HTC Hero Android phone for Sprint

In My Humble Opinion
21

I prefer soft keyboards as well. My last phone (Instinct) only had a soft keyboard, and I really had no desire to go to a phone with a hard keyboard, making the Pre not quite right for me. This phone is perfect.

I love, love, love it. I played around with it all night.

My husband gave me the lowdown on his favorite Android apps, so I went a little app happy last night. The phone itself feels really solid, I really like the auto-orientation and the auto backlight adjust. It loaded my Google contacts super fast and then synced them to facebook and flickr profiles.

The camera is a bit disappointing for 5 megapixels. The pics I took weren’t very impressive at all. Blurry, fuzzy, bleh. The video camera is pretty good though, and I fiddled around a bit last night with the Ustream app. Very fun.

Battery life with GPS enabled is not so great as far as I can tell right now. Mini-USB plug means you probably already have an extra charger around the house somewhere though.

Call quality is fine, quite good actually. Speaker is loud and clear. Music sounded OK through the speaker, very good through a headset (3.5mm head jack makes it easy to switch from ipod/whatever to phone, nice touch.)

The screen feels really solid, not quite as ‘delicate’ and scratchable as my Instinct screen. I think it will hold up nicely to being tossed in my purse and shuffled around. Love the trackball.

I put the phone in airplane mode, and all of my calendar events and cached email loaded quickly. I added an event to my calendar in airplane mode, then turned airplane mode off. Checked my calendar online a minute or two later and my event had been added. i also received a notification on my phone of the upcoming event.

There are all kinds of other goodies, and the apps are what really make it a fun and handy phone. I am very pleased with it so far and don’t see that changing since I know how happy my husband has been with his G1.

22

Dunno if I or anyone has mentioned this yet, but it stays pretty clean too. (Mine’s the white one) I only have to occasionally rub the screen on my belly to clean the finger-rints off. The rest of the phone looks spotless. Unlike my ipod which often looks like it’s been submerged in strawberry jam and then given a cursory wipe.

23

I wouldn’t freak out about the Pre. I’ve got one and it’s awesome.

24

I’m getting worried now. Anyone owned a HTC Hero for a while? Does the battery life improve?
(On the basis that a battery that’s been through a few full-empty-full-empty cycles has been known to get better)

25

Been 3 days now, and I’ve admittedly been playing with the phone like a kid after Christmas with a shiny new toy, but I am also worried about battery life. I used most of the tips on this page, and it seems to have improved slightly, but still not great. But again, I am fiddling with it an awful lot right now.

Oh, and I am hopelessly in love with this thing. I never thought a phone could rock my world as wonderfully as this one has. It is amazing.

26

Your now the proud owner of a smart phone, with it comes capabilities to do stuff , you pay for that with poor battery life. The most you can do is power conservation tweaks, and or get a second battery if it can be removed.

Some handsets have better performance than others, but generally speaking its the achilles heel of smartphones.

Declan

27

Don’t own an Android phone yet but it will be high on my shopping list when I replace my Nokia E71. It appears the ideal smartphone platform. It’s free,open and supports multitasking.It will probably be the first mobile OS to get any new mobile services launched by Google.

In the next couple of years I suspect there will be a lot of expansion into smarthphones from companies like Acer and HP and Android would be the logical OS for them to use. You will also have Android phones from existing giants like Samsung and LG. So you will get a lot of competition driving down prices as well as producing hardware innovation. Gartner predicts Android will become the no.2 smarthphone OS after Symbian in a couple of years and I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes no.1 in 5 years.

As for actual devices my first preference would probably be a slide-out qwerty with a touchscreen and a decent camera. The Motorola Cliqlooks interesting.

However I don’t type that much and landscape software keyboards work pretty well so I would be open to a touchscreen-only phone as well. Ideally I would like a decent D-pad though. The Samsung Galaxy is along those lines though the D-pad doesn’t look that comfortable.

28

Well I went out and picked up the HTC Hero for Sprint a couple days ago. Some people dogged on the “bland” redesign, but I like the smooth shape as it still fits nicely in a pocket.

I haven’t had it long enough (or maybe just don’t use it enough) to run into battery problems, but I like the interface, really like its integration with Google calendar and GMail, was pleasantly surprised to see how easily it interfaced with Facebook (which may actually cause me to use facebook more, don’t know if that’s good or bad) … I like the app store and the ease of installing new apps, the music player is decent… So far I haven’t even scratched the surface but I do not have any buyer’s remorse as of yet.

I do like finally having a phone that charges and connects to a computer with a standard mini-usb plug, and I didn’t realize how much a difference having a 3.5mm headphone jack would make. It’s the little things…

29

But I’ve had smartphones before. In fact prior to this I had the HTC Touch Pro. Battery life wasn’t great but it was better than this (so far)

30

Just got mine yesterday, an upgrade from my Centro. I love the features, but ugh, I can’t get the hang of the soft keyboard! I have freakishly skinny fingers, too. I guess I’ll get used to it. I don’t have any problems with touchpads or other dexterity stuff, so I don’t know what the problem is. But I almost threw it across the room in frustration after about 10 failed attempts at clicking a “remember me?” checkbox led to clicking the “forgot password?” checkbox. Oy.

Also, I hate hate hate where the volume rocker switch is. I’ll get used to it I suppose, but it’s where I put my thumb to hold the handset when typing/using the touch screen!

I’m not all that fond of the native browser, and Opera mini was ridiculously slow, and I also don’t like the default calendar app, but these are all tweakable. I want a calendar view like the old Palm agenda view where you can toggle between day/week/month view, and so on. I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet though.

31

Rasa, it took me a few hours to get used to, but my Instinct was a pressure type screen that I could use a stylus or my fingernail on, while that won’t really work on the Hero. I needed to re-learn touchscreen using my finger pads, and actually had to trim back my thumbnails a bit for now. Calibrating helped a little too.

I love the calendar simply because my Google calendar is my lifeline. Not having easy access to it on my last phone was something that really killed that phone for me.

I do think the volume rocker is ridiculously too big. I’ve already hit it accidentally a few times while texting or browsing. I just can’t see the value in a volume rocker taking up nearly if not half the side of the phone. Very strange, IMO.

Still playing and tweaking a lot, but battery life seems better after following most of those tips and finding my groove with it. I might go ahead and buy a second battery anyway though. The phone will really shine when traveling or out and about in the city, and I’d hate to not use some cool features because of a dead or dying battery.

32

Right. And I had the Instinct and my husband has the G1. Battery life on both are not as bad as on the Hero.

Apparently, it’s a known issue and has to do with the SMS app. See here for a fix for now -

33

I haaaate ChompSMS and the iPhone style SMS interface, ugh. I like the default Messaging! :frowning: But I got Handcent SMS which is a little less obnoxious. I found the same info you posted above here:

http://androidforums.com/sprint-htc-hero/11230-source-poor-battery-life-not-lets-fix.html

I’ve gotten more used to the soft keyboard onscreen as I use it. I’m still struggling, heehee… but it’s gotten better. I still hate the volume rocker and will likely look for a hack to disable it.