HTC Hero Launches in India

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Shripad said:
The only real con is FM. Other than that, most of the things have been sorted out. Lag is taken care off with new leaked official and also custom roms, Sense UI is arguably the best UI on any phone at the moment ( Webos is only other one I can think off ), Camera unit on this phone is surprisingly good just like Touch Diamond 2.

Agreed, when it launched it had its own problems, but things have changed for better. This is why I admire HTC. They managed to bring something to android that they managed with their WM devices, and thats the great community support in addition to their own work.
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how to justify phone with such price tag and have following cons

No video-call camera
No FM radio
No camera flash, dedicated shutter key or lens cover
Camera features are a bit outdated
CIF@15fps video recording (352 x 288 pixels) is below par
No TV-out port
No voice dialing
Flash video playback is laggy
Somewhat limited 3rd party software availability
No DivX or XviD video support or a third-party application to play that
Poor MP4 playback performance - barely watchable in video resolution above QVGA
No Bluetooth file transfers (not without rooting)
No proper file manager (not without rooting)

Along with this dont forget that HTC is the brand which have awful resale value
 
delguy19 said:
how to justify phone with such price tag and have following cons

No video-call camera

No FM radio

No camera flash, dedicated shutter key or lens cover

Camera features are a bit outdated

CIF@15fps video recording (352 x 288 pixels) is below par

No TV-out port

No voice dialing

Flash video playback is laggy

Somewhat limited 3rd party software availability

No DivX or XviD video support or a third-party application to play that

Poor MP4 playback performance - barely watchable in video resolution above QVGA

No Bluetooth file transfers (not without rooting)

No proper file manager (not without rooting)

Along with this dont forget that HTC is the brand which have awful resale value
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Not sure where you are getting all this info from :)

I mean what phone are you using with good Flash support atm? None of the other Android phones have decent Flash support because it won't be fully released until the end of the year or so and will be incorporated into 2.0 before the iphone has it (if it ever gets it) but Flash 9 is better than no Flash.

There are plenty of good file managers for non-rooted phone like Linda and Astro and OI just to name few.

I mean it's a phone for crying out loud... you want tv out, go get a pmp :P

What 3rd party software are you talking about, the Market? Already 1000's of apps there that work just fine on Hero.

And voice dialing ... wow!! I am so sorry you might have to actually dial a phone number.. :bleh: anyway it'll be released in the next major update.

OMG.. I can't go on with the rest of this list :D.............

Mp4 video .. works just fine and ok.. so no xvid/divx, yet none of the Android phones have it and I don't think even the iphone has it (does it?)

There is a hack for rooted phone to play FLAC.

Obviously this is still a developing platform but the Hero is a great phone and will take nice advantage of the improvements coming in 1.6 (Donut) and then 2.0(Eclair)

I would say that anyone interested in Hero with Android should have some inkling that this is an immature platform and not purchase a phone if they are not prepared to deal with it. We are all techheads here, and this is why we hang out in the forum to begin with, I think it is the perfect platform for many of the tech's that likes to frequent TE.

There is always an iphone if you want a closed-source mature OS but personally I like the cutting edge it is more fun and more interesting. :D
 
^^ he copied cons list from gsmareana :P ( and they did the review when they received the phone from HTC before its actual launch and before the updates on stock rom :P. Even though they are currently best or second best when it comes to phone reviews, their reviews are always lack the look from techi's POV, they dont even bother clicking images with custom settings of a camera phone to show users what the best that phone can do and always click at default settings. See how grainy the Omnia HD pics are there, and I have had a chance to handle HD recently, and it can shoot wayyyy better pics than what they show ).

What many people forget about the android platform ( and WM platform ), thats the stock condition of the OS / firmware on these phone is not the end of the world, it does not even give an idea about what the capabilities of it will be 6 months down the line.
 
Shripad said:
^^ he copied cons list from gsmareana :P ( and they did the review when they received the phone from HTC before its actual launch and before the updates on stock rom :P. Even though they are currently best or second best when it comes to phone reviews, their reviews are always lack the look from techi's POV, they dont even bother clicking images with custom settings of a camera phone to show users what the best that phone can do and always click at default settings. See how grainy the Omnia HD pics are there, and I have had a chance to handle HD recently, and it can shoot wayyyy better pics than what they show ).

What many people forget about the android platform ( and WM platform ), thats the stock condition of the OS / firmware on these phone is not the end of the world, it does not even give an idea about what the capabilities of it will be 6 months down the line.
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Well yes i copied from gsmarena and if want check any other review site also which says same about hero. and looks whos talking about 6months. have you ever use ur phone for 6 months ???? i seen you selling ur phone from last 3 months and making 2 sales thread and still unable to sell it nice man good post..
 
delguy19 said:
Well yes i copied from gsmarena and if want check any other review site also which says same about hero. and looks whos talking about 6months. have you ever use ur phone for 6 months ???? i seen you selling ur phone from last 3 months and making 2 sales thread and still unable to sell it nice man good post..
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Actually I did sell my phone (right here on TE, and that was Touch Diamond 2 windows mobile which basically had identical hardware to Hero. I buy knowing very well that there is less demand of such phones and is ready to wait until the right buyer comes along ). And I moved from Windows Mobile to Windows mobile and then finally now to Android. ( 2-3 year old HTC phones still get looks, functionality of modern phones thanks to ROM updates ). Ok maybe I had E71, 5800xm, Diamond and some other phones I cant remember in the middle of all this but well, thats what I do. That does not mean any of these phones were bad. I change for different reason. I have had 2 phone for more than 2-3 years now. 1 has always had 1 windows mobile, and other something else. And now I will have android + something else.

Did you see followup articles on Hero?

Did you see the followup of gizmodo which called this " Ambitious, But Tragically Flawed " in July, and same guy has a followup article and video review saying the "New update changes things".

Have you used any android phone? If yes, you would have known all this. Many limitations can be overcome, phone can be improved. And unlike Nokia, Apple and SE, Windows Mobile and Android users dont have to depend on the parent company to get updates ;)
 
The hero still has a 2 year old MSM7200 series processor and no dedicated 3D H/W. I'd anyday prefer good firmware over good hardware than optimized firmware tweaked to perform on mediocre hardware. Hopefully the next HTC Android phone has

a) TI OMAP 3xxx/Qualcomm Snapdragon
b) WVGA resolution screen (Possible from Android 1.6 onwards due to resolution scaling)
c) Out of the box DivX/Xvid support
d) Camera with a LED flash
 
Actually all HTC phones (including winmo) over last 2 years and the new Android coming like HTC Tattoo have shared same old chip. It began with HTC Diamond( Tytn ii before that had slower clocked 7200), and even latest TP2 / Touch HD, TD all share same basic hardware.

HTC Leo will be first major upgrade for HTC in 2 years. Lets see. Android is more than comfy with current hardware. More wont hurt though.

EDIT : and btw all MSM7200 has 3D acceleration unit built in them. All of them. No exception. There is no support for this under Android at the moment. In fact there is no support for OMAP3530 and PowerVR 3D acceleration in android as well. Its software limitation at the moment. Not hardware.
 
I agree that HTC phones have used the same chip (First 400 Mhz and then 528 Mhz) in a wide range of products. But in 2009 shouldn't they change? ARM11 based solutions are no longer "cutting-edge" for smartphones!

You are perhaps referring to the Qualcomm QDSp5000 and the QDSP4000 DSP's which are part of the MSM7200 SoC as 3D H/W. The chips are present but

a) Their 3D capabilities are only a fraction of what the PowerVR MBX lite (leave alone SGX) can do.

b) Getting the H/W to work has been problematic. Even HTC had lot of issues with their Kaiser handsets before 3D finally got working. So writing an Android driver with such silicon may not be easy.

There is a OMAP Android port that has 3D acceleration and even 720p video decoding support! There are even some youtube videos demo-ing this.
 
Yup, I am aware of its limitation. I had Diamond and TD2, and only thing I ever did close to using its limited hardware acceleration ability on wm was toplay NFS ( thats too mainly because it was fun in the beginning to drive using accelerometer. :P )

^^ and are you talking about Ingenient Beagle board demos?
 
Yeah the beagle board. Btw, Archos also has an Android tablet out there running OMAP3 and doing 720p. They also have announced a new 3.5G "phone tablet" running Android an unspecified 1 Ghz processor (Maybe Hummingbird/Snapdragon?).
 
Yeah read that. Its mostly Snapdragon. HTC might also come out with its own Android version phone based on LEO sometime in Q1 2010. Its a trend with HTC. Now that its confirmed that Leo will sport the Snapdragon, almost all high end offerings after Leo will be based on same hardware :P

Hopefully an android handset based on Leo's hardware comes out soon. Might grab that sometime early next year.
 
The more Android phones/devices that come out on the Market, the better for us as consumers. It will only drive prices down, competition up and technology further ;) and I expect that by mid next year we will be seeing some nice heavyweight devices hitting the stores.
 
Shripad , where did u get the black one from and how much did u have to pay?

been looking all over but seeing only the brown and white everywhere in mumbai

please advise
 
@Sripad, i read in the review at gsmarena that the music quality of this phone is not good also video player is sluggish.....not able to record videos above 15 frames wid quite low resolution.....
I mean the UI is very great to use but why multimedia is bad.....
 
Music playback by default app is basic. Quality is acceptable over headphones. I use PL30, and the loudness and audio quality seems fine.

Video playback was a big issue with stock rom, but its now fixed by Modaco in his custom roms. Plays almost everything flawlessly ( You can use all popular automatic video encoders and use iPhone / iPod touch video setting preset and those will play just fine on Hero ).

Video recording is average at best.
 
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