Disabling Sense on the HTC Desire

I have been playing around with my HTC Desire today, and wanted to see what it was like without the Sense interface. If found several small tutorials online on how to disable (en re-enable!) it, which contained about the same steps, differed a little bit on how extensive those steps were described, and were all completely similar in that none of them actually worked.

Shortly the steps are described as follows; In Sense, press Menu Select Settings Select Applications Select Manage Applications Find "HTC Sense" Click 'clear defaults' Click 'stop application' Press Home button * Select the non-Sense option

Now all of those are indeed correct, but they seem to be based on a pre-retail version of the Desire. When you try this it all goes well until you press the Home button. At that point the Sense UI simply gets restarted again.

The reason for this is that apparently HTC has removed the Home application, and the trick to disable the Sense UI is to install it again. Now I could not find Home for download itself (it's expected to be included I guess), but there is a Home++ beta application, which seems to work fine.

If you download Home++ from the Android Market and then perform the steps described above it works like a charm.

You do want to be a bit careful here, I also tried AdvancedLauncher, but it crashes on startup on this phone, resulting in an endless crash-and-start loop that I couldn't get out of except by removing the phone's battery.

Also note that this only disables the UI, not other Sense-related background tasks. Still if you just want to try it out, now you know how :)