HTC Hero: a short review

Text and pictures © 2009-2010 Guillaume Dargaud
Last updated on 2010/02/04

"To be happy in this world, first you need a cell phone and then you need an airplane. Then you're truly wireless."    — Ted Turner (1938-), US businessman.

Quick review

I thought about writing a longer review of the HTC Hero phone but there are plenty of them already. Let me just say that it is a good phone, very usable, with great software and fewer limitations than the Apple restricted plastic thingie. Before you do anything with it, make sure you update the firmware because you'll lose all your settings.

The good:

• The user interface it pretty good, although you need to figure out some of its tricks by yourself (hold down the [Home] button for instance to recall a list of recently used of still running apps). Remember that the [back] button is a way out of most situations, and the [search] button work most times you have a list in front of you.
• I must say that for me the jury is still out on wheter or not touch screens are a good thing or not. I hate the greasy finger marks always visible on it and wipe the phone on my pants before I do anything with it, and you can't type anything on it without looking at the screen. On the other hand (the one with the other greasy fingers), you get more screen real estate. Still, it's good to have a few real buttons on it and with some self control the trackball can mostly replace a dirty finger on the screen.
• There's some excellent software easily accessible via the Market application. o give just one example, Google Sky map blew me away in its sheer simplicity and power.
• The Android development kit is pretty easy to install on Ubuntu. Developping for it is another problem ! I just got started.
• The phone has a strangely shaped USB plug and comes with its own cable. But apparently any mini-USB cable can plug in it, be it only for power or for full PC access.
• There are 3 different connection modes to a PC via USB: USB mass storage for access to the memory card filesystem, sync mode for letting the PC-side software do various synchronisations, and modem. The first two modes can be switched easily from the reminder menu, but the last one is hidden in the 'wireless' menu.

The not-so-good:

• The battery lasts only about 2 days if you don't use it (passive phone only), about a day with light use of phone / wifi (say one hour of use), and barely 2 hours at full use. You can watch about 2 movies in airplane mode on a full charge.
• It takes a full minute to boot, which is annoying if you want to preserve the battery and only turn it on when you really need it.
• When it's off, it's really off. A opposed to a Nokia that will still be able to ring an alarm clock when off. On the other hand the FBI can't remotely spy on you when the phone is off, unlike a Nokia (yes, it's true).
• The HTC Sync software runs on only half of the XP PCs I've tried it on. It just crashes on start on the others.
• There's no specific Linux software, but you can still connect the phone in mass storage mode.
• You need to root the phone for some of the most interesting functions, like running a wifi router over 3G.
• It doesn't play .avi files (see below).

Some tricks

How to get videos to play on the HTC Hero ?

Forget about installing the many different avi codecs, you need to convert them to one of the 2 formats it understands: mp4 or 3gp. Ffmpeg to the rescue, here's the basic command to transcode videos for mobile use: ffmpeg -i file.avi -b 300k -s 480x320 -vcodec mpeg4 -ac 2 -ab 128k -acodec libfaac File.3gp

It works but it will probably change the image ratio of the video, so you probably need to lower the '320' value if the image appears too tall. Keep in mind that on some videos the pixels aren't square, so that confuses things further. If the original video has a proper aspect ratio when watched on a PC, you can issue a identify File.avi or ffmpeg -i File.avi to get the frame width and height. For instance the video has WxH = 640x272 so you correct the ffmpeg factor accordingly, here ... -s 480x204 ... where the 204 comes from 480/640*272. Round to the nearest integer or multiple of 2. Capici ?

Here's an alternate commands that uses the better quality x264 codec: ffmpeg -i File.avi -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -s 480x320 -vpre hq -crf 22 -threads 0 File.mp4 The aspect ratio problem still applies. You could also use two passes to improve the bitrate flow but that gets complicated pretty fast.

Read this if you have trouble setting up ffmpeg with the proper codecs.

Tethering your PC

You can use the Hero as a modem for your PC. First of all, it works only if you have a 3G connection. Then you must have the drivers installed on the PC. Then the option is fairly well hidden: at the bottom of the Wireless settings called "Mobile Network Sharing", and you can activate it only if the phone is already connected to the PC.

So I get my connection, ssh works, ftp works, ping works, email works... But when I try to access the web, all I get are blank pages. Weird, huh ? As it happens, my operator states in their contract that I'm not allowed to use their 'unlimited' 3G connection to connect a PC. Well, fuck that, I pay for it and I'll use it any way I want, right ? Well, not quite: they try to enforce it by detecting if the request comes from the phone or from a PC. The only way they can do this is by checking the user agent field of the browser request. So an easy workaround is to use the User Agent Switcher Firefox add-on. Then you can either try with a blank user agent, or you can go to check your user agent with your phone, write it down and set it on your PC. The only downside is that some websites (facebook, Google News...) are optimized for the Phone and display in a simplified way.

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