I own HTC Magic - thin and stylish Android phone that I won in internal contest (more about this in a later blogpost); it's exactly the same phone that was given away on Google IO.
But recently I got all envious about new HTC Hero - first Android phone with proprietary custom UI. Take a look at the UI:
The UI is done solely by HTC, not by Google. So there was no way for me to test it before official release, or to even see anyone with such phone in the office.
But.. it is Android. And I have Android phone. So I went to the famous xda developers forum where Android hackers hang out, and found what I needed: Hero firmware image for Magic phone by Qteknology. There was actually another one from Fatal1ty, but I was more interested in the first one because there was multilanguage version with Russian.
So, I downloaded the image linked there, copied it to the SD card, renamed it to update.zip, turned off the phone, booted it in recovery mode (pressing Home button, turn it on, then in recovery mode again keeping home button down press red button shortly to see options), wiped and reflashed the phone. Turned on.. and amazingly everything worked :). With big letters HTC on the screen, it loaded, and I had Hero.
It was yesterday. The day after, I can recap what's good and what's bad I had. Reminder: this is very specific to the actual image that I've downloaded on my Magic; experience on real HTC Hero device might be different.
- It's slow. It's slow and unresponsive almost to the point of being unusable.
Pressing home button always results in "Loading..." for 10-20 seconds. When I have incoming call, and press green button, it takes 5 seconds till it picks it up. When I want to call someone, it takes me a minute till I can press the green button. I can only hope that actual HTC Hero device is much snappier and there is something fishy with Hero-Magic port; actual Hero has more RAM (288 MB vs 192 MB), but CPU is the same. I have used "set CPU" app that is included to overclock, but it didn't help.
- Soft keyboard is great.
HTC has rewritten on-screen keyboard completely; it looks nicer, and spelling correction is awesome. Thanks to it, you never need to care whether you have hit the correct keys on the super-small on-screen keyboard or not. E.g. you type "Grlkp" and it corrects it to "Hello". This is so much better than what I have on generic Android UIs, where I have to be super-precise and slow to type what I want, that it offsets all the slowness.
- Russian keyboard.
I don't know when Russian keyboard comes to generic Android, and don't really understand why should it take so long. But with the fact that I send a lot of SMS in Russian, and need to search in Google and Gmail in Belarusian and Russian often, this is must-have for me. And it sports the same awesome spelling correction system - imagine typing "Мпвмтб" and getting "Спасибо"! That's how it looks:
The screenshot is from very good hands-on review on mobile-review.com (check here for Russian version)
- Contacts management system is also rewritten to accomodate social networks.
Now right in the Contacts app for every person you can see all SMS and e-mails between you, facebook updates and photos of this person. The big downside is that the phone doesn't want to use your Gmail address book by default; when you add new contact, you can choose whether it should be stored on the phone, Google or SIM, and default value is "phone". It is also very buggy; most of contacts don't have photos attached (even though they are set in my Gmail address book), and there are plenty of "Unnamed" contacts on top of the list. It doesn't have any way (apparently) to sort the contacts by "popularity". Nice touch: after incoming call from unknown number, pop-up suggests you to add a new contact.
- Dialer is very nice.
It allows you to choose contacts by using quasi-T9; e.g. to call Sheldon you'll type "742" and it will filter the contacts whose first letter is one of "pqrs", second is one of "ghi" and so on. Much easier than using full qwerty onscreen keyboard.
- The desktop is divided into 5 virtual screens, not 3 like generic Android.
More space for shortcuts and widgets - and many widgets are full-screen.
- HTC widgets are very nice.
E.g. full-screen Twitter gadget, Music player gadget and so on; it is much easier to switch between gadgets with a swipe of the finger rather than open up an app with a shortcut. With all the slowness, if you are on the home screen, switching between screens and gadgets is instant.
- Music player has a filter by composers!
Very rare feature for mobile players and very useful for Classic music lovers. Also, there are no problems with encoding of tags. The only not so nice thing is that it seems to be unable to load album imagery.
- Social features seem to be unfinished and rusty.
E.g. you can set up only three types of accounts: Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Clearly not enough for me. There is a separate app for Twitter but none for Facebook. Facebook experience is scattered across device: you can see per-person Facebook info in their contact cards, and you can see your Inbox somewhere (I don't even remember where anymore), but not your news feed. On the contrary, all twitter activity is inside an app (and gadget), but you can't see it per-contact. The app doesn't show the usernames and userpics - you won't believe it, but it is true - it just shows you the stream of latest tweets and you won't have a clue who wrote what. Twitter gadget shows usernames and userpics but lacks a "refresh" button, and poses as "web" client on updates.
- Russian UI is unfinished.
There are English strings here and there. Is it an issue specific to this firmware image?
- Camera doesn't work.
Every time I start Camera app it crashes. This is clearly a specific issue of this image on my Magic.
- The default setup is strange.
E.g. there are Stocks and Weather apps pre-installed, but there is no Google search gadget on the home screen.
- Flash doesn't work.
I didn't investigate it deeper, but Flash was supposed to work on Hero and apparently it doesn't.
Update: someone posted a video of Hero UI running on Magic.
![[info]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tusVEin7MyOTsgro-OUYnk8zVZMosQRntnb7mP_Hw1AbysWcg68OGMpDsg9VgoEMkPo1IwW2JSnSa8maN2X85DtpqErPoEKnLbAMSr2ay0TA=s0-d){kind=small}
My roommate is using the Fatal1ty firmware and it seems that one is more polished, responsive and has a working (albeit buggy) Camera app :)
The downside - no Russian, but he doesn't need it that much.
Thanks, zerolab. I tried to install Fatal1ty ROM but it didn't start for me :(.
it depends on what board you have. the original Fatal1ty ROM is for 32b (which is the 192MB RAM one) and will not work with 32a (which is the 288MB RAM one).
Here are some links to the ROMs for the 2 board versions.
32B (192MB ram):
original Fatal1ty: http://tinyurl.com/Fatal1ty-Hero-Full-v1-4-zip
32A (288MB ram):
Fatal1ty, modded: http://thephishing.net/RogersRoms/Fatal1ty_Hero-Full_v1.4-ROGERS-signed.zip
[QUOTE]..The rooting method is the same, but you will need a different rooted recovery for PVT 32A and PVT 32B.
Reason :
PVT 32A : 288MB RAM / Qualcomm MSM7200a
PVT 32B : 192MB RAM / Qualcomm MSM7201a
I guess that because of the different Qualcomm chip (and board) they will need different drivers so also stuff inside the kernel.
I noticed that I could run a PVT 32B ROM (like the vodafone ROM or ION ROM) on a PVT 32A, but this gives problems with the camera and wifi, so probably a change is needed in the kernel to support these things. Running a PVT 32A ROM on a PVT 32B doesn't seem to work at all unless you change things in the kernel."[/QUOTE]
If it still doesn't work, I can give you my roommate's contacts so that he can explain more about the process (I remember he also had some trouble the first time :)
He's saying that his 32A also feels somewhat slowish, but not as you described it
thanks. I have 32B but the original ROM doesn't work for me.
I have posted a question with stack trace on xda developers forum, hopefully someone will answer.
video looks great) but after your 13 clauses i feel myself safely with my iphone in the pocket)) is that final release of os?
kirik17: it was comparison of Hero UI vs. generic Android UI. Android vs. iPhone comparisons are elsewhere, and it is absolutely obvious that iPhone doesn't stand any chance :).
I don't know how final this version is.
Мой английский не очень хорош, потому напишу на русском, если не возражаете.
У меня закралось сомнение по поводу первого пункта. Читал уже несколько отзывов о медлительности Hero, интернет-издания тоже не остались в стороне. Так вот, получается, дело в ПО от HTC. Раз на "слабом" Magic родной Android демонстрирует отменную отзывчивость.
@Dr.AKULAvich:
к сожалению, в этой статье онлайнера отсутствуют ссылки на источники (например, на статью на Engadget). Но вообще - неожиданно. Надеюсь, что такие отзывы подвигнут HTC на выпуск телефонов с более сильными процессорами.
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