Update: Living with My Hero

Time flies! I’ve had my Hero about two-and-a-half months, now, and, for the most part, I’m enjoying using it. I’ve found it’s a much better e-mail machine than my Blackberry Pearl was, and I enjoy the on-screen keyboard more than I did the two-letters-per-key approach of the Pearl. I enjoy the apps and find that I’m using the phone to pass the time, access vital weather information and for great maps when travelling — another serious advance over my Blackberry.

(I type mostly in portrait mode, oddly, but that’s probably because the Hero is slow when switching to Landscape.)

The problems are easy to identify — speed and battery life. With all the discussion in the past few weeks about the iPad’s lack of multitasking, I sometimes pine for that problem with my Hero; between the fact that it runs background apps and some of those apps don’t even have a Quit option (quality varies widely) I’ve found that the Hero can slow down significantly, to the point where background apps can interfere with your ability to make or answer calls. That’s annoying.

HTC Sense is pretty, but I’m hoping an update (rumored to be happening soon) will speed it up. If not, I’m tempted to figure out if I can remove it and run a more basic Android interface; my experience is that the widgets are so slow to update that I end up opening applications anyway. The HTC Mail app is so slow that I’m not using K-9 Mail for IMAP access to my work account; the weather widget is so slow that I just launch The Weather Channel app, which is actually really fast.

It’s really pretty annoying to get toward the end of the work day and realize that my phone won’t make it into the evening; I’ve got a charger at the house and at my desk, but if I forget to plug it in, I’m in trouble. Recently when travelling I had charged the phone before my afternoon flight, had it off for the five hours I was on a plane; and still the battery was gone by the time I was at baggage claim at 11 p.m.

Not perfect, more work to be done, and the updates aren’t coming that fast. Having said all that, it’s a remarkable device and the OS experience is certainly serviceable. The “app wars” are on, although I was more than pleased when Issuu (m.issuu.com) came out with an Android version of their “flipbook” reader first — now you can get the JFP and Boom Jackson on your Android phone (with iPhone coming soon).

Posted via web from iTodd Central