After a bit of a bumpy start, it finally started to look like the original HTC Desire might get Gingerbread without losing too much software, but a recently-leaked carrier document shows there might be a larger price to pay, suggesting Gingerbread will see the Desire stripped of HTC’s Sense UI.

HTC first announced that the Desire, along with several other of its older models, was on-track for a Gingerbread update this year. We saw a leak of the software, and everything seemed to be going fine, until HTC announced earlier this month that “there isn’t enough memory to allow us both to bring Gingerbread and keep the HTC Sense experience on the HTC Desire.”

The manufacturer canceled the Gingerbread port, but vocal complaints by Desire users, often pointing out that HTC has managed to get Gingerbread on similarly-equipped hardware, won out and the company reversed course. Now, to save on space, HTC said that it would “cut select apps from the release.” The assumption was that we’d get Gingerbread and Sense, but lose some of the larger, non-essential bundled-in apps; a fair comprise.

Now a document attributed to Telstra in Australia notes that work is in progress on a Gingerbread update for the Desire “that does not include HTC’s Sense UI”. That’s quite the surprise; we thought HTC would pull everything else it could off the Desire before touching Sense. Could HTC have been spot-on when it didn’t want to release the code? Sense is a big part of what makes an HTC an HTC; is it worth losing for an official route to Gingerbread?

So far, we’ve only heard about this affecting Telstra. It’s not inconceivable that Sense might stay for releases on other carriers, assuming they OK other changes to free up the space.

Source: Engadget

Via: Pocket-lint