How to Boost Performance of the HTC Hero and Make the UI Lightning Fast
The new HTC Hero, crowned the best Android based smart phone on the market so far, has been getting quite some attention in the press lately. Unfortunately, many of the initial in-depth reviews and early adopters were complaining about occasional sluggishness of the UI. Otherwise, the verdicts were great for the HTC Hero and it has really been catching up on the iPhone user experience wise with the bonus of multi tasking and running apps in the background.
Anyway, below I’ve summarized a few simple tweaks that you can do to minimize the reported unwanted performance issues and enjoy the new HTC Sense UI even more.
UPDATE 2009-Nov-09: Thanks to a very active and bright open source & HTC Hero hacking community, this post has been heavily shortened linking to new boosting methods resulting in amazing speed improvements.
1) Upgrade the microSD memory card to a “Class 6” or faster
A lot of users have reported less sluggishness when upgrading the micro SD memory card from the slower, 1-2 GB memory card provided with the phone. Buying a faster memory card will eliminate a great deal of the UI choppiness. I recommend spending a few extra bucks on adding some gigabytes at the same time as you’ll quickly run out of space if you’re a trigger happy photo shooter and use your HTC Hero as your default MP3 player. Currently, most value for money is provided by either 8 GB or 16 GB microSDHC Class 6 memory cards.
2) Install the Modaco Custom ROM (MCR) version 2.9 of higher
Paul from MoDaCo has done a great job of improving the HTC Hero default firmware with a lot of tweaks and help from his friends. I’m now running his Modaco Custom ROM (MCR) version 2.9 and the phone is literally lighting fast. The MCR is available for both European GSM and US CDMA versions, click on the links for more detailed instructions on how to install a turbo charged firmware on your little Hero.
I had no trouble installing custom firmware – but remember that there are always a risk that you brick your phone if you start playing around with customized firmware versions not officially supported by your phone manufacturer. I take no responsibility if things go wrong…
Hi Matt – Re. point 2 – I’ve only found one report of this so far, have you seen a lot of people reporting improvements? Don’t want to shell out the extra £ for a class 6 unless absolutely necessary.
@Luke,
I completely see your point. I’m still working on a way to really quantify this. Measuring the read/write speed of the actual memory card is rather straight forward. I actually found out that my Class 4 Nokia 8GB microSDHC is faster than a Class 6 Transcend 16GB microSDCH card, hinting that real performance is not always what you think. E.g. CrystalDiskMark is an easy way to measure the read and write speed of your memory card on a PC (if you have a card reader).
I have a bunch of different memory cards at home and will run some simple read/write tests on them and compare that to the HTC Hero real use UI speed. Once I have that quick analyze done within the next few days, I will update the post with my results.
Hi guys,
Paying £17 inc delivery is not exactly going to break the bank… Also, there are a couple of intersting posts on majicware re: memory.
In my personal experience, the sandisk class6 8GB has made my Hero faster than the default class 2 2GB memory.
The last speed improvement (if you’re really desperate), can be gained by switching off from HTC Sense UI, to the default Android UI.
cant read tif files on my hero…suggestions?/?
I’ve found switching from HTC Sense to Android Home feels slower. It’s definitely not impressively faster.
Will installing the Modaco Custom ROM (MCR) version 2.9 of higher void your warranty or will sprint be mad that you did?