Does HTC Sense... err... make sense?

I've just finished an early evening meeting with a salesman who's quoting to fit us some windows.  He's of my parents generation so not so comfortable with modern technology (though I have no doubt he knows his windows!).

Anyway, I whipped my Nexus One out to do some calculations and he identified that it looked very similar to the new handset he had just been sold by the O2 shop.  In fact it turned out he had the HTC Desire (same as the Nexus One but with a few cosmetic hardware changes and HTC's Sense UI as an additional software layer over the base Android look and feel).

He told me that he was a bit confused as to how to answer calls on it.  He was not sure how to answer it.

I did think this was something that they should have shown him in the shop.  And, besides, it's not exactly difficult on the Nexus One.  But I said I would take a look.

We made a test call from my phone to his.  I was immediately like a fish out of water as the interface on receipt of a call on the HTC is completely different.  In very small writing at the bottom of the screen it does explain what to do though.  You have to drag vertically in one direction to answer the call (I think it was down) and the other direction to drop it.

Every time he had received a call he had not had the time to read that little message and had simply jabbed at the screen until it did something!

Once I had showed him how that works we moved on to other niggles...  voicemail...

Firstly he had not been shown how to drag the notifications in to view from the home screen status bar.  I explained it in terms of being a drawer that could be opened.  Which clicked with him so we had a good starting point.

As it turned out he had already managed to get to voicemail but had not worked out how to get the number keypad up in order to control it!  On my Nexus One (i.e. default Android look) it says 'Dialpad' under the keypad button when you're in a call so you don't have to rely on just an icon to know which button to press.  HTC's 'Sense' only gives you a button with an icon that looks vaguely like a keypad.  To me as a techie this was obviously the button to press - but not anywhere near so obvious to my man from the window company.

I show him this (a revelation) plus, as a Brucie bonus, showed him the speaker phone mode too.

In 5 minutes of showing him through the basics of using his device he went away very happy.

I, on the other hand, am somewhat bemused.  I thought HTC were meant to be making the UI easier to use with 'Sense' (tm).  I don't think so.  Give me basic Android OS any day...