HTC Hero Is Mine
A both unfortunate and fortuitous happenstance has caused me to upgrade to an HTC Hero a bit sooner than I’d thought — my Blackberry got washed with my jeans earlier in the week. After a few days of being cellphone-less, I finally got up to the CellularSouth “Discovery Center” in Ridgeland, Miss., and stepped in to see what the damage was going to be.
Things didn’t turn out too bad — I was able to “early upgrade” the Blackberry to the HTC Hero, got an instant rebate instead of the threatened mail-in variety and, after a switching fee and buying out two months worth of wireless, I walked out for less than $150 with taxes. (In the same transaction I moved another phone from my personal account to the corporate account, saving $20 per month in the process.)
(Aside: Having not bought insurance for all five phones, I saved $25 a month or $250 in ten months. One washed phone later, I’m up about $100 on the deal and I have an HTC Hero. Yes, you can get unlucky, but it’s that sort of math that tends argue against replacement insurance and extended warranties.)
Part of what makes this cool is that I’m still on my $49.99 smartphone plan with CellularSouth, a company which has decided, for whatever reason, to offer the most kick-ass smartphone plan in the industry. That’s 500 minutes of prime talk, unlimited mobile-to-mobile, unlimited nights and weekends (unlimited nights and weekends is optional), unlimited text and unlimited smartphone data. Nobody touches that.
The reason I don’t have an iPhone isn’t the cost, however, although avoiding that AT&T iPhone plan is a nice perk. It’s the fact that AT&T couldn’t get a reliable signal into my house. Perhaps that’s the downside of Apple’s continued exclusive with AT&T.
So now I, the big-time Apple guy, has an Android phone. It’s ironic.
Already I know it’s going to be an interesting ride. I like the phone. It feels good in my hand — the texture of the back is nice, the size is nice, the weight is nice.
It’s taking me a little bit to get used to all the buttons and screens; my iPhone, clearly, had fewer buttons and, overall, a more elegant interface.
That said, the Hero’s HTC Sense on-screen interface is enticing — I didn’t think it would be a big deal, but I like the widgets. HTC Sense offers seven “screens” of widgets, and I’ve found that I fill them up very quickly with weather, SMS text, an e-mail inbox, Facebook, Twitter, Google Search and so on.
The switchable “themes” touted are nice, but so far I haven’t found that my Work and Social are so very different that I need a theme switch. I pretty much want all the widgets I can eat all the time. Maybe there’s a camera mode or something that will make me feel differently about switching themes, or maybe I’ll find that I at least switch themes on the weekend. (Could be a psychological ploy at least, since I used to treat my Blackberry with utter disdain on weekends.)
I’ve seen elsewhere that the Hero feels slow to some reviewers. I agree, there’s some slowness (some of the same slowness that you’ll see when Mac OS X desktop widgets re-load and refresh, for instance). But it’s not too annoyingly slow. There’s something psychological about a “widget” that you assume will be constantly up to date, but the phone has to refresh those. I’ve had it for about 24 hours now and the biggest issue I’ve found is how slowly it switches from portrait to landscape, particularly for typing. It almost feels like an afterthought, as if the developers didn’t realize it could do that until late in development. I’m hoping that’s not a processor thing and that later versions of the OS can handle it.
The standard headphone jack is nice; last nice I plugged in my soft Sony headphones (true ear pillows, not silly little buds) and kept myself entertained for half an hour playing with Pandora. I’m looking forward to getting a setup for the car and listening to Pandora streaming through the phone. (XM would be great, since I’m already a subscriber, but so far there’s no Android app.)
Of course, part of the experience of the iPhone — particularly for a Mac user — is the seamless sync with iTunes, iCal, Address Book and so on. With my Hero — not so much.
It immediately picked up my contacts from Gmail (which I don’t use regularly, but had used more in the past) which helped with a lot of contacts, although there’s a lot of junk in there. With those imported, I can link contacts to Facebook and get a sort of cross-section of events and updates from a particular person, once that person is linked to their Facebook entry. It’s a little tedious, and since Google Contacts doesn’t know everything there is to know about my Address Book contacts, things are a bit incomplete…and, at the same time, I’ve got a lot of duplicate entries.
Likewise, on my Calendar — with the iPhone, it’s an easy sync with iCal. Currently, the best plan with the Hero seems to be to sync via Google Calendar — but, Google Calendar and iCal prefer to play with “fresh” calendar data, it seems, instead of syncing existing stuff. So, here are the steps I’ve taken:
1. A calendar in iCal called Todd’s Appointments used to be shared with others (on my sales staff) as an iCal Subscription. They tended to import those into their Google Calendars. I exported Todd’s Appointments and deleted it from my iCal.
2. I imported those appointments into my Google Calendar.
3. From iCal, I synced with the Google Calendar, thus getting my calendar items back.
4. Now I’ll have to re-invite people to the Google Calendar for sharing instead of having them accept the published iCal feed. (As far as I can tell.)
It’s a workaround. So far, the third-party apps are still in preview or beta or not quite there yet — I plan to test The Missing Sync for Android soon and see how that stands in for sync duties.
Of course, the biggest different is iTunes. I haven’t yet done a lot of testing and playing to see what the solution will be for synchronizing Music — the options are Missing Sync and doubleTwist, which looks promising, but might require two different apps for sync, which is only so much fun.
Did I mention Pandora? I haven’t played with it much otherwise, but on the Hero, it’s a very nice service. Once I get a car adapter going for the phone, I may find myself listening to Pandora while driving around and working about — and worrying a little less about synchronizing my iTunes music. We’ll see.
Oh, and the phone part. I’ve only taken a few calls so far, but they sound good. Call management isn’t as slick as the iPhone, and there’s no visual voicemail (and Cellular South’s regular voice mail is pretty middling, requiring a lot of dialing and waiting and button pushing). We’ll see how handy it is to have communication — calls, texts, Facebook — handled through the contact manager, where you can take a look at an archive of multimedia discussions you’ve had with individuals.
So, what’s next? We’ll have to see what happens with the Android app store and the desire to develop for it. Will there be an NPR app for Android? A Priceline app? And what about key business app with a Mac-centric flair such as Elements, which offers a nice iPhone app but might not want to put the effort into developing an Android version. (Not to pick on Ntractive, which might well do an Android version. The question is will Android apps come from Apple-centric companies that make great Mac products.)
The good news for apps — I get the sense that Android devices will jump off the shelves this holiday quarter, with major and minor carriers offering great deals on the phone and iPhone envy driving some sales for people who simply can’t do business with AT&T. (And AT&T is taking it on the chin with their 3G coverage and the resulting lawsuit loss.)
The iPhone will likely come out of this quarter just fine, particularly if Apple finally gets to a multi-carrier strategy (in the U.S.). But I think Android will gain quite a user base by the first of the year.
With an installed based in the tens of millions, the iPhone has a nice head start and a wonderful user experience on the Mac. But my Hero is likely to keep getting apps over the next year, and it’s nicely affordable for a smartphone. So far, so good!
Disclosure: Cellular South buys ads sometimes from my newspaper company, www.jacksonfreepress.com. I didn’t get any sort of consideration on the phone or the plan.
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