Alltel HTC Hero First Look

What I Needed Was A Hero


I have gone through many Blackberry Tour 9630's and I was lucky to be able to get an HTC Hero after suffering for months through a device that basically just didn't work consistently or reliably. This is Alltel's first Android device. It is available today, May 20, for Alltel customers in AT&T divested markets, and "soon" for those in ATN divested markets (customers who will be staying Alltel).

I have got sick of waiting for AT&T to come to Montana in hopes of a good phone, and the Hero - while far from perfect - should tide me over easily for a one year contract. Yes, it's already outdated. There is no reason to expect FroYo any time soon, and probably not ever, for the Hero. The essentially identical HTC Hero Android Phone (Sprint) only just recently got the 2.1 (Eclair) update. 2.2 makes the OS faster, offers full flash, and allows app storage on the SD card. More on that in a minute.

Initial Impressions


This phone works great. My wonderful first impression was that once I had Google setup, my contacts and calendar and GMail all worked perfectly. I made sure my contacts were all in my GMail "My Contacts" group and formatted correctly before I got this phone. Everything works great. This is a huge plus, if you are an existing Google services user, nothing could be simpler. Google services work great, too. Google Talk doesn't have any official client for iPhone. It's great on here. Google Voice is totally integrated. All the apps I was hoping for are available on the market, except Square. But that's their fault, it's really too bad though - I was hoping this phone would let me start taking credit card payments. Oh well. The web is fast. Faster on EVDO 3G than my iPod touch rev 2 is even on Wi-Fi connected to 15mbps cable! The signal strength meter means nothing, literally. Actual signal reading is available in status and has no relation to the bars. The phone did drop to 1X randomly at my church, but so did my BlackBerry and so does my aircard. Drops to 1X are common even in strong signal areas on Alltel locally, so I can't fault the phone. There's a few more things I'll talk about here.

Input


Most of you will wonder about how it is to type on a small touchscreen. Eh, okay. Not as good as the iPod touch/iPhone. But not at all bad. You just need to be careful and get used to it. Turning off haptic (vibration) feedback helps a ton. Hearing my phone buzz/shake each time I hit a key does not help anything. Sometimes you miss a letter or the keys take a second to catch up, but it's totally usable - similar to a BlackBerry in terms of ease but not as good as an iPhone.

Speed


Yes, it's slow like you've heard. No, it's not nearly as bad as the BlackBerry Tour. But yes, it's slow. FroYo would help this - probably fix it entirely due to it's new JIT (just-in-time) compiler, but the Hero wasn't on the list of phones HTC announced they'd be releasing FroYo for :( So, yes, it's bad. Not unbearable. Not even as bad as a BlackBerry. But not silky smooth like an iPhone or an HTC incredible. The only place it got REALLY bad (rather than slightly laggy) was when my cousin sent me like 20 MMS messages in a row quickly.

Pictures


The image quality is good for a cell phone but still, obviously, a cell phone. Make no mistake. The files may have 5 million pixels but they're just 5 million cell phone pixels. Still, remember, the best camera is the one you have with you. Sharing and emailing the pictures is a dream. There is a couple seconds of lag to focus, but one of the best camera phones I have seen....

Battery


I have not had this phone long enough to be sure, but a couple hours on Google Talk pretty constantly left me with over half battery. It should get through a day of light to moderate use - lasting at least as long as the BlackBerry I would imagine. I'll update as I learn more.

Conclusion


Based on these first impressions, I'd give this phone a solid four stars. Get Square running on it, and it gets to 4.5 stars. Get FroYo for it and it'll be a solid five stars. A great phone for Alltel, and since it's a 1-year contract (AT&T divested only) you'll be able to get the latest and greatest next summer, maybe even something running Gingerbread. No, it's not a Snapdragon. And no, it's not a super high-res AMOLED screen (it's just a 480*320 pixel LCD like an iPhone [but a hair smaller] - totally adequate for a phone but outdated by today's standards of approximately 200 DPI phone displays). It displays more dithering artifacts than an iPhone too but oh well. It works. It's a great value because of the one-year contracts and outstanding price plans of Alltel, and it's in a totally different league from a BlackBerry... I give it four stars. I'm loving my new phone and am so glad I was able to replace the BlackBerry nightmare! And to close it out, a video:



UPDATE 2 or so:

One more BIG BUG, this one's actually probably in Alltel's network. Alltel will not allow calls to be made with a + in the phone number. This is not a big deal, except that if you link a contact to a Facebook contact that has a + in front of it (as Facebook ASKS you to put in front of your number as that is the proper international dialling format), your contact will have a + in the number with no way to get rid of it except to unlink from Facebook. There's basically four workarounds that I am aware of:

- Unlink that contact from Facebook.
- Add a second phone contact for the person without the +.
- Use Google Voice to call that person (probably breaks M2M and My Circle benefits...)
- Manually dial that person.

One of these should work for you, but it's much better to know about this bug than to be really confused why some calls don't go through when you first run into it.