Engadget Mobile put up their (excellent) review of the HTC Hero recently and I got a lot of information out of that review that I hadn’t gotten anywhere else. More specifically the following highlights:
- Hardware – The hardware in the HTC Hero was rumored at one point to be improved upon the HTC Magic, that form the basis for the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, Google Ion as well as being deployed as-is to something like 19 other networks world wide. After investigation by the Engadget Mobile team, it looks like the hardware inside the HTC Hero is identical to the Rogers version of the HTC Magic, more specifically:
- 528 MHz CPU
- 288 MB of RAM
- 512 MB of ROM
- 480×320, 3.2″ Screen
- OS Changes – A lot of people (myself included) were drooling at the shiny new interface that HTC slapped ontop of the Hero that was not the default Android UI, but instead this nicely animated and flashy looking UI that HTC had invented. Unfortunately, Engadget found out that this all comes at the cost of many more running processes in the background on boot. From the special calendar to the flashy paging manager, they actually took a look at the number of running apps on two vanilla devices, the HTC Hero and T-Mobile G1, and found the Hero to have significantly more running processes on boot. Given the same hardware specs at the HTC Magic (and almost identical hardware that had to the G1), this means less memory available, more background tasks, more VM to ROM swapping and generally more lagging during usage of the device — which Engadget confirmed:
- Flash Support – The HTC Hero is currently the only phone that offers native Flash support. This means browsing to pages like YouTube, Hulu or CollegeHumor won’t give you a special version of the site with integration into a native movie-player like the iPhone or T-Mobile G1 have, instead you actually see the Flash site. Sounds great, in theory, unfortunately the processor and memory requirements to performantly rendering a Flash page kick the hardware in the HTC Hero right in the nuts, leading to a sluggish/stuttering browsing experience:
- Keyboard: One of the more talked about features of the new HTC Hero was the “superior” soft keyboard that they were launching as a complete redesign to the default software keyboard in the Android OS. As someone that never had a problem with the soft keyboard in Android as it’s provided now, I didn’t see what all the hub-bub was about. It seems that you aren’t missing out on a whole lot with it having annoyances just as bad as any other soft keyboard and the author claiming it’s still not as great as Apple’s iPhone software keyboard. Just to be clear, I don’t find Apple’s iPhone soft keyboard to be any more awesome than Android OS’s existing soft keyboard… I didn’t even care that much for the physical keyboard on the T-Mobile G1, so I have no idea what metric all these people are using to review keyboards. You can learn any keyboard comfortably with enough practice… as long as it’s not retarded, you’ll be fine.
Some other thoughts on the device from the review were:
- 5MP camera was great
- Video capture was terrible, just as bad as default HTC Magic (352×288)
- Battery life was good (all day with decent use)
- Speaker clarity/volume was solid
- Graphical fidelity of the HTC Hero UI was great/sexy
- Custom HTC widgets (like the compass) were great
- Custom HTC apps (like the Twitter app) were great
Overall, I saw a very fair balance between pro/con in this review. In the past I’ve always been willing to trade flashiness and glitz for performance in my computers, and that extends to my mobile devices as well. Having just purchased a T-Mobile myTouch 3G for my wife and having been playing with it’s Google-counterpart (the Google Ion) for a few weeks, I don’t see anything in that review that would make me want to hold out for a Hero on T-Mobile instead of ordering the HTC Magic-based myTouch 3G they offer now.
Back when I originally planned to hold out for the HTC Hero, it was under the impression that there was a revised CPU and Memory in the device to compensate for the Flash support performance requirements. Seeing that isn’t the case, and the price paid for running advanced software like that on older hardware makes me almost completely uninterested in the device.
The litter judders and stutters I get on my 1st generation iPhone with the 2.2.1 firmware already drives me crazy, any more pausing and stuttering and I’ll throw my mobile device through a wall.
For us “vanilla” Android device users out there, we also have Android 2.0 coming out this summer to look forward to as well. I imagine the UI will continue to get polished and tightened up as time moves on.
After much consideration for me it was between purchasing a nokia n97 or the htc hero, built in flash for the web browsing was one of the most important reasons that I have had to disregard some of the other phones out there.
Both phones have their pros and cons, and it does feel at this moment I will be going for this htc hero. This being my first touch screen phone I feel I want a more pleasing experience when it comes to using it, and that’s what I feel I would get from the htc hero, also the nokia’s ovi store seems to lack over what the android app store has to offer.
But it seems like whenever I feel like I’ve made a choice there’s always something that lets the phone down in some way. I felt for the n97 it was its out dated symbian os, and also the screen not a capacitive like this htc hero is. The htc hero also seems part of a revolution which shows the potential that the android could hold. But at this point, I can’t really see much worth holding out for much more when anything is going to be better than my current k750i phone.
Cheers for this anyway!
Portion,
I know the feeling — there is always something RIGHT over the horizon that you want to wait for.
I don’t know what carrier you are on, but we just picked up the myTouch 3G on T-Mobile (HTC Magic) and are loving it — it doesn’t have the sexy UI that the HTC Hero has, but after reading all the reviews, that sexy UI come at the cost of some serious performance penalties and battery life.
Overall I’m really happy with Android and would try and steer you towards an Android phone instead of a Symbian-based one — their App story is dead in the water at the moment and the new app platform they have introduced to try and begin addressing this completely break older apps.
It will take Nokia a while to get everything straight, in the mean time the Android platform is blowing up.
I also don’t know if you use the Google services, but the top-tier integration with everything that Android offers is *huge* for me… it’s this totally seamless mobile/sync experience that I just love (And tried to duplicate on my iPhone with varying degrees of success).
If your carrier offers an HTC Magic, I’d recommend going for that over the Hero. I have a feeling HTC will refresh the Hero next year with faster hardware *and* an optimized Sense UI and will really become a killer device… but until then, the performance hickups will just get annoying after a few months and you are just “trying to get something done” on it and no longer appreciate the stutter as the faded animation plays.
That’s just my 2 cents… if glitter is more important than anything, the Hero will be a great choice and I’m sure you’ll like it just fine.
Indeed the HTC Magic sounds like quite a nice phone.
It seems quite exciting times for Android at the moment, and I can see myself getting one in the not too distant future, also an extra plus for the Android is that I do use Google services, such as mail and blog, so I can see this being a big factor in my decision also.
Still yet to come to that decision though. Thanks for this, it’s always nice to see what other people think.
Portion,
Keep us posted on what you end up choosing and what you think!
Finally,
I’ve ended up choosing the HTC Hero, and I must say I love it. Because I haven’t actually properly used another Smartphone out there I have nothing to compare it to, whether that’s a good or a bad thing.
So performance wise, I can’t really fault it, considering it effectively is a mini computer it does what it needs to do, and pretty well. As you state above about little judders and stutters, I have rarely yet experienced such things, but a possible cause of this I could imagine being that some apps you download do not always completely close, therefore you could end up having many background processes, so as long as you restart your phone or use a decent task killer I’ve never really come across any problems.
I’ve heard reviews say that the camera is almost pointless in dark conditions, but while playing about with the settings it’s easily possible to adjust the contrast to -2 and it works very well in lower light conditions, although I would not turn down the chance of a flash being added. As for the video, I have yet to really try this out.
The Android market is very nice, with many free apps, a majority of the free apps are not particularly great, but there is some good ones, and haven’t bothered with any the apps to buy yet, but depending on what you’re looking for I’m sure there’s something.
Battery life is pretty decent for such a device as this, heavy use of browsing etc. could get you through a day, but once you get past the novelty factor of a new phone, and you start using it as you would any other day, battery life will overall be pretty good.
Overall extremely happy so far, I’m sure there is pros and cons and as I get to use it more I’m sure there will be things that could be done better like any other thing, but being a fussy user of what I purchase, making sure it’s going to be worth my while, this has yet to disappoint me.
Portion,
Thanks for circling back and letting us know — really glad to hear that you are loving the Hero, the UI is fantastic and as long as the workflows you are performing don’t lead to a lot of unloading/reloading and GC cycles of huge apps, you’re right, you probably won’t see many of the jittering.
ALSO, it looks like HTC is preparing a refresh to the new interface that is coming out later this summer and then we have Android 1.6 and then end of year, beginning of next we have Android 2.0 — all possible performance bumps in each of those releases.
So I think you are just going to love the device more and more over time.
I just recieved my hero a few days back and I’m returning it. I found the batter life to be pretty poor. This may have been to do with the touchflo application being faulty as this force closed a few times and re-booted, especially if I killed the apps through dofferent task managers. Also, I don’t know if the touchflo would have an effect but the phone would sometimes scroll through things on its own and also when I pressed to open an application it would change screen. This might have drained the battery more. Think I’ll stick to the cheaper Magic for now (I just received this also free with carrier) and wait to see what comes out in the future. No flash for camera is pretty poor. With battery life being so bad I don’t see how people would change the phone and seperate mp3 player to a smartphone all in one?
Cheezy, thanks for following up and letting us know how the Hero went. Sorry to hear that you basically had the same experience that the Engadget folks did — I imagine HTC isn’t too happy about that, but they really pushed that device to it’s limits trying to get a nice flashy UI running ontop of the existing platform on old hardware like that.
I got a Google Ion (HTC Magic) recently and have enjoyed using it, the predictive typing is stupid but thankfully learns what you prefer as you go, so after a few weeks of use it stops trying to replace something like “OS” with the word “tekful”, which I couldn’t believe.
I dig Android though, it’s not flashy, but it’s very functional and integrates with all of Google, that’s all I wanted.
I have HTC Touch Diamond with WinMo 6.1. Find extremely frustrating since there is no auto redial in this.
HTC Hero Review Uncovers Prominent Performance Issues | The Buzz Media guy@gigemail.net