HTC Hero - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

LouCypher · 11-07-2009, 02:32 PM

Just picked one of these up through work, no service yet but very impressed with this phone. Was reading through some of the Blackberry vs Iphone stuff in the other topic and really am thinking this HTC is overlooked with all the other hype.

Really new to smart phones and just curious on peoples experience with HTC, both this model and previous ones. Seems to be a good variety of Apps and the Android OS seems to allow quite a bit of freedom as support for it grows.

Wondering as well what peoples must have Apps are?

Igottago · 11-08-2009, 01:05 AM

Looks pretty cool. I'm looking for a new phone, but I'm on a Mac and want to be able to sync my calendar and contacts with the phone. Do HTC phones easily sync up with a mac?

Or maybe it is easier to use google calendar and sync it with that?

LouCypher · 11-08-2009, 08:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Igottago

Looks pretty cool. I'm looking for a new phone, but I'm on a Mac and want to be able to sync my calendar and contacts with the phone. Do HTC phones easily sync up with a mac?

Or maybe it is easier to use google calendar and sync it with that?

Not entirely sure about sinking with Mac's. I do know there is quite a bit of sync software out there beyond what is already with the phone. Also there is a Mac address as well as IP address for the phone.

JayP · 11-08-2009, 09:41 AM

I'd like to hear some opinions on HTC as well. I'm in the market for a new phone (with Telus) and both the Hero and the TouchPro2 have good reviews and seem to have all the features that the bigger names have.

GoinAllTheWay · 11-08-2009, 10:33 AM

Crazy....same phone I'm looking at. For me it's down to the iPhone, Hero or Storm 2.

I have an HTC Tytn ATM, phone has been pretty good, held up well over the years. It's just the O/S that pisses me off. When I first bought the phone, it was running Win Mobile 5. I was quite blown away with it at the time but can see how dated it is now. the phone itself was pretty good but when I installed Win Moble 6.1 I started experiencing really bad lag and the touch screen would go unresponsive at times. I'm hoping that was only because the new O/S may have been a tad robust for the hardware.

It's the only reason I'm a tad nervous about another HTC product but I'm sure with the hardware that phone packs and the Android O/S it should be fine. Only reason I bring up the lag is because during some of the vids I watched of the Hero, it seemed like it was showing some chopiness/lag when the demonstrator was flipping through some of the menus.

Do you experience any lag running through the menus? I'd be interested to hear what you have to say about it after a few days use. I'm interested in how well it runs, how it plays music/video, how the angled mouthpiece affects typing if it all. Ya know, just overall impressions.

LouCypher · 11-17-2009, 09:27 AM

Now that ive had the phone for a bit I must say I am still pretty impressed. Heard quite a bit about the lag but haven't experienced much if any outside of the odd glitchy app. If your running 8 or 10 apps at once there will be some lag as well but I haven't had reason to logically run that many.

Having an App killer or task manager is a must though as there is no easy way to shut down apps properly that ive seen. App killer is very easy to use however. Phone recpetion has been great, far better then my previous mobile.

So many incredibly useful apps and in North America we are just seeing the tip of the iceburg as I see much more potential for apps based on location (lots of neat apps based on european or asian locales that would translate well here when someone puts the effort in)

Contact list and how it intergrates everything from call history, to facebook and flicker accounts really is quite useful for keeping up with people.

The iphone is great and has a lot of hype but this phone is just as good if not better for its ability to customize.

GoinAllTheWay · 11-17-2009, 10:20 AM

Awesome, thanks for the info. Glad to hear the lag is minimal or non existant. I stopped by the Telus store the other day and one of the reps actually had a new one as well and was showing me all the different features of the phone, really is a tight little device.

I agree, the potential for this O/S is huge, I hope the continue to improve on it.

sworkhard · 11-21-2009, 12:19 AM

I've had the hero since the 7th and I'm really happy with it. The iphone 3g-s will be faster and have more apps, but isn't as open of a platform and android is just getting started so it will catch up. The multitasking is great.

One thing to note though is that it doesn't have a proximity sensor so the touchscreen stays on when your talking on the phone which makes it easy to accidentally end the call. You can get around this by hitting the home button after dialing as then the end call touchscreen button is not longer visible which is fine because there are physical send and end call buttons on the phone.

2 must have apps are:

-locale (lets you configure you phone based on where your are, what time it is, and much more. There are a lot of other apps with plugins for local as well. Probably androids killer app at this time (besides gmail integration))

-taskiller (for when you have too many things running at once), both avaiable from the android market

Iceman90 · 11-22-2009, 01:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Igottago

Looks pretty cool. I'm looking for a new phone, but I'm on a Mac and want to be able to sync my calendar and contacts with the phone. Do HTC phones easily sync up with a mac?

Or maybe it is easier to use google calendar and sync it with that?

The way the Android OS works on the Hero, is that when you turn the phone on for the first time, you are asked for a Google account. You can either create a new one, or add an existing one. It does this because all Google's web services are then integrated with the phone's software.

While I am pretty sure you could sync it with your Mac, it may be easier to just use Google Calendar (if you like iCal, I am sure you can get Google Calendar to feed to the iCal software, or use Mozilla Sunbird or Mozilla Prism as other ways to access your calendar on the desktop).

LouCypher · 11-22-2009, 07:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iceman90

The way the Android OS works on the Hero, is that when you turn the phone on for the first time, you are asked for a Google account. You can either create a new one, or add an existing one. It does this because all Google's web services are then integrated with the phone's software.

While I am pretty sure you could sync it with your Mac, it may be easier to just use Google Calendar (if you like iCal, I am sure you can get Google Calendar to feed to the iCal software, or use Mozilla Sunbird or Mozilla Prism as other ways to access your calendar on the desktop).

One thing I encountered since I had the phone for about four days before it was activated was that I couldn't properly use Market once my phone was activated. When trying to create a Google account it would always have an error. Factory reset and then adding the Google account only way to correct this problem.