Several hours ago, HTC unveiled its 2014 flagship, the M8. The device is already getting a lot of critical acclaim for its design but as usual, you can never please everyone can you? Just ask the likes of Samsung. While the M8 is receiving a lot of flak about its seemingly underwhelming camera (and rightly so), some other HTC fans think the bezels could’ve have been reduced and that the on-screen buttons that HTC adopted after ditching the two capacitive buttons on last year’s One (M7) are not good enough. Why? They eat into a portion of that 5 inch Super LCD 3 full HD display. First world problems.
Problem or not, there’s a petition on change.org to push HTC to include Paranoid Android’s most popular feature, pie controls. Why? They could add more functionality in the wake of a much “smaller screen” after the bezels and the on-screen buttons have had their fair share of the pie.
Interestingly, the guys behind the popular Paranoid Android custom ROM have since ditched pie controls in the latest beta version of the ROM which is what will eventually be pushed out once it stabilizes to all supported devices. Another development is that Google has recently patented something similar to PA’s pie controls.
Though the petition does not hold water in my opinion, the twist it brings is the interesting bit. Expect no response from HTC. There was a lot of outcry when HTC announced they’ll be dropping official update support for the One X and One X+ and that hardly went anywhere despite many online petitions backed by tens of thousands (not a mere handful of geeks) being lodged.
