PureMobile sent us in the GSM version of the HTC Hero, one of the most popular Android-based smartphones out there. There are already a number of in-depth reviews about this phone out there (here’s one), but here’s my own take on what I liked, and what I disliked.
Before we start, let me say right off the bat that my husband works for Google, at the open source side of Android (not directly with the operating system’s development). However, this is not a “with Google” phone like the T-Mobile G1 was, it’s an independent HTC-only phone. And most importantly, it does not use the default Android UI (UI that I will be mostly discussing), but HTC’s own flavor. So I felt that I could give it a whirl, and see if it can compete with the iPhone (despite my husband working for Android, the iPhone has been my personal phone choice so far).
Specs
The Hero comes with 2G GSM 850/900/1800/1900 Mhz and 3G HSDPA 900/2100 Mhz. It weighs 135 gr, it has a capacitive LCD with 65k colors, at 320×480 resolution and 3.2″ size. HTC has some elements of multi-touch in its input method, an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and a trackball. It also has a 3.5mm audio jack, 288 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM, Qualcomm MSM 7200A processor, a microSD card slot with a 2 GB card coming in the box. It also comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP support. It has a 5 MP camera with autofocus and touch focus. It can also shoot video, but only at 352×288 at just 15 fps. Finally, it has A-GPS support, and a digital compass, all running under Android 1.5 Cupcake. Recently, HTC said that they will offer an Android 2 release for this phone, sometime in the next few months.
The Hardware
I love the way this phone looks. In some ways, it reminds me the design of the original Motorola cellphone! But in a good way!
I absolutely hated the G1 because of its “Jay Leno” chin, but it is not a problem on the Hero because it’s so thin! On the G1 I simply could not type because my small hands could not go over the chin and easily reach the keys at the bottom. But on the Hero this is not an issue, because the LCD is on a higher ground than the hardware keys are on the G1, and the Hero is thinner anyway (so my small hands have an easier time going around it).
The device also feels very nice in the palm. It is less wide than the iPhone, and it can rest on my palm with ease.
The Hero comes with the standard Android buttons, plus a dedicated search button. I wish that the buttons were a bit bigger and easier to hit though. Another problem are the volume buttons on the left side that are way too easy to hit. While grabbing the phone from the table, 2 times out of 5 I would be pressing the volume buttons by mistake. They should have been more rigid and more difficult to get pressed.
Battery life is about 3 days with light usage (considering that this is an always-online, syncing with Gmail, phone). Phone call quality is top notch.
The camera is ok (samples), and there are some nice white balance and other settings while shooting. I can’t really ask anything more regarding the still capabilities (except maybe a flash light). The video mode is a disaster though at 15 fps CIF resolution (sample).
The HTC Sense UI
As mentioned above, HTC has written from scratch their own UI on top of Android’s. Some components are completely replaced, other just modified, other are vanilla. Basically, HTC has rewritten the launcher application, the Phone/Contacts application, the virtual keyboard application, and quite a few new screen widgets: twitter, calendar, weather, pictures, contacts, email, music player, browser bookmarks, “footprints” (a traveling app), and more.
There are 7 “virtual” screens on the HTC Sense UI, there are 3 in the default Android home screen. You can easily fill up these virtual screens with widgets and shortcuts. The widgets are very nicely designed, with beautiful icons, animations and interactive elements. You can simply flick through images or emails with really nice animations for example. Originally, the HTC Sense UI had speed problems doing all that, but the latest update (that the phone comes with by default) fixes a lot of these problems.
The virtual keyboard is definitely better than Android’s default one. Its multitouch ability and easy way to switch between languages, and auto-correction, give it the upper hand. However, the HTC virtual keyboard is not without its bugs, creating incompatibilities occasionally for some apps (e.g. an SSH app we tried).
The phone screen was re-written as well. The dialing screen is now rendering on top of the contacts, meaning that the dialing screen takes half the screen, and you can just scroll the contacts list on the other half of the screen. The same application includes a full screen view of all your Gmail contacts, ability to edit these, create “teams” of contacts, call history, and get this: Facebook updates. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t work properly for me (info below).
The music player is re-written too. It takes a while to load the album art of all the music in the cache, and until it does, scrolling through the music list can become slow. But after it does load, it works wonderfully, and all my album art was recognized (something that is not true for Nokia phones, and even Sandisk players). It can play MP3, AAC(AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, Ogg Vorbis, MIDI and Windows Media Audio 9.
The HTC Hero is the first Android phone to come with Flash, but it’s very slow, doesn’t work most of the time (e.g. vimeo), and when it does work (e.g. Youtube) there’s already a dedicated app for it. So basically that Flash port feels very much like a throw-in.
Overall, the HTC Sense UI feels more modern, more impressive and cooler than the default Android UI. It’s true that while I did try to get into Android in the past, its UI was holding me back. On the iPhone, multi-touch and the very consistent usability were always big features to me; Android doesn’t exactly have that. HTC Sense is not as polished and consistent as the iPhone either, but it fares better than the default Android.
Complete walkthrough on HTC’s UI, here.
What I disliked
There is no “additional languages” installation ability. However, the situation is more complex than that. When I used my Greek SIM, the phone asked me if I would like to change the language to Greek, and I said “yes”. It made everything Greek, as it was supposed to, but when I am going to the language settings, only Polish and English are available there (as these are the phone’s original languages). I mean, if the phone comes with all these languages pre-installed (it certainly didn’t download anything off the web to enable Greek), why not let me make “Greek” the “official” language on the phone?
Unfortunately, while the above might not sound like a big problem to you, consider the following: for some applications that get their text from the web, if that text is not in Greek, then it doesn’t show it to me at all. What I mean is this: Comments in the application pages of the “Market” application DO NOT RENDER on this phone when it’s set to Greek. It would ONLY render comments, and let you read them, if the comments were *written* in Greek! And my friends’ Facebook updates are also not loading at all because they are not written in Greek (I presume)! While I understand the need to hide text of weird languages from the user (although this is debatable usability), I don’t agree that this should also be done for plain English. Heck, most Greek people can read English, thank you very much.
The launcher comes with a big button that gets you to the Phone screen, and a smaller button to open the application launcher window. Personally, I am more of a PDA-like user rather than a caller, so it would have been nice to be able to exchange the position of the two buttons (so the app launcher has a bigger button).
The Contacts application loads all the gazillion of my Gmail contacts that I don’t want there. It doesn’t try to only show the contacts that actually have a phone number, I am ending up having thousands of “contacts” that have emailed me at some point in the past. People that I don’t really know. It’s impossible to find a true contact in that screen just by flicking.
There are two ways to lock the phone’s screen: one is with a special visual pattern that you can draw (part of standard Android), and the other one is simply to double-click the “menu” button, or slide down the whole screen. Unfortunately, that second way is way too easy to unlock the phone by mistake. The slide-down way should have been slide-horizontally-a-small-icon like on the iPhone, because right now, even by touching the screen on your trousers can cause it to unlock the screen.
There is no usable VoIP application right now for Android, and this has an impact for me, since I use it to call my mom in Greece. The single one popular SIP app that’s available for Android and kinda works, requires to use the developer’s PBX rather than your own SIP provider directly (something that I am not willing to do because there are too many hoops between countries adding to the lag). Update: SIP Gizmo5 has trouble registering with the SIPdroid application on my network. Manages to register only once every so often.
Skype is a disaster on Android, as it doesn’t work via Wifi-only, it requires that you enter your cellphone number and works through it (something that I don’t want to do either). Android 1.6 is the first version of Android that comes with VoIP API hooks, so hopefully Skype and other SIP apps will get updated soon.
The HTC Sense’s Bookmark widget does not sort the widgets the way you request the web browser to do so, so you end up with only one sorting order: chronologically created. And because most people would create the bookmarks they most care about first, these will show up at the bottom every time, requiring the user to scroll each time. Poor thinking here.
The HTC Hero can’t play iPod videos (DRM-free, of course). It is able to playback MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV9 on paper, but in reality, it required 480×320 or smaller resolutions, while I already have a few iPhone/iPod-encoded videos at 640px wide widescreen format. I mean, the Hero should have been able to play these (the Nokias can, and besides, it should always be a strategic target to be able to play the same formats as the iPhone/iPod).
The Weather widget has no option to follow the weather for the cities of Nancy (France) and Preveza (Greece). The iPhone uses a service that does have support for these cities.
No “week view” in the HTC Calendar app.
No Amazon MP3 application. USB is the only way to add music to the phone.
The “pinch” on the web browser is not great. It is not as smooth and precise as the iPhone’s.
The “Market” app is a disaster. Although the newer version of the app (e.g. v1.6) is a bit better.
Conclusion
Overall, the HTC Hero is so far the best Android phone for me (not talking about the Motorola Droid, since it’s not out yet). And the announced update is obviously going to bring new life to this Android 1.5 device.
The question is: would it knock me off the iPhone? And the answer is “not yet”. It’s not as polished as the iPhone. However, if my iPhone was to stop working tomorrow morning, the HTC Hero would be the phone I would reach out first to use instead. It’s dangerously close!
Rating: 8/10
New Android 2.0 devices with high resolution screens like the Droid are much nicer. I’ve had VGA screen on my last few phones, no need to downgrade to HVGA.
That said, I will wait for Maemo phone without a keyboard .. it will be nice to know that I support the same technologies that I use on the desktop by buying a phone.
the way I see the Droid and ads, it is designed to appeal to those that were interested in Windows Mobile and the iPaq a while ago. I think the strategy is to get a lot of developers and serious apps for Android before thinking about the walmart and itunes market.
A few months ago, we borrowed a HTC Dream (aka G1) for some testing at work. This review is fairly close to my own impressions of the hardware and software.
The two devices that I was comparing to were a recent iPod touch and an old Palm Tre 650. Overall, I found the Dream fit somewhere in between: way more modern than the old Palm OS, but with a less-polished interface; more flexible than the iPhone OS, but not as slick.
Two details that weren’t touched on in the review:
The little trackball isn’t particularly useful (I still prefer the d-pad on my old Treo, FWIW). It’s too easy to accidentally scroll while attempting to click (the ball is clickable, in the same way that most mousewheels are). And while I expected it to work like a scroll wheel in the browser, it actually just jumps from one link to the next in the direction that you’re trying to scroll.
And the keyboard – I preferred the Dream’s hardware keyboard to the software keyboard in the iPhone OS, but I found it harder to type on than the Treo keyboard (despite being larger). The main problem is that the keys are fairly flat (presumably so they don’t get in the way when sliding the phone closed). The Treo has keys that are rounded enough that I can use it to slowly touch-type (touch-thumb?), not so with the Dream.
I’ve been using SIPDroid for VoIP (through my asterix box and through Gizmo5) without any problems at all since August. I don’t know if the app is still available on Google Market, but it is available from sipdroid.org.
That’s the app I was referring to in the article. I don’t have an Asterisk server and I am not willing to run one. And I definitely don’t want to use the German PBXes, the developer’s own PBX company. PBXes has one of the worst license agreements I have ever seen, and besides, I don’t want my call to go from Greece (my mom) to the Bay Area (Google Voice), to San Diego (Gizmo), to Germany (PBXes), back to the Bay Area (myself). This will make the call even more laggy than it already is. So going through Germany, just because this guy doesn’t want to make Gizmo5 work right out of the bat without the need for a PBX, it’s not something I care for. I even made a bug report about this, and he shot it down saying that he’s not interested in making this work! In other words, the way *I* see it, SIPdroid is nothing but a lock-in solution to use this guy’s PBX solution (since most people wouldn’t fiddle with Asterisk themselves).
I just require a VOIP SIP solution that I can configure it with Gizmo5’s proxy/other settings and “just work”, like I can do on the iPhone in more than one such applications! But on the Android side, I have to fiddle with PBX/Asterisk, and I don’t want to do so. I am 36 now, and I don’t have the patience to fiddle with software all day long. I wish I was 31 again, but I am not. 😉
Edited 2009-11-01 02:20 UTC
I don’t use PBXes to make it work. It works out of the box with Gizmo5 w/o any intermediate connections. Just because they recommend some third party service, doesn’t mean I use it. I’m actually a little uncomfortable leaving passwords to every VoIP service I use with PBXes.
For ref, the settings from my phone (when not configured for my personal pbx):
Account Settings->Username: 1747XXXXXXX
Account Settings->Password: (gizmo5 password)
Account Settings->Server: proxy01.sipphone.com
Account Settings->Domain: (leave empty)
Account Settings->Port: 5060
Account Settings->Protocol: UDP
On the PBXes Features menu, I have none of the options set as I don’t use PBXes. Call Options/Advanced Options don’t seem to affect network connections, so I didn’t list those.
The only drawback as far as I can tell, is that if you don’t have an data plan (I don’t anymore), the native Google Voice client refuses to work (thus you don’t have native dialing when calling non-SIP contacts). I remedy this with a bookmark to voice.google.com on my homescreen, but it’s honestly a pretty shitty alternative. This isn’t really SIPDroid’s fault though, more of a problem that Google Voice only appears to use the Edge/3G connection to transfer the request to initiate the phone call.
Edited 2009-11-01 03:55 UTC
I had tried that with a G1 and it didn’t work. I tried with the Hero, it didn’t work. Opening a UDP port on my router, didn’t help either. However, I just managed to make it register by changing UDP to TCP. I will update the article.
Edited 2009-11-01 05:42 UTC
False alarm! The registration only works once every ~TEN retries. And it unregisters all by itself after a while, and then fails to re-register. I am afraid that SIPdroid just doesn’t work properly on my network. I have opened the UDP/TCP ports too, just in case, but no cake. Other iPhone/PDA/PC clients on various platforms don’t have a problem registering btw. So I am inclined to believe that this is a SIPdroid bug or incompatibility.
Edited 2009-11-01 06:52 UTC
Using the SVN version of sipdroid (http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/source/checkout) works better than the Market version.
Also if your Asterisk has “qualify=yes” in its configuration, then you probably need to apply this patch also, otherwise Asterisk will mark the phone as unreachable: http://code.google.com/p/sipdroid/issues/detail?id=109#c16
Sorry, I will certainly not pull source code off the SVN and build it, or set up an Asterisk server. If an app doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, then it’s just doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. It ends there for me.
Fring is currently working on an Android port. They have a private beta right now. Maybe if you contact them the could let you participate in their beta program. That might be just what you need 🙂
I don’t like Fring, because I have to give them up my passwords and work through their system. I just want direct clients.
I personally find my windows mobile based Samsung BlackJack 2 to have everything I need for basic smartphone usage. It syncs with my Google account, reads office documents (but not OpenOffice), browses the web, and (with Skyfire) plays flash. Though, I am rather annoyed that the Windows 6.5 update won’t be available… It’s a major improvement over a “dumbphone” that only supports calls and text.
So basically you spent the whole review saying how much the phone sucks and gave it 8/10 as a rating. I don’t get it. You had nothing nice to say about the product, but gave it 80%?
If you want to write a review of the ‘almighty’ iPhone and bash every other phone / OS out there, please do so. I feel offended (as an Android user) having to read “reviews” that do nothing else than free marketing for Steve Jobs.
Edited 2009-11-01 03:53 UTC
You are judging the rating based on the amount of words used in each section, and not about how important these problems actually are. Except 1-2 points, the rest are either easy to fix, or not really show stoppers.
I think you did a good job. Too many reviews today focus on the good parts and then give crazy good rating. A months later people realize the bad parts. (Good example from a few years back is GTA4, which got 98%+ nearly everywhere and now we know all the bad parts make it more like a 66% game.)
Mention the bad parts and give a realistic rating is good practice IMO.
Edit: I hope you will review an Android 2.0 high res/fast cpu device in the future/or a Maemo phone.
Edited 2009-11-01 12:44 UTC
Fair review, but you’ve completely missed out on the potential for the Android platform which is why I bought a HTC hero. This phone rocks. 2nd only to the iphone 3gs because it is slightly slower than the iphone and the iphone has more apps. But when you consider the nature of the multitasking operating system you realise that this phone is leagues ahead in sophistication and would be 10x faster than the iphone if it was to implement a single task at a time OS model such as the iphone. The hackability of this phones potential is awesome, apps are easier to create than the iphone, plus did you know that if you have unlimited internet and install the dyndns app you can use the phone as a server? When it comes to apps its behind the iphone in number but googles programming model is designed to overtake it. Heres how: Each phone app is divided into modules (i.e. activities, services, broadcast recievers) this modules can be easily reused and recombined into new applications the potential for rapid app development as well as upgrading applications to use published best of breed solutions is off the charts, apps will be able to be upgrading in seconds.
Granted that the trackball isnt used much, but the potential for the phone still hasnt been reached fully, it will find its place. Google maps isnt a GPS in car navigation app, Google are planning on releasing this next year for free, the rumour is it will also use Streetview. With Streetview, it could become the best GPS package on the market! When the news hit wall street shares in TomTom and Garmin fell by over 10% overnight. Granted iphone is the best at the moment, but if you are looking to make a purchase that will tie you to a phone for the next year or so, IMHO it would not be very smart to get an iphone.
It almost sounds like the early days of Mac OS X when a lot of applications were not localised for Japanese, but the English would work its way onto the display in a later release.
HTC is probably right to replace the UI so that all of their phones work the same way, but knowing that Android is the base would make me want it to work the Android way. I remember a review of the UI over Windows Mobile said that it was sluggish to respond. I wonder about a comparison between the two.
I really love my Hero but I’d also like to add some things I’ve noticed after using the phone for about two months.
In the bug department:
* Sending SMS containing special characters and bigger than 64 characters will scramble the rest of the message on the reciever’s phone (encoding problems).
* TouchFlo sometimes crashes in loops and requires a phone restart.
* The phone will randomly call people in your phone history if you keep the phone application open and put the Hero in your pocket. It’s not an unlock problem since I have set a difficult enough password.
In the usability department:
* When composing a number with the phone app, it matches contacts which have the keypad letters. This is really nice for fast dialing and should also be used in the phone search.
* The four buttons disposition is not intuitive. Maybe it’s me, but I always mix them up and have to look at them to push the right one.
* You can sync contacts infos with Facebook, but you have to do it individually on each contact !
* Google maps path-finding doesn’t draw the route on the map but gives a list of waypoints.
On the positive side:
* Making a call is faster than on the iPhone. It’s unlock, dial button, 2-3 letter to find the contact and click. On the iphone you often have to exit a running application and finding the right contact takes longer.
* Home screen holds useful informations. I have my next calendar events so that I don’t have to open the application.
* Less procrastination because the games on the app store are crappy :-p
* Direct synching with Google is a big plus, no more docking to keep my infos up to date.
* Availability of 3rd application data on the sd-card and trough disc mount is also nice.
On a more general note, I hope they will get the 1.6 version out soon. It was promised in September and we’re still waiting. I hope it doesn’t reflect problems in the developer department at HTC. Public communication could as well be improved and more transparent.
After reading my comments you may feel the review is really bad but don’t forget it’s much easier to describe problems than making positive comments. In general, I’m much more happy with the Hero then the iPhone. Small details like the number of steps to make a dial make the difference. And in general, I don’t really use all those applications. It’s much more important to me that the 2-3 applications I use daily are polished than having tons of them.
Cheers,
zimbatm
In google maps path finding if you press the menu key on your phone one of the options that comes up is “show on map”
One of your usability problems is now gone 🙂
There wont be any 1.6 update for the Hero, they will deliver 2.0 instead. They are going to skip 1.6 due to the modifications they did to stock android. It was pointless for them to patch up 1.6 if 2.0 already is out of the door.
My biggest gripe is their non existent Mac support for Tethering (Partially Apple is to blame there as well) outside of that I love the phone.
European GSM Version.
First of all the phone is really snappy, if you add the latest software update to the mix. Before it was laggy, but now it is more or less at the same speed level as the IPhone UIWise.
Secondly, I agree mostly with the article, HTCs camera support always was subpar, but the phone is so close to being excellent and yet it falls short in some minor areas.
First the biggest gripe I have is not phone related. The phone supports USB Tethering, and it works, but not in OSX (thank you apple for not delivering a proper RNDIS implementation)
So you have to hack the phone open to enable Wifi Tethering which the phone is perfectly capable of to support tethering for OSX. While the last slower revisions of the OS made the rooting process relatively easy, HTC tries to prevent rooting now by all means. Which is kind of stupid since most users prefer the phone rooted. (due to wifi tethering and apps2sd being enabled)
The second thing is the camera, if you buy HTC you get rock solid phones with lousy camera lenses, period. Id rather have a phone build as solid as a brick (it has metal framing left and right) than having a phone with good camera and the rest is flimsy. The Heros camera is ok but not excellent.
As for 3d, the HTC uses a qualcom chipset it has dedicated 3d, but it is not really that fast.
But for now I love the phone generally, but I am aware that the next generation of Android phones comes out now. But I am in a wait and see loop, I will exchange my phone probably next year have in mind that NVidias Tegra is on the doorsteps, it probably will be mid next year that the first Tegra phones will be available.
As for the Motorola droid, I would recommend a wait and see approach as well, Motorola has not been known to produce solid hardware the last years. Maybe they have changed. So far regarding solid hardware I would only trust HTC and Nokia so far blindly.