We’ve been talking an awful lot about the Palm Pre and iPhone lately, but what about Android? Sure, we’ve mentioned Android a number of times when it comes to netbooks, but what about phones, you know, what Android is designed for? Well, today, HTC annoucned its 3rd Android phone, the HTC Hero. This is the first to include a custom UI, as well as Flash 10 right out of the box.
The HTC Hero takes a few serious cues from the Palm Pre and its webOS with “Perspectives”, a technology that ties together contacts, emails, and social networking in a manner supposedly similar to Palm’s Synergy. It will be interesting to see how well it works, seeing as Synergy still has some bugs up its bum.
The Hero does not come with the default Android user interface, instead preferring HTC’s homegrown Sense UI, which will also appear on Windows Mobile phones from HTC. It uses something called “Scenes”, where each scene is a customisable homescreen with different sets of widgets and information. The other big thing is that the Hero will come with Flash 10 out of the box, which probably could be seen as a competitive advantage over the iPhone and (currently) the Pre (the Pre is supposed to get Flash as well).
From the press release:
With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content, while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including AGPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a five mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.
The Hero will be available in Europe starting July, Asia later in the summer, and North America later in 2009.
I’m not entirely sure if these custom user interfaces are a good idea for Android. While the openness and customisability are obvious strengths of the open source Android platform, having the same Sense UI available on Windows Mobile will mean that people won’t really notice a difference when going to the shops to buy a phone – they won’t see the benefits of Android because it’s all tucked away under a UI that’s completely cross-platform.
It may look better than the default Android interface, but since I’m not even sure if it’s open source (no word on that one), it seems like no other manufacturers – or even Google itself – can benefit from HTC’s work, which seems kind of counter-productive for Google.
This might be a better phone than the ones introduced here in the US. But I am also concerned that all these custom configurations is going to affect user experience for “Android” as a platform. But this is choice and something I that operators and handset manufacturers need to seperate them selves from others … otherwise all of us will be forced to use the same thing …. iPhone anyone?
This and the Nokia/Intel announcement is a good thing for opensource. Google gives Java (atleast the language) a leg up on mobile and Nokia will give Qt the same (I hope). What will happen to Gtk on the Mobile phone?
HTC is out there to make money. They are loyal to themselves and their shareholders…not Google and especially not their competition. Do you live in a communist country?
How can CompanyA doing something be counter productive for CompanyB?
Quite simply because if Google wants to incorporate part of HTC’s UI into Android, they will have to develop it from scratch. Why do that when HTC already has?
Alright, after looking up the definition of counterproductive, I stand corrected. I have never seen it used like that before. I always thought that counterproductive meant that it was one party working against itself. In this case it is HTC working against Google.
While that maybe true, HTC is still the vendor with the most Android handsets so, custom interface or not, Google are still benefiting from HTC
Communism has nothing to do with this.
will it be easy to disable the Sense interface if you want to use the default Android interface?
It should be possible. I do own HTC Touch Pro 2, and on Windows mobile it is so called Today screen plug-in. You can turn it off and have plain old (ugly) WinMobile 🙂 I am expecting Sense is just add-on to Androind, which can be turned off …
.
It could also have a positive effect…you’ll trick someone into using Android without them knowing. Something which is going on GNU/Linux by using WindowsXP themes by default.
Later on when there are 10 or 15 Android phones to choose from these manufacturers will want something to differentiate themselves from the others. I would say expect more to come, very few vanilla UIs.
How is tricking someone positive?
If the phone has a great system, it should stand above the competitors all by itself, right?
Edited 2009-06-24 20:34 UTC
People who buy the phone for business use might specifically want Windows.
On the other hand, teenagers probably would prefer an Android phone if they see Google’s name on it. Windows Mobile phones aren’t exactly popular with the younger crowd. And Microsoft’s Mobile OS in general isn’t regarded all that highly, atleast here in India.
At least in the U.S., people who buy phones for business use buy Blackberries. There are exceptions but they are the extreme minority.
This interface is very much targeted to the younger generation with the significant integration of social networking. Given this Exchange integration was an interesting choice.
Still I think the Hero should bring more users to the Android platform which in turn will bring more developers.
This is just slightly amusing…
People and companies work for money.
HTC spent time and money developing their UI.
If they open source it, then their competitors can take what they did for free.
Of course, if your competitors also released their stuff, then you could get their stuff for free.
Of course… I would hope you think your ‘stuff’ is better than their ‘stuff’ as that is why people would buy your products instead of theirs. So why would HTC put its stuff as open source?
Why do some companies use open source? Generally because there is no edge in the market or because the open source product is not a key differentiators and you get free workers.
For example, IBM has adopted open source not because they are kind and gentle folks. It is because they decided to focus on the services/solutions sector. In the services/solution sector, you sell services/solutions because your customers don’t want to configure, choose, support things on their own.
Microsoft does not support it as they sell software.
Open sourcing software is not a moral choice for 98.25% of people. It is a practical choice based on business needs.
/Rant begins
Well, I am going to “yah, boo, hiss” on this one.
Yes, right people and companies work for money. Clever you.
But you are conflating money with profit here. Profit goes to shareholders. Shareholders dictate what happens ultimately with a company (or often, don’t do anything until the sh*t hits the fan). They then go crying to govt., as do businesses, when the risk did not pay off. These people suddenly find ‘communism’, by which I guess you mean state intervention and direction, suddenly very appealing. Strange that.
Money is just a means of value exchange. The way money is valued these days, the way material goods, services, and, by extrapolation people, are valued, is pretty much based on mass speculation, and speculation designed to benefit a paltry few who don’t *do* much that is productive. King Midas, anyone?
What would IBM have as an opportunity if like X% of people were *not* making a voluntary, moral choice to create something out of their own prowess, and ability, and allowing it to be shared and re-used? Nichts, nada, bl**dy nothing.
I am kind of up to here with the frontiersman, capitalist, gangsterism mentality that pervades a lot of what is posted here when it comes to economics and politics.
Think about it – it’s like someone getting mugged saying that you don’t need the law, because you have to protect freedom. You strive to maintain the situation whereby you’ll be exploited, either personally, because you are forced to compete over credits, or collectively, because the guys who screw up in business come wailing cap in hand and the taxpayer is asked to bail them out.
I don’t live in a communist country but I do live in one in which businesses don’t even abide by their own supposedly superior capitalist ethos, and the government is too supine to even point it out.
/End of rant
/begin rant…
“These people suddenly find ‘communism’, by which I guess you mean state intervention and direction, suddenly very appealing. Strange that.”
I do not fault the companies from wanting money. What capitalist doesn’t want free money. I fault the government for giving it to them. A government which, people like yourself, have empowered time and time again to take such actions.
“and speculation designed to benefit a paltry few who don’t *do* much that is productive. King Midas, anyone? ”
Umm, I work in engineering. My salary is paid for by that ‘paltry unproductive few’. I gain benefit (i.e. money) from it. Sure, I’ll write open source software, the day government tells me it will guarantee me a job for life. Let me know when that happens.
The only slave driver here is government. The CEO of walmart doesn’t force me to do anything.
It is only government that oppresses me. Heck, if I don’t pay the property tax on my house, some government oppressors will come and kick me out of my own house.
As a matter of fact, without government taking 50% of my income and another 15% in sales tax, and another 5% in property taxes each year, maybe… just maybe… I’d have been able to retire by now (I live a very simple life), and I could then focus on writing open source code just for the problems I like solving.
So in fact, it is government that keeps us enslaved to work.
let me preempt any ridiculous argument.
Providing roads, basic policing, security… would not cost much at all. It could probably be paid for just with a sales tax. It is all the extravagance that government does, including the hated bailouts, that cost all the money that causes us to be enslaved.
/ end rant
All I can say is wow.
Isn’t it nice that we have all these great phones to choose from now, with iPhone, Android phones, new Palm, Blackberrys, etc…
Definitely. The more competition the better. More ideas, more features, and faster development. None of the companies can afford to take it easy, and will have to continue to innovate (or atleast copy really well 🙂 to stay competitive. No matter who wins, we the customers win.
You are exactly right!
Personally i think the iPhone is the reason for the big push in the mobile space to develop the market and produce some incredibly impressive devices.
Just the other day i was looking at a Samsung Tocco Lite, this device has a very clear and easy to read screen, excellent apps such as GPS and google maps, a widget android type home screen. It was just complete, very fast and stable, i even joked saying that this phone should have been called an iPhone Nano
It’s really incredible to watch the whole computing industry pour there creativity into small mobile devices (mobile phones, netbooks etc). Every one is benefiting from better UI’s, batteries, software etc.. I don’t think it will be too long until a manufacturer brings to the general market a fuel / improved battery that will allow phones to run for weeks and laptops/netbooks run for days, at this rate.
it looks nice but I am worry with those video.. because the final result is often NO WHERE as smooth as the video makes it look like.
Curious about specc of those however.. who knows.
The myTouch announce earlier this week was such a joke… I am glad there is a better Android phone on the horizon.
I couldn’t care less if it is open source or if it doesn’t use the default Android interface. The phone is sleak and I feel tempted to buy it.
That said, I’ll wait for the reviews. Things that look slick are not always as usable as their screencasts make them look. Still, HTC and their front-end has a good reputation.
As for being counterintuitive to Google, *whatever*. HTC is helping Google by bringing more people to their platform. More people = larger customer base = a bigger incentive for developers to develop apps for the platform. Thus everyone benefits.
I think this kind of vendor-specific innovation is a good thing, as long as the UI stuff doesn’t hinder OS platform compatibility with other device manufacturers (for reference see the historic case of the three Symbians: S60, UIQ and MOAP).
Forget the UI, the big news for me is that it’ll support flash 10. I’m on the fence whether to go with apple again for my next phone, or android. Flash is a huge plus for me in android’s favor if it works well.
Other reviews I have seen state that the HTC Hero has Flash Lite 3.1 not Flash 10. Definitely worth checking before you part with your hard earned.
Odd that they left an example of landscape mode out of the screen cast. Surely it will do that, no?
Will these Android based phones connect to Linux computers to share files? My RAZR 2 V8 has a Linux based OS but my openSUSE box can’t read any files from it.
Will these Android based phones connect to Linux computers to share files?
Yes, I use my T-Mobile G1 Android phone with Ubuntu and the Xfce desktop. It mounts as a USB drive. You can just drag files to it or open a terminal and copy away. I might be biased since I use the phone each day, but wow this phone seriously rocks. You can do some cool hacks with it. I couldn’t wait for the Cupcake update of Android and downloaded it and flashed the phone manually — I was crossing my fingers hoping it wouldn’t brick. It doesn’t have the eye candy the iPhone has but if you use Google’s web applications it really shines. Once in a while I worry about Google tracking me with it but I think I have given up on the idea of privacy anymore. They can have all my crappy data, as long as they don’t spam me. And about the new Android phones, the original one with the slide out keyboard is more useful if you do a lot of typing. I use the onscreen keyboard for quick replies but having the full button keyboard rocks for quick texting. Oh, I should mention the downfall of the current G1 phone, battery life. If I turn on G3, GPS and do a lot of web browsing and texting I get about 4 hrs. of battery. I ended up turning off G3 and GPS to stretch the battery to 8 hrs. The funny thing about these smart phones is the manufacturers slyly avoid talking about the poor battery life. The iPhone has the same problem. Turn on all the bells and whistles and the battery runs down quick. The irony is that when you turn off the cool features you are left with a fancy looking regular cell phone. Ah, progress.
Edited 2009-06-25 01:35 UTC
You’ve raised some interesting points that I think many people overlook, especially in regards to battery life. I remember having a Sony ‘smart phone’ a few years ago and the battery life was terrible; where if I forgot to plug it in at the end of the day I would find the next day my phone would be useless. This wasn’t just normal use but when apparently it should have been put into low power mode.
For me the smart phones remind me very much of the time when I had an iPod Touch (before moving to an iPod ‘Classic’) – I was in love with the idea of being able to surf the net, run applications, watch movies and so forth but when reality kicked in I actually used none of the features and simply stuck to listening to music. Same situation when I had my Sony smartphone. I was enchanted by the geekery behind the scenes and all the neat features but the reality was that I never used any of them.
I’m not entirely sure if these custom user interfaces are a good idea for Android. While the openness and customisability are obvious strengths of the open source Android platform, having the same Sense UI available on Windows Mobile will mean that people won’t really notice a difference when going to the shops to buy a phone – they won’t see the benefits of Android because it’s all tucked away under a UI that’s completely cross-platform.
If the custom UI is better than Android’s, why shouldn’t it be used? Non-geeks probably aren’t going to buy the phone just because it runs Android. Now, if Android runs that UI _faster_ than WinMo does, or is more stable/reliable in doing so (and I don’t see how it can be worse than WinMo in that department), I think it will sell itself.
I have been eagerly awaiting Android development, and the G1 looks like my dream phone; that is, one with a large, hi-res screen and a big, honest-to-goodness keyboard. I am also hoping for some more innovation than I have seen from the WinMo crowd. Alas, it is not coming along fast enough for me, as I am going to need a new (CDMA) phone in months, not ears.
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Geeks knows it runs Android, non-geeks don’t care! So everybody wins, what’s the problem?
I’ll have to disagree that it’s counter productive for Google and i doubt they care about HTC’s interface!
The UI looks nice, but I don’t like how the lower end of the phone is bent forward
I don’t see the point of that, other than looking funny in my pocket.
The UI is beautiful…love it! I would love to see something like that here in the states with my carrier.