2 Months Later – Living with Android and the HTC Hero (part one)

Date of Review – 25th October 2009 by Gavin Fabiani-Laymond

Available from – http://www.clove.co.uk

Price – £315 + VAT

Back again. It’s been over 2 months with the HTC Hero and what a great 2 months too. I am going to split this review into 3 parts. First examining my thoughts on the HTC Hero as a device and then looking at Android, the applications and games.

Part One – The HTC Hero

Living with this new phone has been a joy. It is without exception the first smartphone I have had whereby it just worked without too much fuss. HTC have done such a great job integrating their magic and customisation into the Hero. At every stage you are left with professional looking screens with lots of functionality. For example the Clock program has everything from alarms, world clocks, stopwatch and timer, all executed beautifully. Also, the alarms always go off in the morning. I like the fact I can adjust the sound and level of the alarm too. Then there is 7 homescreens, all customisable. Across the 7 screens I use the HTC Stocks, Weather, Twitter, Digital Flip Clock incorporating weather, settings flip switches (wifi, gps, Bluetooth, airplane on/off), Bookmarks and People. I have a free widget on one screen called Calwidget. Then I save my 7 home screens as a custom scene. HTC provide a number of default scenes. So if I was going on holiday, I could switch to a different scene with 7 different homescreens. And naturally if I was at work, play etc I could have a different scene for each of my moods. Now that is seriously cool. There are some many widget options that you could spend months deciding on your new look.

In daily use, I use my Hero as my satnav (using Copilot 8), phone, camera, sms, email, rss feeds, twitter, web browsing and the odd game. I love how you pull down the notifications screen to see what’s happening. I find the web browser to be the best I have used, even better than my iPod Touch. Why? It has flash for some websites, but the way you can easily read everything on the screen is wonderful. Talking about the screen, as it is capacitive this makes data entry a lot easier. Also, the built in keyboard is excellent. Google search is very intuitive too. Start typing a few letters and its starts to auto suggest search results based on your location. So if I typed pizza, it would list Pizza places nearby. Talking of satnav, I use a custom Hero car kit. I got this via Grey Mobiles Ltd on eBay.   This is the best gps screen mount I have used. So adjustable its great. I also learnt that attaching the screen sucker to your car screen is best done using a tiny amount of vegetable or olive oil. Push and hold on. Leave for a few hours and it will never fall off.

Speed. The Hero is quick. It can multitask very well. By default Android will close non essential applications if you need more memory.
Android has been an easy learning curve. It works really well and then new Android updates at version 1.6 and 2.0 look pretty amazing. The Hero is running Android 1.5 at the moment.

The negatives. Android by default requires all apps to be saved in main memory. Whilst the Hero does have a lot of memory this will soon be lost if you start buying games, so I wish you could save and run apps from the memory card. If I was being picky a faster processor would really make the Hero perform like a bullet. It is not slow at all, but seeing the new 1ghz devices does seem to make a difference. But if one takes into account the cost of the Hero, then really it is a great value piece of kit. Also there is no ereaderpro reader or the ability to take screenshots. I would love to be able to read my encrypted books and take screenshots to show you some of my slick homescreens.

The positives. It is open source. This means the negative above has been solved by a clever developer. More on that later. It’s brilliant and everyone agrees, so much so that HTC are having trouble keeping up with demand.

Updates and custom roms. I do have a custom rom, which I can update in less than a few minutes as I do not need to wipe my Hero, simply run update and all my settings, apps etc are all kept in tact. This is also done without connecting the Hero to my PC. Cool. To help make my Hero faster, I have split my memory card into 3 partitions. Part one as normal for storing all the usual stuff, part 2 for storing and running my apps (using a program called app2sd) and part 3 as a 32mb linux swap (memory card used as additional phone ram). I was also using a program called Swapper which added another 32mb ram, but I felt I didn’t need this.

Part two will be posted tomorrow, looking at the best Android applications.