Gamaze

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.

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Mattias Mobile android, firmware, HTC Hero, MoDaCo, performance, user experience

It is easy to say that I’m a very satisfied owner of the HTC Hero since a couple of weeks. Overall, the smart phone is great and having the ability to run apps and processes in background gives it a clear edge over the iPhone. On the other hand, there are several areas where the Apple experience is just so much smoother. Without going into details I hope the rumoured couple of Android updates still this year will help ease these early misses.

Regardless,there is one thing a smart phone just has to offer and that is getting through a full day or 2 without having to recharge the battery. This is an area where the HTC Hero is struggling a bit. I often end up having to give it some more juice during the afternoon or early evening with the default factory settings. That is fine for a laptop but not acceptable for a smart phone.

To solve this I’ve been fiddling with the settings quite a while to maximize the battery life and below is a short summary of how I’ve managed to get through a heavy usage day without having to recharge the phone. One of the not so secret ingredients to a long battery life is to minimize active network connections – that is also where I focus my tweaking effort below.

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Mattias Mobile, Tutorials android, battery life, HTC Hero, Mobile

Since a couple of months, I’ve been excitingly waiting for the Nokia N97 I ordered in May to arrive in my mailbox. The other day, when I finally  got my hands on it my high expectations were brutally crushed. Frankly, I was depressed by the user experience. Since it officially made it to the stores, the new flagship device from Nokia has also been publicly bashed by reviewers across the world – and not completely without reason.

The few strong areas where the N97 still keeps itself above the surface are the excellent dual-flash 5 MP camera, the hardware build and the familiarity of the Symbian S60 to devoted S60 users. Looking back, it really is a huge improvement to previous Nokia high end phones, no doubt about it. Still, when compared to its real competitors such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 and Hero devices, the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, the N97 is not able not keep up at all. The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.

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Mattias Mobile HTC Hero, N97, Nokia, phone, user experience