Tag Archive for 'android'

There are four analysis’; Engadget’s, Gizmodo’s, BGR’s and mine.

Engadget’s Review

“smartphone fans seemed to agree that the company had finally achieved what has been missing in the world of Android. Namely, a polished and attractive device — polished enough to go head-to-head with the iPhone — that kept its open source heart”.

“The display on the Hero is gorgeous, no doubt. Using a similar smudge resistant material as the iPhone 3GS, it certainly seems to repel oil”

“The Hero’s 5 megapixel camera is pretty darn amazing, we must say”

“On the other hand, video recording on the Hero wasn’t quite as awesome an experience as still photos were; the maximum resolution is a pathetic 352 x 288, and even at that resolution we experienced noticeable hiccups and stalls in our videos. We’re not asking for much, but we’d at least like some smooth VGA here. If you plan on using this for any kind of decent video — think again”

“The general design is much more on par with contemporaries such as the Pre, iPhone, and recent versions of the BlackBerry OS”

“Secondly, the device has an underlying social networking tie-in (a la webOS (Palm Pre (NDLR))) which can pull in Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr data in various spots on the phone, and also allows you to move media and messages between the services.”

“Google’s touch keyboard has been completely dashed here in favor of HTC’s iteration, and that’s a good thing… to an extent. The keyboard is certainly usable — even good sometimes — but it’s hardly a competitor to Apple’s onscreen QWERTY, and not even in the same universe as a physical keyboard. We know a lot of readers have been on the edge of their seat about whether the Hero’s lack of keys would be a detracting factor, and despite a tremendous attempt by HTC here, it certainly is (of course we feel similarly about the Magic). We found ourselves regularly frustrated by the speed of typing (which can sometimes hang painfully, a la iPhone OS 2.0), and some of the auto-correction, which is typically good, but can be maddening when incorrect. Keep in mind, we really, really wanted to like this keyboard, but the more time we spent with it, the more frustrated we became by it. Trying to tap out an address in Google Maps while walking somewhere, for instance, was a truly unpleasant experience.”

“The Hero represents a valiant effort from HTC — though unfortunately, the company appears to have bitten off more than its last-generation hardware can chew. If this build of Android were to be loaded atop the guts of a 3GS or Pre, the performance would likely be astounding, but fused with the two-year old architecture of previous devices, it’s mostly disappointing. We’re not saying this isn’t the best build of Android on the market — we think it is. What we are saying is that this build is a bit too much for a device like the Hero to handle, and that makes for an uneven, sometimes frustrating experience. Going into the review, we desperately wanted to love this phone, but given the combination of a few poor hardware choices and an OS which outclasses the device it runs on, we can only recommend that you enter at your own risk”

MobileCrunch’s Review

“The Hero is a great phone. It is on par – and ultimately better – than the Palm Pre and, some would say, the iPhone on many points. It also turns those lumbering Windows Mobile and Symbian into something that you will fondly remember from your youth, a set of dinosaur technologies now extinct.”

“The phone also has the G1’s “chin.” This is a small protuberance under the screen that is bent out at a 30 degree angle. HTC explained that this was more a design choice than a functional choice. The chin defines HTC’s android line in the same way the home button defines the iPhone: it’s a deliberate grace note to a minimalist design. I don’t think this design gets in the way of portability or usability and you don’t notice it in your pocket.”

“The Android Market is no match for Apple’s App Store, but it doesn’t need to be. In fact, it’s better than the App Store. You see, the majority of apps cluttering the App Store are full of entertainment value and nothing else. That’s fine if you’re into entertaining yourself, but if you take a look at the Android Market you’ll notice it’s much, much different.

“There are many more apps than there really needs to be simply because the Market is open and free. While this makes for some dumb apps, it allows the really good apps to shine. As you browse through the Market you find odd apps everywhere: What’s this ToggleWifi app? Oh, it let’s me toggle Wi-Fi on/off without having to dig through the menu? Can the iPhone do that? Nope. Google Voice? It’s there and it’s free. Find My iPhone? Sure, Android has the same functionality. Thanks to Wheres My Droid I can send a quick text to it and it starts chirping. Need to fuss with Transmission, the bittorrent app, from the phone? You can do that with Transdroid.”

“On the whole the Sense UI is as impressive as the Palm Pre’s and, from a purely functional standpoint, better than the default interface for the iPhone. The Pre, for example, has pages, just like the Hero, but the pages in this case are actually “widget containers” that can hold multiple data points and controls on one page. For example, you can dedicate one of the seven pages to entertainment apps while other pages can be dedicated to email accounts.”

“The Sense UI also adds social network awareness to your contacts. This means you can watch your friends in real time, picking up tweets, updates, and Flickr images without thinking about it. The Contacts app, for example, has an “Updates” tab that allows you to connect your contacts with their Facebook profile. It also keeps track of all the exchanges you had with that person, including text messages and emails. Finally, it shows that person’s current Flickr stream. This system isn’t foolproof but it works better than the Palm Pre’s.”

“The onscreen keyboard is also very usable, once you get the hang of it. The keyboard auto-completes most English words and to pick out special characters and numbers you hold down the alphabet keys until alternate keys appear. Most of the time there is only one alternate key – a colon, perhaps, or a plus sign – but for most letters you find almost all of the international symbols needed for casual correspondence.”

“In general the Sense UI is a triumph. It’s that good. They’ve made Android amazingly usable and that’s quite exciting.”

“Now for the bad news: the Hero widget engine is very slow. It runs a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200A chip with 256MB RAM compared to a 600MHz with 256MB RAM for the iPhone 3GS. There is no reason, then, that this device should be so slow to update the widgets. Sliding from page to page is fast enough, but once you’re there you’ll notice a definite lag. For example, when you slide to the email page, it’ll take about 5 seconds to see the latest email. Then when you go back to the default clock page you’ll notice the clock is stuck at a previous time – say ten minutes before – and updates a few seconds later. It’s frustrating to see this lag front and center on the device. Once you dig deeper, however, you find all the rest of the apps are more or less speedy enough. It’s only this one sticking point and could frustrate potential users.”
“This is a phone for the masses, yet it still has the power and geek chic of Android. To paraphrase Candy’s character in the movie, the Hero is fun for the whole family.”

Gizmodo’s Review

“The HTC Hero is as much a champion for HTC as it is for Android: It’s the first genuinely gorgeous piece of hardware running Android, and the Sense UI is the most ambitious, polished software HTC has developed yet. It doesn’t have a carrier in the US yet, but as Android’s headline phone, it makes the just-launched myTouch 3G on T-Mobile a lame duck. It’s the most important Android phone to date, since it’s the first one to really give us at peek at just what Android is capable of.
The Hero is flawed, though, in ways that are truly depressing in light of its potential and how much it does get truly right: It’s often sluggish, which absolutely destroys the user experience. It’s a particularly unfortunate affliction as the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre emphasize speed, making the Hero feel that much slower.”

“It is a multitouch display, as the other Android phones, but this time it’s actually enabled. The first time you pinch to zoom out in the browser, the feeling is both shock and matter-of-factness: “Holy crap, multitouch, this is so much better than those stupid plus and minus buttons,” followed by “of course this is better, where the hell was it before?” While the touch accuracy is very good, I would rate it slightly behind the iPhone and Pre, and equal to or slightly better than the Dream. However, I suspect this is at least partially a software issue. It is good enough to type confidently, at any rate.”

“But moments where the phone does nothing for a second or three after you’ve tapped, flicked or swiped happens far too often. Which is to say, a lot.”

“To roll all of that up into a pair of bullet points: It’s fantastically designed and sculpted, amending many of HTC’s past sins, but it needs more processing powah and a better camera.”

“The stock Android user interface isn’t ugly, but it is wildly inconsistent—text messaging looks completely different from mail, which is nothing like Google Talk, and settings and the Android Marketplace have another look entirely. HTC’s user interface has a (mostly) consistent look across the phone. Most of the oh-so-glossy interface looks like it was molded out of plastic, with lots of black and the occasional shock of neon green, plenty of gradients, and no corner that isn’t rounded. Universally, text is white on black in menus, and black on white within apps. It looks polished, if philosophically somewhat less sophisticated than the webOS’s user interface.”

“It takes a couple seconds to switch from one scene to another, but being able to completely rearrange your entire desktop almost instantly around whatever you’re doing at the time is incredibly awesome, especially if you’re trying to maintain some kind of work/life balance. The problem is that if you load up a scene with a ton of widgets, it kicks the phone’s performance in the nuts, so you’re better off running lean.”

“While HTC only puffed up the keys a tiny bit, the keyboard is noticeably more comfortable and accurate than the standard Android soft keyboard on the Dream and Magic, and while it’s closer than ever, it’s still not quite as good the iPhone’s. (But it’s still pretty damn good.)”

“Sweet christ, Android needs a media syncing application. Dragging and dropping just doesn’t cut it now that the Hero has a real live 3.5mm headphone jack, especially given the awkward way you have to mount and unmount the SD card when you plug into your computer. Fix that crap, seriously. Otherwise, the music player listicle interface cribs a bit more liberally from the iPhone’s than the stock Android UI, but otherwise it’s pretty standard, and all of our MP3s and album art imported and played just dandy.”

“The Hero is a really good phone. It might even be a great phone. HTC’s done a fairly remarkable job transforming Android’s rough surface into something slick and glossy and palatable while integrating social networking features that go beyond any phone but the Pre. And the Android Marketplace has come into its own, so that as a platform, Android easily stands up there with the other major smartphone OSes.”

“The biggest drag on the phone is that it, well, drags way too often, smooshing the other solid user experience into a goopy ooze of the awesome sauce that you hoped the Hero would be.”

TechAwe’s analysis

Please note that this analysis is the result of my personal (tech) thoughts about these three major reviews I read and many others. I haven’t physically tested the phone, though I began this HTC Hero reviews quest to know if I should, or not, get it. The answer is simple.

Maybe you haven’t already read my iPhone 3GS review, but I got it. This is important.

After you read all these reviews (above), you’ll probably notice that Hero’s problems are often translated by  speed. Apple, with iPhone—I really don’t know how—knew this. Because believe me, if Hero was faster than iPhone 3GS, it would have been the greatest deal breaker of our modern mobile tech times. Apple looked at it, said, alright, we need speed. Done. Next.

I recall; while HTC Hero is better than the iPhone 3G, it has a smaller amount of awesomeness than the 3GS. You know why ? Yes, you do.

As you read above, HTC Sense is a customized UI based on Android. It’s really powerful and surely more adapted to our web needs than iPhone OS, yet, Hero’s hardware fails to adapt to HTC Sense. iPhone’s harmony between OS and hardware prevailed, once again, and even more with the 3GS.

Nevertheless, you’ll think that Android has a great advantage. It’s free/open-source. But Apple developers adapt themselves to the tough policies Apple applies; they build external apps (understand Mac OS, not iPhone OS). Redsn0w or DiskAid; they’re all the same. They’re forbidden by Apple but they make the iPhone profitable to everybody.

The solution to end this war is to create an Android based device, with an iPhone-like UI (intuitive (HTC Sense is on the good way, really)) and to match the software to the hardware. HTC’s attempt was honest and good but they need to craft a new device—HTC Legend, or something—that has some serious hardware specs.

That’s it. Questions, requests, comment.