The indecision continued for a long time after my first full blog post. I spent a lot of time reading reviews, forum posts, bug reports and so on.
In the end the decision came down to cost, operating system and availability. The iPhone was ruled out because I wasn’t happy with the outlay required to get the device. The HD2 fell by the wayside because I had a brief experience of Windows 6.5 on my O2 XDA and because the phone is still an absolute pig to source in stores.
I went with the HTC Hero, specifically the T-Mobile G2 Touch version of it which I acquired free on a £30 18 month contract direct from the store.
The specs
I’m not going to go through too detailed a list of specs for the phone, these are available from the official HTC website.
Opening the box
The ‘exclusive’ black handset is minimally packaged in a T-Mobile branded box. As well as the handset, the box contains a USB cable, a charger with a USB port onboard, headphones with a built in but minimal remote control and a battery. There is little in the way of documentation, most of this is stored on PDA file on the included 2gb SD card.
The handset
The T-Mobile Touch G2
The phone is dominated by the large glass screen which sits flush with the front panel. Six hardware buttons sit on the prominent chin at the bottom of the device, along with a track ball. The buttons are initially a little oddly placed, but use of them soon becomes second nature. I would have liked the Search and Back button to have been slightly better placed though as I find myself struggling to bend my thumb back far enough to reliably hit them. The track ball is a lovely feature and is a dream to use. T-Mobile branding on the hardware is limited to a logo at the top of the screen.
The back of the phone is covered with a rubberised material which stands up to
The back of the handset
scratches well. There is a hole for a lanyard as well as one for the speaker and a central camera lens.
Side buttons are limited to a comparitively massive volume controller which I frequently accidentally hit while on the fly. The only other features are a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the device and a USB connection on the bottom. The USB connection is identical to that on earlier HTC devices such as my O2 XDA and easily accepts a mini-usb cable, despite the phone actually coming with HTC’s odd shaped connector. I tested this with an XDA remote control/microphone and it worked fine.
The handset won’t win any beauty awards, but its retro looks have grown on me in the last few weeks, the prominent chin is actually rather nice to hold.
A first look at Android
A main factor in my decision was the inclusion of the Android operating system. The G2 Touch runs on a custom T-Mobile version of Android 1.5 (Cupcake), which at the time of purchase has an update on T-Mobile’s website promising bug fixes. I took a moment to download the update, plugged the phone in to my laptop and immediately hit problem number one. The sync software provided by Google wouldn’t work. Eventually I traced this to a known issue with Windows 7 64-bit and acquired more drivers online. After another 30 minutes and a few changed settings on the phone I managed to get the update done and could finally ‘move in’.
First impressions of Android were very good, the phone asked me to enter my Google account details and also allowed me to add my Hotmail e-mail address, this can be checked regularly as it was on my Windows Mobile phone. The phone also quickly located me and downloaded weather updates with no problems.
I managed to sync my contacts via Outlook 2007 and then found the excellent syncronisations with Facebook accounts on the phone. Never will I forget a birthday again! Hopefully… The phone also easily synced with my Google mail account.
The capacitive screen is a new feature to me, it is very sensitive when compared to a resistive screen. No more can I brush against the screen without worrying that the phone won’t pick up the touch. This nearly landed me in hot water when I accidentally hit the ‘Loud Cat Screech’ button on a sound board app I had downloaded then started in the office. One red face later and the phone found itself turned off.
I am slightly disappointed by the amount of apps currently supporting multitouch, probably the only one being the browser. I hope more software will use this feature in future.
Text entry on the keyboard is responsive and the haptic feedback gives a reassuring shake to notify you of a successful key press. Turning the phone on it’s side reveals a larger keypad allowing two thumb typing, ideal for my sausage thumbs. The keyboard will also best guess your text entry, miss spell a word and the phone will suggest to correct alternative
Sense UI
HTC’s Sense UI is a breeze to use and adds some great features to the front end. Android’s front end relies on a Widget system, many of which are unique to the HTC device. I’m really happy to have a phone which intigrates Twitter so well, the Peep Twitter client has some really good features and has satisfied me after using the excellent PockeTwit on Windows Mobile. There are also a multitude of clocks, weather, stock market, text, mail, photo widgets… The list goes on.
Making a call
Oddly, I’m not big on phone calls. I’ve used the handset to make one call so far. The call quality was excellent and my wife reported hearing me nice and clearly at the other end. There is a speaker function, although I found it awkward to access. When activated that also sounded loud and lear.
Browsing
The built in web browser works excellently. It happily renders full size webpages with few issues. The multi-touch screen allows pinch zooming and the browser will then rearrange text to fit in the window. This is ideal for reading large bodies of text.
Market
The Android Market was another deciding factor in my choice and so I was quite eager to check it out. Sure enough, it’s
Android Market
absolutely crammed with fart soundboards and tower defence games. It’ll take me years to sort through the lot.
In the meantime I’ve found the following apps really useful:
Twidroid – Although Peep is a great twitter client to begin with, I soon found it slightly lacking. Fortunately Twidroid picks up where it left off. It allows full landscape browsing and has a great intuitive front end.
Layar – An augmented reality browser, this software uses a combination of GPS, the compass to allow you to display useful things like restaurant locations, twitter users (only those who share location) or even local landmarks.
The Schwartz Unleashed – a virtual lightsabre using the accelerometer. Sometimes you have to have a bit of fun.
UK Traffic – Quite explanatory, the app shows current traffic conditions.
Advanced Task Manager Free – a simple app allowing you to easily close running applications. It’s quite surprising how many programs you can run on the phone before it starts to slow, but this app will quickly kill everything you don’t need.
Satellite Navigation
With Google’s navigation system being a feature exclusive to 1.6 Android systems (The Hero will skip right to 2.1), I decided to go with my old favourite CoPilot. Version 8 is readily available in the Market and cost me around £25 including UK maps. I’ve relied on version 7 many times in the past and Version 8 adds a few nice features including junction mapping on motorways and all new updated maps.
Battery Life
This is where the G2 Touch falls down a little so far, although I have only had the phone for approximately four weeks and in that time I’ve occasionally struggled to get through the day. As it stands I’m getting about 8 hours of moderate to heavy use out of the handset. This is two to four hours less than my 18 month old O2 XDA. I never expect to see more than a day of use out of my handsets as I’m quite a heavy user, but with this phone I frequently find myself sneaking a charge from my work laptop. All this despite me turning off wifi, bluetooth and GPS access.
In conclusion I am really enjoying the phone, definately in the honeymoon period but already there are far fewer annoyances than on a Windows Mobile device. I’ll be sure to revisit this review over the next 18 months. I also hope to comment on a few of the apps I’ve found to be useful.
