A lot of you may already know me well from HowardForums or Twitter but for those of you who don’t, I’m EverythingBlaxx or simply Blaxx. I’ve gone through an absolute heap of different handsets from almost every manufacturer, running just about every operating system. To run off a quick list of my favorites: Nokia – N95, E71. Motorola – V400, V635. Sony Ericsson – w300i, XPERIA X1. HTC – TyTN, TyTN II. Siemens – SK65. Needless to say, I’ve been around the mobile block a couple times but I’ve always felt most comfortable with Symbian. It’s a powerful OS with an abundant developer community and while the iPhone’s tagline might be “There’s an app for that”, it’s Symbian that originated the practice. While the foundation might be solid, the house built upon it has seen better days. I’m talking about the S60 UI, it’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. It seems with each feature pack, a previous annoyance is fixed by the introduction of a new feature or new option, but that new feature or option creates a whole new annoyance. It’s like expanding your house by adding an additional bedroom but you have to go outside and walk around the whole house to get in there. Taking that into consideration, simply slapping a touch interface onto that same cumbersome UI seems like a terrible idea but that’s precisely what was done with S60 5th Edition (to be fair, Microsoft was the first to shoehorn touch support into an OS not originally designed for it but I digress) and the experience is just as clunky as it sounds.
Now had S60 5th Edition been introduced as the UI running on the Nokia N95 in 2006, it would have been hailed as a giant step forward for Symbian & S60. However, a couple iPhones, Android and a Palm Pre showed us what a UI built with touch input in mind from jump should look like and more importantly, how it should “feel” (pardon the pun). It also shines in the spotlight directly on the fact that touch was an afterthought when it came to S60 (Can you picture an N97 running S60 3rd Edition? I can). Now the N97 is my first foray into S60 5th Edition after a brief dabbling in vanilla S60 3rd Edition (Nokia E62), a long marriage to S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 (Nokia N95 & Nokia E71) and a quick stopover at S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (Samsung i8510 & Nokia N85). Not a lot has changed besides the addition of touch support and it was probably very clear to everyone involved that this was never meant to be a long term solution. It is now September 2009 and we’ve yet to lay eyes on what the future has in store for Symbian or rather, what Symbian has in store for the future. As such, it’s only natural to take a look at some other options and find out if the grass truly is greener on the other side of the fence or does it just appear to be from here because we’re currently standing on a brown patch. I’ve just returned from spending a couple days with my neighbours (who happen to be “Androids”) and I’ll tell you that it’s the latter. At least on that side of the fence.
The HTC Hero
I picked up an HTC Hero recently to see what all the fuss is about. For months, I’ve been hearing that the HTC Hero is everything the N97 should have been from a hardware standpoint and at first glance, it would appear so. Faster CPU, more RAM, capacitive touchscreen, 7.2Mbps HSDPA/2.0Mbps HSUPA. However, take a closer look and you’ll see that everything that glitters ain’t gold.
RAM, CPU, & Memory
First things first, the CPU has a clock speed of 528MHz and wihle that is faster than the N97′s CPU, which is clocked at 434MHz, the difference is negligible, you’ll notice this for yourself when you power on the device and start using it. This thing sure does lag at times. This is never more evident than when you have to use the on-screen keyboard or change the screen orientation (if it even lets you change screen orientation. More on that shortly). The entire show stops and the phone freezes for a few moments while the keyboard comes up on screen or the view changes from portrait to landscape. This was a problem for me when I was using the phone while lying down and the screen orientation would get changed inadvertently. The lag also ruins the Photo Widget, which is otherwise a great idea, by ending the smooth transition animation from one image to the next with a low res placeholder while you wait for the next image to load. I have nothing but good things to say about the 288MB of RAM that the Hero is loaded with. The multitasking is a bit strange though. It’s actually forced because once you open an app, you can’t actually close it, it just moves to the background when you’re done with it. Weird but at least all that RAM gets put to good use. I don’t necessarily need or want to press the shortcut for the browser and have it show me the last page I was on instead of my homepage but its not a big deal.
Hardware
Hardware-wise, the phone is built solid. You should expect nothing less from a phone with just one moving part. Speaking of that moving part, the trackball is located below the screen and is pretty much useless. It’s placement makes it difficult to use with just one hand and I often had to hold the phone in one hand while working the trackball with the other. Cute of them to include it but it’s much less of a hassle to navigate with the touchscreen. The ‘screen’ part of that touchscreen is vibrant and clear, I was actually very surprised when I learned that the resolution is just 320×480. The ‘touch’ part of the equation doesn’t quite match the looks but we’ll get into that in the next paragraph. I don’t know exactly why HTC designs all of their Android devices with that angled “chin” at the bottom seeing as it serves no functional purpose and it definitely does not look attractive. To top it off, it makes it even more difficult to use the trackball. Nothing special really about the rest, 3.5mm headphone jack (thank you for complying to industry standards this time around HTC) up top, volume rocker on the left, nada on the right, extUSB port on the bottom (forget what I said about standards), 5MP camera around back and MicroSD card slot under the battery cover. All of these worked as advertised so I didn’t spend much time going over them.
Touchscreen Experience And Typing
I’m not about to get into the whole ‘capacitive vs. resistive’ touchscreen debate in this space, let’s just say they both have their advantages and they both have their drawbacks. However, regardless of what technology is used, a touchscreen is only as good as its software. That being said, the HTC Hero’s touchscreen leaves much to be desired and the blame lies squarely on the software. The experience is far too inconsistent and I think HTC’s Sense UI is a big part of the reason for this. The touch response ranges wildly from too sensitive to not nearly sensitive enough and back again. For example, the homescreen (which is the crown jewel of the SenseUI) is far too jumpy and has a difficult time differentiating between taps, swipes, long presses and drags. Too many times, I would tap an icon and the phone would think I was starting a swipe. This is doubly annoying because unlike other phones that would respond to this swipe with an animation to a different screen (ala N97′s homescreen), the Hero requires you to “pull” the next page into view yourself so a short swipe will pull the current page a bit then it will snap back with a little recoil action as it sways back and forth a bit before locking back into place. The reason this drives me crazy is because the phone doesn’t accept any input from the touchsreen unless the current page is perfectly still. This results in having to try 2 or 3 times to open something from the homescreen. On the other end of the spectrum, the on-screen keyboard on this device is awful, just plain awful. It is far too cramped in portrait view even though the letters are incredibly tiny with a good amount of space between one another. Despite the decent spacing, the phone is never really sure which letter you were trying to press anyway and if not for the above-average predictive text, I don’t see how they would have gotten away with this.
Image by intomobile.com
The keyboard is a bit better in landscape because of larger keys and an even better spaced layout but it still struggles to detect exactly which key you want to press. The other problem with the landscape keyboard is that quite frequently I encountered application or certain menus in the UI that simply didn’t support the landscape QWERTY. At first I thought the phone didn’t have an accelerometer but the fact that the landscape QWERTY is just sometime-ish instead is far more disconcerting.
Widgets, Shortcuts, & Android Market
Image by gratisgadgets.com
My experience with the HTC Hero wasn’t the greatest but there were a lot of things I loved. The 7 pages of the panoramic homescreen is definitely #1 on that list. More than enough space for me to customize, organize and prioritize my widgets and shortcuts. I spent at least 2 hours just creating different ‘Scenes’ as HTC calls them. The device comes with pre-installed Scenes to get you started but it does not allow you to edit them at all which kinda depreciates their value but you can create as many of your own that you want. The shortcuts that can be added to all these Scenes go way beyond simple links to applications or bookmarks (they are there too if you need them), you can set shortcuts to turn Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on/off with a tap, instead of a shortcut to a contact card with options on how to contact them, you can set up shortcuts to make a specific communication with different contacts. For instance, I can create a shortcut to call my mother with a single tap but I might set up a similar shortcut to send a text message to my girlfriend. Very useful. The widgets that come loaded on the device are standard far but there are endless amounts just a click away in the Android Market. The Market is very straightforward and Nokia could learn a thing (or 17 things) from it. Simply list the available apps, ringtones, videos, utilities, etc., give a brief description of it, show me the price and rating all on one screen. A click later, my desired app is downloaded and installed. No fuss, no muss. The fact that the first thing the phone asks me to do after turning it on for the first time is my Google username and password is a nice touch but it was far too hard to locate the wizard in the menus if you choose to skip it or if you need to change something later. I never thought I’d say this but I kinda missed the Nokia Welcome app.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, there’s not much new here. Instead of being everything the N97 was supposed to be, the HTC Hero is pretty much the same phone. Great flagship phone but far from perfect. As the “New kid at school” luster starts to wear off, Android is just going to be another operating system if everyone keeps making all Android devices look the same. It’s a shame too because there is all kinds of potential under the hood (like the insane amount of integration with social networks in this phone) that would be better showcased in devices with a little more flavor and identity. You would be hardpressed to find major significant differences between the Dream, Magic and Hero if I were to lay them all down on a table in front of you. I would love to see Andorid on a device like the HTC Touch Pro or Touch HD (without having to hack it on there) or even a device with the form factor of a Nokia E71 or Blackberry with a larger screen and touch support. Until manufacturers start showing some originality, there isn’t much to write home about when it comes to Android.
Related Articles:
- Photos: Nokia N97 vs. E71 Side By Side
- What I’d Like To See In The N97′s Near Future
- Nokia N97 vs. 5800 – A World Apart
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