. And take a look – it will find album art for you…and it works. I’m using two pics from Energy here.

The weather tab is also fairly unchanged except that the weather animations have been improved. 

Next up is a new tab for Twitter. I don’t tweet so I’m using a pic from NRG.

Another new tab is Footprints. While it’s a great app it’s not fully functional at this point in the VGA port. Here are some pics of what it looks like with existing Footprints. To add your own there are workarounds but they take a little effort at this time.

Surprisingly, some of the most significant changes come in the Settings Tab. I won’t bore you with this, but from an ease of use perspective I bet this is welcomed especially for new users. It’s a lot easier than the old fashion method of looking through settings and trying to figure out if it’s a system or personal setting. Currently the new sound settings (relating to pocket and movement) are not implemented. The first picture (showing social networks) is one of the selling points of HTC lately. Now all of your social networking can be built into your homescreen so it’s right at your fingertips. There are animated backgrounds incorporated into TF3D 2.5 but not in the current VGA port.

So there you have it. A little look at where TF3D is now. None of this would be possible without Akeo and Amarulz and of course Energy for the ROM. These packages are very difficult to work with so these guys really deserve a ton of credit for what they’ve done and what they continue to do. TF3D 2.5 is only available if cooked into a ROM (and may never be a stand alone cab because of the file dependencies). The current builds are really incredible but if you use them expect some bugs – it’s not the porters or the chefs fault. If you’re thinking about trying this, I think Big Badger put it best “Please do not trust your livelihood to something you have not tested, running on a custom ROM, built on top of a beta operating system with a UI ported from another device! If you depend on it, test it first.” When you really think about this software it’s amazing it’s been ported, incorporated and generally works pretty damn well. And it’s really fast considering it’s intended to be on a phone that has a 1ghz chip.

Great work again guys!