Gadgetory

hey everybody it's joe from pocketnow.com and i've got a little bit of a treat for you today this is a HTC sprint hero and the problem with this phone it's a gorgeous spoon but it's stuck up with android 1.5 so a lot of the apps that I've been showing you in my previous videos just aren't available they don't run on it so sprint has promised us that they are going to release an update to android 2.1 for this really really nice phone but we haven't seen it yet in fact we've had lots of rumors and lots of Miss dates they just say that they'll get it to a sometime in first half of 2010 the first half is quickly going away and we just missed another rumor to update window but as part of that somebody found a leaked version of the ROM and I just happen to get my hands on it so what I'd like to do is show you how to install that on your HTC sprint hero so let's go do that okay the first thing that you're going to need in this process is the HTC sync software which you can get by going to HTC com you'll want to navigate into the support section and then into product support for the HTC sprint hero you can see the page here on screen see there are two downloads one is the user manual which if you've lost yours there you go and the other one is the HTC Sync update version 2.0 point 33 that lets you do some synchronization and some other stuff that we're not going to worry about but the main thing we need out of that is the drivers so I've gone ahead and installed that on the machine and I'm going to plug in the phone here and right away you'll see HTC sync up here USB connected so we've got all of that done that's great the first time you plug this in you're going to have to go through quite a bit of a process while it goes through and detects all the drivers took me about five maybe eight minutes to do that but once you've done that you're great the next thing that we need to do is run the update which in this case is the ruu hero sprint 22 765 1.5 are something i'll have a link to that in the article notes so you can find where to get that now this is an unofficial rom it is not supported by Sprint but it is signed by Sprint so this is as far as you can tell exactly one hundred percent legitimate they just decided to pull it before they release it while they went through and did some other stuff rumor has it that was so that they could pull some tethering capabilities out of it so this might actually be a better run than the one that they finally release when they do that so we're going to go ahead and run this and Windows is going to tell me that it needs UAC or permission to run that in administrator mode go ahead and say yes to that it'll run through the first time now it's very important that you have a good charge on your battery when you start this process rom flashings very tricky you don't want to run out of juice in the middle of it luckily we're getting power through the USB cable as well so we're going to let this turn for just a little while say we understand and agree to all the stuff in the readme next and turn on your Android phone connect your pc using the USB cable provided we've done that disable the standby and hibernation mode on the pc all you've done that and make sure the battery power is more than thirty percent we're going to hope that's the case we will check the box and we will hit next verifying the information on the Android phone please wait ok and we're going to say next continue the image version here is 1.5 6.65 1.2 and we are going to click the update button ok the current version it says is 1.5 6.65 1.2 so that last screen was identifying what version is currently on the phone the new version is going to be 2.2 7.65 1.5 and we'll hit next continue because that looks right during the update process the following things are going to occur the android phone will be prepared for the update process the progress information will be displayed both on the pc screen and on the android phone and the update completed screen will be displayed on the pc so we'll say next to that it reboots the phone up into the bootloader which should take minute or so and as you can hear it's loading up some additional drivers the android bootloader interface just installed successfully so that's good and at this point it's sending the ROM over to the phone this is actually downloading that ROM image onto the phone itself and it says that this process will take about 10 minutes so I'm going to cut right here because I don't want you to sit and look at the HTC logo for 10 minutes and we'll be right back when there is more cool stuff to show you okay so after about three minutes we've gotten to the point where it's updating the signature on the phone and the status bar which before filled the entire bar is now over to this point so it cycled all the way through once and now it's to the next stage and it's showing us how far through that process we are again we're about three minutes into the flashing process right now it's updating the radio and we now have a status bar on the phone itself okay at this point we've just passed one hundred percent some user data was updated on the phone I don't know exactly what that is right now but we now have and congratulations screen says the rom update has been completed we're going to go ahead and click on finish and over on the phone itself you'll see that the HTC logo is up like I've said in previous videos first boots sometimes can okay so what I've done is I've gone into the settings screen specifically into the software information you can see we're running android 2.1 update one with a baseband version of two point 42.0 1.04 point 27 kernel version is two point six point two nine dash be c0 d to c FF whatever all that means and just a whole bunch of cool stuff browser version is 3.1 primary version 2.2 0 prl is 606 64 and that I hope is enough to convince you that we're running android 2.1 on this phone some things that i can't show you there are no live wallpapers that come with this we come in and I keep forgetting this is a sense device so we get to the wallpaper from going to menu in wallpaper but you'll notice we now can apply wallpaper to the home screen add to the lock screen I don't know if that's in addition or not we have an option for photos and HTC wallpapers but no live wallpapers that's simply because this doesn't have the 1 gigahertz processor that the newer Android two devices have like the Nexus One and the desire and the HTC incredible it's a little bit slower so they've taken some things out that's the first one the second thing is and I don't know where they have filed this away is over here if we look at the photo gallery the photo gallery is just the stock gallery it's not the 3d gallery which theoretically means that you're going to have the full color photos and not the 16-bit photos that you have on the other version as well so those are the only two things that I'm aware of that this version of android 2.1 doesn't have that other 2.1 versions do have as you can tell from here this is really really snappy it's really quick I it still looks gorgeous it still has that HTC Sense UI on top of it and overall I'm really impressed with it one thing that I do want to check here before we go and that's pinch-to-zoom because I know a lot of you are interested in that so let's see if we have pinch to zoom here in the browser and look at that pinch to zoom just like that beautiful you also have pinch to zoom on the home screen where you can pinch to zoom and see all 2 4 5 6 7 screens right there select which one you want and it animates back again pinch to zoom that in thumbnail view or zoom out just by tapping so really really cool your first look at android 2.1 running on the HTC sprint this is not an unlocked phone it has not been rooted this is an official yet leaked rom and there you go so for pocketnow.com I'm Joe Levi