--the manufacturer's user interface over Android--has garnered a mixed response from consumers and tech journalists alike. And has, by far, the best-looking interface of any version of Android. I understand why manufacturers slapped on overlays in the early days of Android: The underlying interfaces were ugly. HTC Sense is undeniably pretty. But its animations and colorful widgets have a tendency to bog down the operating system.

Perhaps my idea that manufacturers might leave Android 4.0 alone and just add a few customized widgets was just wishful thinking. To HTC's credit, Sense 4.0 is much subtler than previous versions of the interface. The company has cleared out many unnecessary icons and text that cluttered older versions of Sense. You can still pinch the screen to see all seven of your homescreens, and you get that handy customizable lock screen that we saw with Sense 3.0.

Still, Android purists might take offense to a few changes. The Recent Apps UI has been tweaked in typical Sense fashion. Rather than displaying your apps or websites as a list with thumbnails, it displays them as pages that flip as you flick through them. The Sense widgets are a bit too busy and garish for my liking, but you can easily remove them.

HTC Sense also makes some very basic tasks more difficult than they should be. For example, to change the phone's wallpaper, you have to dig through multiple menus in the Settings. Changing the wallpaper in vanilla Android 4.0 is as simple as holding down on the homescreen.

The Evo 4G LTE comes with a significant amount of carrier and manufacturer-added software, but that seems to be the norm these days. You can disable some of these so they don't show up in your apps menu. Annoyingly, you can't disable either the Sprint Music Plus player or the Sprint Zone.