Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brianna minimun from pocketnow.com and this is an overview of the experience of the HTC Hero we're gonna go through the Sense UI that HTC is brought in addition we're going to talk about the Android experience and how it's different than other phone operating systems now in future videos we're gonna drill into the web browser take a closer look at them the application store they call it the market plus compare it side-by-side to other mobile phone platforms such as Windows Mobile and iPhone but in this video we're just going to take a overview of how the phone actually functions and works so let's get started I'm going to press the power button and immediately we're taken to this unlock screen which is pretty useful it shows us the time the date unfortunately not next appointment we get a preview of any message that we have such as an SMS or a missed call down here at the bottom it says hello it's an SMS now I really like the way that the hero unlocks the screen it's just by a swipe downwards with your thumb the reason I like this so much compared to say the iPhone where you have to position your thumb right in a certain area slide to the right or even windows mobile 6.5 where you have to go to the top of the screen to slide over the lock bar is because you really don't have to be precise you can unlock your phone without looking when you're walking down the street and you're not really paying attention to your phone so just a quick swipe of your thumb and you are to the homescreen interface now we've talked about in a previous video and I'll put a link up on this video how the whole widget based interface works you can add and remove widgets you can have up to seven screens of different widgets you can even download additional widgets for example this battery meter does not come stock but I've added it which i think is a nice little addition so let's talk about how you actually access programs in Android on the HTC Hero now like the iPhone you always have to go back to the main screen in order to access programs which is a bit unfortunate whereas in Windows Mobile we can go up to the Start menu to your recently used program list and just tap on any of the recently used programs and jump right into it now Android does do multitasking unlike the iPhone and like Windows Mobile it actually keeps applications open at one time it intelligently closes applications based on how much RAM that you have so you're gonna notice if I open an application and go back to it it opens up very fast it doesn't have to reload it saves the state the application was in which is really important if you're doing something in an application so any way to access programs on the hero you tap this a button in the bottom left corner you get a list of all your programs now unfortunately there's no real way to organize or group these programs out of the box and it can become a very long list of programs fortunately like a desktop computer Mac or even a Windows computer you can take an icon let's take chess tap it and bring it on to the desktop or if you want to call it the desktop it's really the home screen that way you can quickly get access to the programs that you use most and you can also have you know many different panels of icons available so that is how you get to the programs from the main screen now there's a really intelligent notification system and Android and this isn't unique to the HTC Hero other Android devices has this as well if you pull down the window shape you get a list of all of your notifications in one screen now the reason that this is quite cool is because your phone is always trying to tell you something you have new email new SMS a missed call or perhaps you're using a Twitter application that ties into this notification system it'll it'll alert you when you have new tweets or if you're using perhaps a stock program that is trying to alert you when a certain stock reaches a certain price that functionality exists that capability is there in Android so of course we can just go to any of these notifications and just tap on them to drill right into that particular notification area so really interesting also you get sometimes a preview of a message if you get an SMS and you are currently in another program you'll often get a little scrolling message at the top that'll give you a preview of what the person said to you and then you just pull down the notification shade and you action on it right there now let's go into a few programs again we're going to drill into more programs specifically later like the web browser but for now let's just poke around and kind of get used to how the whole Android interface is laid out let's start off with let's say what's going to the calculator keep it simple now in Android and it's an attempt to save screen space they've really hidden most of the menu items so in order to change a setting you have to click on the menu button down here and then you'll get the any available settings that are available I think this is actually pretty cool because it saves on screen space but simultaneously because the menu items aren't on the screen to begin with there's always an extra key press that you have to do to bring up the menu items in fact for the whole system-wide settings you have to press the menu button and then you go into settings and now we go into system settings one of the biggest problems with how the settings are laid out in Android is that they're not graphical based there's no icon next to it so if I'm very very quickly trying to change a Wi-Fi setting or trying to change the wallpaper I actually have to read all the text that I see here whereas in Windows Mobile or an iPhone or other operating systems you can quickly glance and see the little icon that you're looking for and drill right into it it's very very text-based and Android when you go into the settings and the second screen is the same and here is scenes we've we've sought we've seen that in in a previous video and so through here you can change typical things right go to wireless controls you can change Wi-Fi what Wi-Fi network you're on turn on airplane mode pair Bluetooth headset or hands-free kit change your mobile network settings and by the way I had to add the an access point for AT&T it didn't come with that information out of the box it didn't auto configure itself to AT&T and we put a post up on pocket now that shows you how to configure for AT&T so let's go back and as you can see an Android to go back to the previous screen you press the back button now it doesn't work like Windows Mobile non-touchscreen where it will go back to the previous program then to the previous program it will only go back to the previous screen within the same program that you're in so we can go back again back again and eventually we are back to the main screen if we press back again nothing happens because we are where we started in that program now let's go into the mail application and talk about what that looks so if we tap on any message it will open up in a new screen look at the look at the lag do you see the lag right there that's one of the biggest problems with the with the whole HTC Hero and Sense UI is that it's quite laggy and slow at times especially when open an email something that should be rocket fest now something that's reminiscent of touchflo 3d from Windows Mobile devices are these buttons on the bottom watch this this is look familiar it's right out of touch flow 3d the email application is really cool because what it does is it actually sorts by certain characteristics so this is my plain inbox if I go to conversations it will actually group email conversations by you know it'll it'll actually show me threaded email so I can keep track of you know five conversations in in five different areas rather than having to look through fifteen different emails so very nice we can go to messages that are flagged and then we can go to messages that have email that have attachments on them so this touchflo 3d kind of interface carries over to other parts so if i pull up a contact card let me take it off the screen we get HTC's unified communication view and you saw this in Windows Mobile in touch flow 3d the idea is that when you look at somebody's contact card you can reference quite quickly whether you've had any SMS conversations with them any email conversations with them if they've got any Facebook updates if they have any picture updates from Facebook or Flickr and you can see their call history all in one screen so that you don't have to kind of dig through a million different places to find out what you've said to a particular person so that's come over from Windows Mobile and it's a really great concept to have on a on a phone so let's talk about the on-screen keyboards because obviously the hero doesn't have a slide-out keyboard like the g1 or other mobile devices so the on-screen keyboards are very important fortunately HTC really knows a lot about on-screen keyboards by now this device has a capacitive touch screen display so think about the keyboard that comes on a device like the Touch HD or the touch diamond2 or even the touch pro2 or you can go back to the HTC touch pro or even the touch diamond2 understand how good the keyboards are so I'm gonna try to type something out here and it's kind of a weird angle so so it uses t9 to guess what you're trying to say you don't have to be exactly precise just like on the iPhone or other on-screen keyboards out there now there is a version in landscape so let me flip it over and it kind of takes a minute which is one of the problems with the which the hero and then you get a much much larger on-screen keyboard you also get a little bit of a haptic feedback when you type so a very very good on-screen keyboard because the screen on the hero isn't as sensitive as it is on say the the iPhone typing takes a little bit more getting used to but if you have a concern about getting the hero because it doesn't have a built-in keyboard you don't need to have that concern the keyboards are really fantastic I've gotten much much faster in using it in just a few days and I'm very very comfortable on it especially with the vibration feedback that helps a bit now to hide the keyboard then windows multiple of course you would press the button in the center here but there is no such button so we press the down button and it hides the keyboard off of the screen okay so let's take a look at a few of the programs as we wrap up this video let's go into the calendar and see what that looks like so the calendar again looks very touch flow-3d like we can tap on a date to see what we're doing on that particular date and we get the weather right on one screen which is really great we can go into menu and again remember Andrew it hides all of the settings for a particular screen behind the menu button and we can go to say agenda view a little bit of a delay there's a lot of delays in the hero when you open certain programs and when you jump from screen to screen I don't think it's as fast as it needs to be we can jump around we can make a new appointment we can go into the settings and again just like the settings in the previous screen the whole system-wide settings there very bland and black and white very text-based very half-baked eloped looking some people may appreciate the simplicity but I rather have icons for everything and a better hierarchy so that I can look down the list and not think that everything looks the same at a quick glance so let's go into some other programs let's go into the phone and of course you can access the phone by doing this cost button or by pressing the large phone key here and I'm gonna cover up part of the screen because there are some phone numbers listed up there so if I tap on phone I get this large keypad and let's say you're trying to dial you know Jessica so you would type jess2010 grams real quick and let's go into the YouTube application the YouTube application is not as glamorous as it is on Windows Mobile and iPhone it's very very light and so we can scroll down and see little thumbnails and we can do I will just tap on one of these see what it looks like mean kitty that should be entertaining and we go to landscape and here it is the videos playing we're doing it over Wi-Fi right now so it's downloads pretty fast video quality is quite good that's funny anyway so click the back button to go back and a lot of programs work in landscape the app store works in landscape YouTube does which is good because sometimes you want the option of getting kind of a wide screen view of a certain application if it makes sense in the case of this application I probably have it in portrait because if you go to landscape you get fewer results on the page at once which really doesn't make too much sense so overall I found the experience the user interface and the way that you use the device on the HTC Hero are really Android in general to be kind of a mixed bag there's a lot I like a lot I don't like I like the customizable home screens that allow you to not only have icons on there but you can have widgets next appointment stocks all kinds of different things that you keep an eye on on a regular basis I like the unbox screen you can unlock it without even looking at the screen I'll really like the notification window shade because within seconds you can access anything that needs your attention all in one place I also like how applications can actually tap into the note vacation window shade so that Twitter for example can tell you when you have new tweets what I don't like about Android and the hero is how you have to go back to the homescreen to open any programs and as you can see I just got a text message and it shows you it right here at the top which is really awesome so to access any program you always have to go back to the home screen and press this up arrow here now Android does have a feature if you tap and hold the home button you get a list of the six recently most used programs and that would be awesome if you could access that in any screen but if we drill into a program tap and hold on the home button it just takes you back home and then you can open it again Android can multitask it leaves several programs open but if you can't switch easily from app to app then really what good is multitasking so really in the end there are three things from keeping this device from being my daily driver one it doesn't have us 3G which will obviously change probably in the near future I'm - it needs a little bit more horsepower there's a delay when when you have a lot of widgets on the home screens or when you are trying to bring up an email and number three I love to find a way to multitask to switch from app to app within seconds I'm sure there's some kind of third-party application that exists for this and when I find it I'll make a video about it so that we can we can have that feature available but coming up soon we're going to talk about more specifically certain parts of the Android operating system such as the marketplace and the web browser we'll be back soon with more that's it for now