HTC Hero review
Mobiletechaddicts.com goes Android. Our fist Android device is in the house and we’ve been playing with it for the last week. Here’s what we think.
The HTC Hero is HTC’s third Android device following the T-Mobile G1 and Vodafone’s HTC Magic. Both of these devices are exclusive to the networks and in order to get one you have to take out a contract with the network. Finally, there is a SIM free Android device on the market and it brings with it the beefiest specs of all the Android phones to date.
The device is, as always, smaller than expected. I am consistently amazing at just how much tech they can cram into devices these days.
What’s in the box?
- Manuals, warranty and accessory information
- 2Gb microSD card
- mains charger with switchable plug, only UK standard fitting supplied
- Fairly duff 3.5mm headphone (you will own better ones somewhere)
- a lapel clip for the headphones
- a USB lead for connecting to the computer or the mains charger
Working around the device we find the left side has a large volume rocker. It’s flush with the surface of the phone at both ends, so it’s quite hard to find if you aren’t looking at it. It’s also angled, I found my having to fiddle around to get it if i was holding the phone up to my ear. Other than that there is a little HTC Innovation brand on the silver finish.
The right side has nothing. I won’t go into detail.
The top sees a little indent for you to rip off the back cover and near it is a 3.5mm headphone socket. That’s right HTC and 3.5mm headphone in the same sentence, who’d have thought. the connector is very tight and I noticed that when putting the headphone jack into the hole it didn’t fit in completely.
The bottom has the MiniUsb connection and a small hole for the mic.
The towards the top of the front of the phone is the ear piece. Serviceable sound quality, not up to the standard of the Touch Pro 2 but not tinny or low quality in any respect.
Under the 3.2 inch 320×480 capacitive touch screen are the main function buttons. From left to right are the Accept call button, the Home button that bring you back to the home screen, the Menu button and the end call/power button. Under here is a blackberry-esq trackball and two more buttons, search and a dedicated Back button. The Menu button brings up menu in any application you happen to be using, this menu will be native to the application as oppose the device.
On the back is a hole for the speaker and another for the 5.0 megapixel, autofocus camera. More about this later on.
Under the cover it the 1350 mAh battery and a the sim card slot.
On the left hand side of the back is the SD card slot. It’s a little hidden away however in comparison to other phones, taking the back off to hot swap the SD card is remarkably simple.
Android is an exciting operating system. I love it. It’s still emerging, has it’s fair share of problems but at version 1.5 it is a blessing. A great many things have been thought about to maximise usability and it takes the best parts of Windows Mobile and marries them to the iPhone. It’s not 100% successful at this bit, but its not a kick in the ass off it.
The user experience is first and foremost. It’s a terribly simple operating system to use. As with any new operating system the user is going to have to spend time getting to know it, however most things are logically laid out for the user to access.
My biggest moan about the operating system is the lack of any screen capture tools for the likes of me to illustrate my review here. Nothing in the Marketplace and it seems the only other method is to install the SDK on a computer to do so. So I’ll have to pitch what I can find from other sources.
HTC Sense UI is pretty much one of the biggest bonuses to his phone. Right from the fully customisable home screen to the little addictions they have added to the menus. When I first started to play around with it I was a little bewildered at just how many options there are and how much space you could use. There are a few pre-arranged formats or themes however most probably won’t fit your day to day needs. It’s so simple to modify and arrange these.
The auto lock is non intrusive. It shows everything that is going on with the phone without having to unlock to check, the status bar along the top is always there to you don’t miss anything. You are given previews of your messages without too much detail for any sticky beaks who happen to be nearby.
Media-wise the phone works well. Video, in my opinion runs quite smoothly. Some have mentioned it cannot handle certain type but I didn’t really put a vast array to test. Music playback was a synch. The Music player is simple to use and I only had one niggle. Blopping along to a tune, the song was suddenly interrupted with a new email sound, followed by new tweets. The music stops for a second then carries on. The song then stuttered as it tried to catch up with were it was. It’s nice not having to unlock the device to skip tracks. It would have been lovely to have it over the top of the song. There is a little plug-in for the lock screen that allows for interaction.
The onscreen keyboards seem to be a standard layout of Android and HTC. As a physical keyboard fan I found this incredibly difficult to adapt too. My spelling was all over the place and the predictive word replacement was as much a hindrance as and assistant for a while. After a week I felt a little stronger especially on the full screen keyboard but I would never want to be having to write too much on there. In the past I have written reviews on devices, the Touch Pro 2 and the Treo Pro for example, I would never have the patience to attempt to do so on the Hero. Quick Office is provided on the phone however this appears to be for viewing files more than editing. With Google Docs being one of the easiest methods to review Word docs I figured that after a year of Android development there night have been some implementation other that through the Browser, but unfortunately not.
Where does the device fall down? The biggest problem is the aerial. It think it is made out of cheese. Getting signal is frustrating. A you can tell from any of my pervious reviews I put phones through their paces due to my locality. At best I have low signal in only a couple of the rooms in my house. At that this device struggles even in my known hot spots. The only other phone that came as close to this device was the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and we put that down to the metal facia the phone had all around it. However, this phone makes the X1 seem like a signal magnet. Just this morning I was trying to send a quick message back to my girlfriend and it took me over 20 minutes to send it. The phone fluctuates between three bars and zero bars constantly and by the time you are ready to send a message or have brought up the resend dialogue signal has disappeared even though you haven’t moved. It’s a mess.
Secondly on that note, I would frequently use Google Latitude when driving. I have this on Windows Mobile and have found the response time to be excellent with the map updating off screen even when on Edge. The Hero is forever sporting the nasty white background as it slowly downloads the maps or cannot process them fast enough to display. Surfing the net can be stuttery in the town centre were we have rather speedy Orange HSDPA. All phones I have reviewed for this site have performed well on this network, yet the Hero has been the slowest of the bunch. When using the phone over WLAN things are speedy and respond as they should. It’s all down to the aerial, it’s made of cheese, and not even nice cheese.
Another problem is the device response speed. It can seem laggy at times. Most of the time it runs nicely but there are occasions that the phone feels bogged down and you’ll even see a little loading screen appear. The most gruelling example of this is removing applications. This menu can take almost a minute to load. If you download something from the Marketplace and decide it is trash you better be prepared for a bit of a wait to get rid of it. This is nothing like the simplistic method of the iPhone. Perhaps this is the HTC Sense UI affecting things. I’m sure in the coming weeks there will be some form of update for this.
Battery life time isn’t bad. It has a big battery for it’s type, especially compared to the G1. It seems to use it quite well. However, I have the same sized battery in my Tytn II and I would say that device will be running a few hours more than the Hero.
The screen is practically unusable in direct sunlight, and it’s then you realise that your fingers are greasier than you had once thought as the fingerprints become the most visible feature.
Multitouch is there however there aren’t too many opportunities to use it. The internet browser makes the most use of it. It’s simple to do and almost identical to the iPhone’s method. You can also use under Albums to zoom in on the pictures you have taken and can take some getting used to.
The camera is obviously a big draw. At 5 megapixel it is a bigger draw than some of the other more established phones. However, as I have said many times megapixels is not the best way to measure a camera quality. The colours seem a bit flat and washed out. Taking snaps was simple, there is a little delay as ever on phone camera but once done you can fire it off to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or MMS and email.
The zoom is acceptable I guess and it’s quite nice to be able to use the trackball to take the picture. A lot of phones with touch screens tend to have an onscreen button and this can compromise the framing of the shot.
It might sound like the phone had nothing but faults. Not quite, it has it’s fair share and most would only affect a few users. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the phone and found myself overlooking some it ifs short comings. It’s a head turner and it would be quite easy to woo someone with it’s feature set.
Android is a particularly strong operating system and one that will be a major player in the next year. It’s impossible to avoid.
The Hero isn’t an iPhone killer, it’s never going to be in the same league. It’s not a Palm Pre killer. It’s a HTC Magic with a better spec and nicer User interface. If you get one, you’ll probably love it – especially if you live somewhere with good signal.
Thanks go out to Clove who have supplied us this review device
Networks – GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900, HSDPA 900 / 2100, HSDPA 850 / 1900 – American version
Size – 112 x 56.2 x 14.4 mm
Weight – 135 g
Display – TFT capacitive touchscreen, 65K colors, 320 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches
Memory- 288 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM, microSD (TransFlash)
Data – GPRS, HSCSD, EDGE, 3G, HSDPA
WLAN – Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth – v2.0 with A2DP
Camera – 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus, Video
CPU – Qualcomm MSM 7200A 528 MHz processor
Battery – Li-Ion 1350 mAh
Stand-by – Up to 440 h (2G) / Up to 750 h (3G)
Talk time – Up to 8 h (2G) / Up to 7 h (3G)
- Sense UI
- Multi-touch input method
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Trackball
- Speakerphone
- 3.5 mm audio jack (!!!!!!!)
- miniUSB
- Android OS, v1.5
- GPS with A-GPS support
- Digital compass
- Dedicated search key
- Scenes quick profile switcher
- MP3/AAC+/WAV/WMA9 player
- MPEG-4/H.263/H.264/WMV9 player
- Voice memo
HTC Hero screenshots – Talkandroid, Techradar, Textopus
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Hows does the 3.5mm hole work with 3rd party headphones? When i had a quick look at the Hero, it seemed as if hole was at a slant, making it difficult to use some headphones.
My Bose worked okay with the 3.5mm socket…
As for the phone, it’s laggy, the HTC Sense is an overlay on the Android OS and in my opinion the Hardware needs to be better for it (processor/ memory).
Sometimes the phone comes to a complete halt because Android kills tasks – but the user doesn’t know exactly when. You can get thrid party apps like Task Killer but when I used it the phone screen would appear and I thought I was making a call.
Mine is back in the box awaiting an unlock code, then I’m selling it.
HTC Sense is not an overlay but a launcher replacement. You can use other launchers , my fav is dxtop and is extremely useful for windows mobile users switching to android as it has a tasks pane. Android can only close apps when they are in the proper state. In this case they behave like an app on an iphone. This will not lead to instability in the OS> As for the Hero the review is spot on, HTC Sense looks good but is not implemented very well. HTC devices are known for not providing GPU support certainly on windows mobile and it looks likely here. Sense is a memory and processing hog and the first thing I would do is install dxtop or the original android launcher.apx which is available on xda. See xda to get yuor Hero running better.
So once again we are served inferior hardware (Qualcomm crap) and a poor UI experience, HTC really need to either give us something decent or get lost
After thinking about this review a few days I had to comment because I’m still unable to figure out how you can give favorable comments when the phone had such serious signal issues. The best comparison I could think of was trying to say the iPod Touch was a nice device even though music sounded bad on it. How can a phone even be considered marginally acceptable if it has serious issues with connections?
Matt, I understand what you are saying however the signal issues are often sorted out with a firmware update so the phone should not be dismissed just because of this, having said that HTC need to sort it out and fast as my iPhone 3G S on software 3.0 was awful, now running the beta of 3.1 it is much improved, if you are in a good signal area you would never know there was a problem.
At the end of the day though, I had the Hero for 24 hours and found it unusable where I live because of the weak radio.
As Chris states, this can be sorted in an update. However, there is a vast majority who do not have to worry about signal in their daily routine. I wouldn’t write off a phone when there is a chance that someone will not suffer the problem, it’s just a warning.
I’m not so sure the counter arguments of good coverage and firmware updates are really that valid. Again going back to the mp3 player analogy, could you really recommend a player to someone that had really great side features or potential when you knew it had issues playing mp3′s? I’d understand it if the reviewer stated that coverage in his/her area was bad for all phones, but that isn’t what was written at all. In fact it sounds like other phones did just fine except for one and even that one wasn’t nearly as bad as this.
The most optimistic thing you can say is that (maybe) the issue will be fixed with a firmware update but I still can’t fathom recommending a device where the primary function has a good chance at being unacceptable to certain people. Plus, it might be a decent number of people as the reviewer indicates other phones aren’t showing the same problem which I interpret to mean the reviewer’s location can’t be extremely remote. Maybe it’s me but if my phone can’t do a decent job at calls then I can’t really get into all the other things that it does do.
I should say that I am highly interested in this phone so I’m coming from the point of view of someone who wants to like it. But if the device can’t do a satisfactory job at it’s primary purpose when compared to other similar devices (as indicated by the reviewer) then what I walk away with from the review is that the device is very poor (or at least below average) and should be rated as such.
In all fairness this is the worst aerial I have seen on a phone. Aerials, in my opinion are always a sore point. I have yet to be satisfied with any since signal drops intermittently where I live. This is not just a just of the phone but a fault of the network provider. The phone does work as a phone in the right environment, however it does not were the environment is unfavourable.
Some people will find it frustrating and some will not.
If your present phone has bad signal in your area, then don’t get this right now.
I have the Vodafone HTC magic (we where screwed on the memory front though) and I have a really good signal much better than my old TYTN II which was reasonable. Considering I am also in the Belfast area and the hardware is very similar to the hero its strange that the Hero is so bad. Here’s a link to Talk Android where many people in the forum are pointing out the poor reception on the Hero and not just on Orange. Orange are aware of this problem though the likely hood of a firmware update from Orange/HTC , I think is very unlikely considering the two companies past record.
http://www.talkandroid.com/1303-htc-hero-approved-by-global-certification-forum/
Just like to say well done Gareth in the review, I have read a few reviews of the Hero and your’s is the only one I have read that picked up on the signal issue. Well done.
Signal Problem – thank you for explaining this as many people including myself suffer from this probl,em on HTC Hero. So the aerial is to blame, does this mean that there is no possible firmware upgrade possible to sort this problem, and I shouldnt wait for HTC to bring out any upgrades to sirt this out?
P.S. your review is the best, if only I saw it before…
It’s possible. HTC can be hit of miss with their updates. However they have been good to the Magic. My guess is that they will update firmware a few times but probably leave the radio alone. Radios vary depending on your network and where you are in the world so I can’t imagine them release new radios for all variations. XDA Developers might be one of the best bets.