Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and in this video we're gonna show you the browsing experience on the HTC Hero then in a few minutes we're going to compare the browsing experience the rendering fidelity and speed with Windows Mobile and also iPhone so that's coming up in a few minutes but first let's talk about the browsing experience on the HTC Hero and let's get a little bit closer in on the screen ok so right now we are over Wi-Fi and you'll notice that I also have Opera Mini loaded on here this is from the market app store on Android and the reason I have that is because this device doesn't have us 3G so it really helps to have a web browser that uses server-side rendering to kind of increase page load times it would be great if Skyfire had a version for Android but they don't yet Skyfire does the same thing as Opera Mini but I think a little bit better so let's go into the web browser on the hero and the web browser on the hero makes really good use of screen space it always goes fullscreen much like most of the applications and Android and to get to any sort of function you have to press the Menu key doing so and right now we're in landscape it looks like let's flip it back over doing so will bring up the address bar plus some buttons that we're gonna explore later so let's go to a website let's go to pocketnow.com and we'll see how long it takes it's already coming up here and it's done it was about 15 20 seconds which isn't too bad a little bit slow and as you can see it's doing the it's doing flash up here and just like you saw before we can rotate to landscape although it takes a little bit too long the hero does have multi-touch so you can pinch to zoom out although it's strange that it starts zoomed in it should start actually zoomed out a bit more and of course you can flick downwards like so and what you don't get as seen with other mobile browsers is the grid pattern if you flip down really fast so it has really good rendering capability in terms of refreshing the page you can also use the trackball if you want to flick up forward kind of makes for a nice scroll actually and if we want to zoom in we can DoubleTap on a column and it will resize the column although it kind of fakes it this should be a bit wider and we can zoom a little bit more we can move it around on the page and see websites just like they appear on the desktop now if we go down here and hit the menu button we can do a few things for example we can go to the selection of Windows right now if two windows open you kind of get this Cover Flow like look to the different windows that are open and here we are on a YouTube page and I'm gonna play this video which is obviously flash based and and I say the hero sort of does flash because on flash banners and certain flash applications it will work but in the case of hulu hulu does not work here on we weren't on a youtube page and we couldn't get the streaming youtube video right on the page actually what happens is it links to the YouTube application kind of like the iPhone does with YouTube videos so let's go and open up a new window and go to a different website so we can just press the plus button here now let's go to cnet.com see how that looks and so it brings up the keyboard as the dot-com built in and we'll hit go let's do landscape okay it's done already it looks like we have the mobile version of CNET right now and so there's not really much to zoom out on we can tap along to reviews and again we got the mobile version so it's a lot faster than the full desktop version but we can go down here to view full see net site so see what it looks like on the hero here we are on the full see net site and let's see how it looks sumed out still loading a little bit it looks pretty good we get the flash animation we get all of the text aligned the way it should be we can pinch to zoom or double tap to zoom in so pretty so pretty good in terms of rendering fidelity let's go into the menu and see what kind of options that we have so we can go back it's kind of unfortunate the back button isn't built right into the screen it's great that the Android browser takes advantage of the entire screen but again you have to drill into a setting or the menu button to do really anything to go back or to press refresh or this becomes a stop button if it's loading the page so we can make a new bookmark or we can go to more and there are some items we have here let's go to settings see what kind of settings there on the web browser and change the home page by default it's HTC comm you can choose to load images on web pages if you want to save on data and make it come up faster and block popup windows you can turn on or off the mobile view if you want to have pages load faster enable JavaScript new windows open behind the current one or if they open the current one change the text size and it actually may make sense to make it smaller so that you see more on the screen at one time if your eyes can handle it and then clear cookie data clear cache it'll save passwords and all that sort of advanced stuff that you get on a desktop browser change the cache size enable plugins although I'm not sure of any plugins that work with this browser I'm sure there are some in the application store and you can reset everything back to default okay so we're gonna try to pull off an amazing feat here by getting all three of these devices to launch Engadget at the same time got the Omni of two running Windows Mobile using from mobile 9.5 the iphone 3gs running Safari and the HTC Hero running the Android browser so let's try to do this at the same exact time not making any promises let's see what we can do here okay ready set go and they're off nice okay the iPhone 3GS looks like it's ahead and it won iPhone 3GS 1 followed by stay here I'm gonna win or at the omnia it's close call progress bars are still loading they're much further behind the iPhone 3GS leaving some final elements in the page here Oh second place omnia coming up in last place still not done here it goes so let's move around the webpages see kind of how they look notice how the hero starts in a zoomed in position and then the and then the iPhone 3GS kind of is very much zoomed out and then the omnia is kind of halfway there it's got part of the page there it may be hard to tell but the AMOLED screen on the omnia 2 is really showing its stuff right now it's just beautiful with the blacks and how crisp everything is so let's kind of move down the page and see what it's like to just flick down the page so it looks like the omnia has a problem with redrawing the page if you move down too fast the iPhone 3GS moves a little bit slower but it doesn't have the problem with the checkerboard and nor does the HTC Hero which doesn't have as smooth scrolling as the iPhone 3GS but it can actually go a little bit faster so let's let's zoom into a column I'm gonna zoom out on all of these and for this well we're already zoomed out let's find the story at the top and zoom into the text all the way up here by double tapping on the entry here we are so I'm gonna double tap here see what it looks like so cut it wraps the text but doesn't weird way the iPhone 3GS formats it perfectly the omnia two kind of does it very similarly to the hero it doesn't actually it wraps the column in a smaller area than than the iPhone so let's zoom out again and let's go to another webpage okay next up we've yeah who financed so we've got them loaded up here and we're gonna hit go try to do it at the same time here one two three go there we go and they're off iPhone 3GS is looks like it's coming up first yep its first hero is the omnia - may actually beat the hero Wow almost the same time to hear on the omnia - so again let's take a look at look at how these three devices render Yahoo Finance so again the iPhone 3GS starts from a very zoomed out position the samsung omnia does kind of halfway zoomed out but it's not completely zoomed out and on the hero it starts in the upper left corner of the site which actually doesn't really make a lot of sense so we can pinch to get the the outside view so let's just scroll down the page do a little flick and see how it works it goes right to the bottom it's a little bit smoother here and it went right down without having any checkerboard now let's do a test of the screen rotation in Yahoo Finance now turning over three devices at the same time it's probably going to be very difficult so we're gonna do these two at a time first we'll compare the omnia with the iPhone so okay so the iPhone is a bit faster and turn it back over okay let's do that again I don't think that was fair I didn't turn it completely over and Sagami is definitely slower than the iPhone let's compare the omnia to the hero and screen rotation speed and so no it's hard to see at this angle it ready go well the hero went very very fast the omnia 2 is slower and let's compare the hero with the iPhone and the screen rotation speed test so let's flip over now faster on the iPhone 3GS faster again just faster by half a second not very significant the hero has pretty fast screen rotation speed sometimes that half a second feels like a long time so overall the web browser on the HTC Hero is quite good it's not as fast as the iPhone 3GS and it does have some flaws like it starts the page zoomed in instead of zoomed out but it does perform well and it doesn't have the checkerboard pattern that sometimes we find in Opera Mobile 9.5 it doesn't have full flash support it kind of has half flash support it doesn't let you look at hula videos or certain other video sites but most of the mobile browsers like you know Opera Mobile 9.5 and Safari on the iPhone don't support flash anyway so that's not really expected so that's it on the web browsing experience on the HTC Hero we'll be back soon to talk about the market and the whole application buying process on the HTC Hero we'll be back soon with more