HTC Hero (Graphite) Review. (iPhone 3G comparison)

Chazam · 09:42 AM

I've recently decided to sell my iPhone 3G and have moved to the HTC Hero.

(My main reasons for giving up the iPhone was due to some regular outages with o2 recently, the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 software is awesome!).

Inside the box I got:

HTC Hero Handset
Battery
USB Cable
2GB Micro SD Card
Power adapter with a USB input
Headphones
Basic documentation (Quickstart guide)

The android sync software was on the SD card of the phone along with the PDF manual and also had a sample video of the user interface.

Pictures

Here are some side by side shots compared to my iPhone 3G:

Default lockscreen

BBC News zoomed in on a news story.

Both lock screens.

BBC News again.

Booting up

The iPhone 3G boots up slightly faster than the Android based HTC Hero. Video

On a fresh boot I used to have around 30MB free on my iPhone (I found his using SBSettings when it was jailbroken) and never had much more free than that. With the Hero I have around 80MB's of free ram on a fresh boot and if I use the default Android UI that increases to around 120MB's.

With this amount of ram I've not had a single app crash yet and it seems that the Hero and Android OS handled multitasking very well. The iPhone can not multitask without jailbreaking and with only 30MB free ram it probably wouldn't handle it too well. (The 3GS would probably handle it better with its 256MB's of ram Vs the iPhone 3g's 128MB.

User Interface

The Hero's "sense ui" is aesthetically pleasing but does appear to be lagguer compared to the iPhone OS I was used to. You can see a video of me comparing both here

Once I'd gotten to Android OS it wasn't difficult at all navigating between different screens and apps.

Others
I've only tested a few things on the phone. Wifi works as advertised and ss a phone I've had no issues with it. I've tested Google maps on it briefly which (unsurprisingly) worked fine. The Hero contains a digital compass which worked fine when I downloaded an app from the Android app store for free.

The app store is nice to use but has far less content than the Apple app store. I've tried a few games and the device seems ok for gaming but one thing I did notice is that some games designed for the T-Mobile G1 would not work as they used keys from the physical keyboard on the G1 (A homebrew port of Doom being one of them

)

The touch screen works well and has a predictive text function. The web browser is based off of Apples Webkit so the rendering is extremely similar to Safari on the iPhone but with one small advantage, the Hero works with Adobe Flash content. you can double tap on a flash applet which will make it full screen for you to view.

It's a really nice phone and I'm enjoying having a device that can multitask again. I've been listening to last.fm far more on this handset than I would on my iPhone as once I wanted to do anything else I had to close last.fm which would stop my music. The Hero comes with a headphone jack ad works fine as a music player so I've ordered an 8GB Micro SD card to put my music on to.

The phone can link contacts with your facebook contacts and downloads their brthdays, status updates and photo albums for you to look at without accessing Facebook and also Flickr albums can be associated with people too. the Native twiter app is great and works fine too! you can also update your own facebook status without even opening facebook from the Hero.

The Good (compared to my iPhone and in general)
Removable battery.
Multitasking OS.
5 Megapixel cam with autofocus.
Open app store with less authorisation issues than Apple.
Expandable/removable memory.
Lots of different file formats supported for media.
Great facebook, twitter and Flickr integration.

The Bad
No flash for the camera.
Low amount of content on the App store.
Apps can only be installed onto the 512MB built in memory which is already taken by some apps.

The last one could be a big disadvantage for some people but fear not, the applications themselves have access to the SD card storage. Doom installed the WAD files onto the SD card but the app has to be on the internal memory. If a commercial GPS maps app is released it will undoubtedly store all other content on your SD card!

That's about all I have to say on the Hero!

DsK · 08-01-2009, 01:59 PM

Very nice review. Good also because youre an iPhone fan! I think what people need to be reminded is that the iPhone has some serious hardware (GPU too) in comparison to the Hero, and this is sadly reflected in the price.

Mine should be arriving soon!

UTGeneral · 08-01-2009, 02:24 PM

http://gizmodo.com/5302637/htc-heros...feel-like-junk

interesting article on the material used on the Hero, I think you only get that material on the white one

I still hate them for giving every phone a chin.

But then, all is kiddie crap compared to this:

http://www.gigapascal.com/iPhone.html

Chazam · 02:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DsK

I think what people need to be reminded is that the iPhone has some serious hardware (GPU too) in comparison to the Hero, and this is sadly reflected in the price.

This is what has me lost. I've seen lots of posts about Android devices not having 3d acceleration but one of the apps on the app store is called Neo Core with some pretty good effects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PWV6yYlXzg

Does this thing have a 3d accelerator or not?

Excuse the extremely poor video....

Chazam · 02:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UTGeneral

http://gizmodo.com/5302637/htc-heros...feel-like-junk

interesting article on the material used on the Hero, I think you only get that material on the white one

I still hate them for giving every phone a chin.

But then, all is kiddie crap compared to this:

http://www.gigapascal.com/iPhone.html

thanks for the read UTGeneral. The iPhone enver did bother me as I always had mine in a case.

I'll have to get one for the hero but all I've seen online look utter crap.

That does look nice tho!

zortoflaven · 08-01-2009, 03:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chazam

This is what has me lost. I've seen lots of posts about Android devices not having 3d acceleration but one of the apps on the app store is called Neo Core with some pretty good effects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PWV6yYlXzg

Does this thing have a 3d accelerator or not?

Excuse the extremely poor video....

I don't know if its a dedicate chip, but it does support OpenGL ES.

Nice review. I'm sure DsK appreciates it more than anyone!

Chazam · 08-01-2009, 03:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zortoflaven

I don't know if its a dedicate chip, but it does support OpenGL ES.

Nice review. I'm sure DsK appreciates it more than anyone!

AAh, so the GFX processing is being done by the CPU?

And yep, DsK does love his phones (and I hope he learns to love his hero!).

zortoflaven · 08-01-2009, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chazam

AAh, so the GFX processing is being done by the CPU?

And yep, DsK does love his phones (and I hope he learns to love his hero!).

If the Hero is like the Dream or Magic, it is a dual core ARM based MSM7201A that does all the calculations for everything. That's what wiki says anyway!

Chazam · 08-01-2009, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zortoflaven

If the Hero is like the Dream or Magic, it is a dual core ARM based MSM7201A that does all the calculations for everything. That's what wiki says anyway!

According to my box its a MSM7200A...... What is the 7201a..... Is it better?

zortoflaven · 08-01-2009, 04:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chazam

According to my box its a MSM7200A...... What is the 7201a..... Is it better?

IIRC, the 7201 is for NA only. Its the same as the 7200, but it infringed on some patents here so they had to make a revision for our market.