Another HTC Hero Review: Keyboard, Phone, Battery life

I’ve got a Pre and the sound quality is average at best. I’m going to stop by a store and play around with the Hero but hold off on my decision until I play with the Moment.

I’ve had the Hero since 10/12 and the battery absolutely sucks. It was fully charged 4 hours ago and is now close to dead. I haven’t made a single call, the GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi are all turned off, and no mail is syncing. This is ridiculous.

The HTC hero in itself is an amazing phone, a lil small yes, and the feedback is a lil slower when typing. I do miss my iPhone due to ease of use with the keyboard and web browsing. Ive had the Hero for 3 days now and have yet to get but half a day out of the battery. But I have been using it quite excessively customizing it and playing around with the features. Perhaps a nicely made case that doubles as an extended battery? that would be nice. had one on my iphone and it lasted 2 days with moderate use.

I got my Hero on the 11th and love the phone but HATE the battery. With WIFI and bluetooth turned off and my mail sync set to every 5 minutes the battery migt last 7 hours.

I would everyone to call HTC and SPRINT to report the battery problem. I myself started the day with a fully charged battery. I made two phone calls totalling a little over 5 mins. 3 hours off the charger and the battery is dead. All I have on is the bluetooth, and of course the phone.

I am also not getting good reception at all.

Sprint 30 Day Exchange is sending me a brand new phone to see if the unit is just defective. However it seems many people are reporting the same problem.

Kinda reminds me of the trouble that Apple had with the iPhone.

I had the same issue with my battery from day one (Sat. 1O-11-O9). But 2 days ago I learned of an app thru Android Market that will allow you to turn on certain features & conserve battery life.

Look for Power Manager and also search battery meters, I have one that displays the actual % in the status bar, & allows you to customize even more settings.

I have had my phone unplugged for about 11 hours, with no GPS, no Bluetooth, and have made 4 calls about an hour in total, and am down to 65%.

Hope it helps you like it did me.

Make sure you check other forums for battery issues. Their is an issue that is keeping the phone in call lock mode (even though the screen goes off) and is causing the battery to drain as if you were on a call.

My HTC Hero review and comments!!!!!!

One thing users might be overlooking is that in nearly every application including Browser, When you press the menu key….there is a pop-up menu, with forward and back arrows and other options including bookmarks.

Hit Menu in nearly every app and “voila”….more options…fast and just what you need….like a genie in a cell phone.

Too many reviews with too many fly by night people that seem to only know half of what the device can do.

I have spent over a week 8 hours a day loading apps, trying fixes for improving battery life, (thanks to countless posts on Sprint discussion forums and others) including getting rid of any Advanced Task managers because the phone manages apps fine and app conflicts with the Droid functions.

Switching to Handcent or Chomp and killing Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and mobile data….not only save battery life but after doing a reset (i.e. turning the phone off with the end call button and then turning it back on will reset the awake tine……so you can monitor IF the phone is actually turning off……I am getting 9-20% awake time depending on usage now.

Go to Menu, Settings, scroll to About Phone, tap, taps on Status, scroll to bottom and compare Up Time to Awake Time to monitor your battery drain. Note: you can hit end call after noting the “awake time” and check it in a few minutes..and if it doesn’t change….then your Hero is sleeping like it should.

Also, adding too many apps at any one time WILL overload the memory temporarily and eventually KILL the phone function and begin a series of force close tabs….You will not get the phone back without deleting apps…and may not be able to access a forced reset.

Get X-Uninstaller and delete the last 5-6 apps you downloaded…and the phone comes back….give it a rest for a day and then slowly add a few apps at a time.

So far, I have over 75-100 apps and my Hero flies…..no widgets except “Quick Settings’…an “all in one management” app – with all the widgets in one – that need to be turned off when not necessary to save battery life…….

I also have Handcent, Fast Call, Voicemail, and a screen dimmer APP called Brightness Level on my main page and that’s it.

Also, My Backup Pro is pretty powerful for saving data and apps to the SD card and restores after resets if they are absolutely necessary.

Flexillis Mobile Security is an extremely good app to keep your device safe. It has anti virus scanning/protection plus a firewall. Its backup function will backup your contacts, photos, call log, mms, sms’s and pretty much anything else you want it to their online site. And there is a phone locater also as part of this app.

Power Manager is great for battery monitoring.

There’s so much this phone can do and it seems that way too many novices flying by the seat of their pants are in a rush to get on you-tube with their video reviews, in addition the bloggers and so called tech journalists offering VERY limited knowledge of EVERYTHING the HERO does.

And comparing it to the IPhone. The IPhone is great, but droid just may challenge Apple to reinvent themselves. And we benefit from the tech wars. Something new has come along and bashers and defenders are slinging their opinions and more. Why not just do comparisons, take the high road and lay off the slams. You don’t and I DO! Tech is as diverse as people, We are all different. What a concept. Diversity!

Verizon’s Motorola Droid will have a bigger screen and 2.0 firmware, but will not be that much faster. The Moment will please some desiring a real keyboard. And then the differences get into personal preference.

As more people start adding apps and crashing due to what I have already mentioned, they will either give up or exchange for a simpler phone……or stick with it and “get it”! Play with it for a few weeks and then read the MANUAL. And then start researching on Google. There’s a ton of droid info. Opps, did I say GOOGLE? Yes my HTC Hero says that on the back, made in mid September. Rev A.

Have fun. It took me 3 phone lockups and hard resets to “get it’ and then two more phone lockups….BUT this time I started deleting the last 5 or 6 apps I installed and now I am back up in 10 minutes instead of days…..ALL that to get to where I am now. Cruzin’ with a killer phone and sticking with HTC and Sprint.

A slightly bigger screen and faster processor would be nice in a Gen 2 phone, but I can wait. So much to do with this amazing piece of technology, it will take months to exhaust the possibilities” and push it and the addition apps to the max.

By the way, I am one torqued off Palm Treo 650 user who was abandoned when they went stupid and lost the PDA/Smartphone race several years ago. The Pre is promising but too small a screen for my 59 year old eyes. I wish them well, but are they listening to what the market wants? NOT!

I was so close to an IPhone, researched everything for weeks and then researched the Hero and android operating system. WinMo lost. They’re dead and need a new mission statement and goal.
Just a few thoughts from someone who’s lived with the Hero and decided to stick with Sprint like I have for the past 7 years.

And I am not a paid reviewer, endorser or even work in the tech industry. I just played with, crashed and kept on looking for answers till I feel like I am the master of my HERO, and NOT the other way around!

Best of luck to all the “Droid” pioneers. Droid DOES!!!!

Thank you so much for your generousity in sharing this information and wisdom; I almost feel guilty using the recommendations you make because I’ve only had my Hero for a few weeks and haven’t put in the energy you have clearly invested in ‘getting it’, but I can only figure that you put up your knowledge to help people in just my position– I LOVE this guy. I too am a ticked-off former Treo user left out to dry and getting the Hero and sticking with Sprint like we have for… We are in strikingly similar situations. Anyhow, I’ve been worrying bad these past few days, because the Hero seemed to fatally force close chain, window on top of window with that force close piled on top of each other; no connection w/ Web, mobile network, just some all-local functionality like a notepad app or other stuff on-board the device but anything tries to use one of the many ways the device can communicate wirelessly, you have to force close it; the only remedy if it can be called that was a hard reset, and after 3 of those, with the only help putting things back together each time being the Application backup to SD card in ASTRO Manager– but my screen, all my personalizations etc., died each time I had to hard reset, and its been such a hassle to spend an hour downloading ASTRO again, re-installing all my apps, having to re-set up my email accounts and of course Google account, and then the home screen set-up that I had spent so much time customizing each time needed to be re-created from scratch… in the past 2 days I was worried Id have to find a different phone when I’ve fallen in love with this one. Much of your advice will be directly useful, and perhaps I’ve been overloading the memory causing the series of force closes as you described from your own experiences–and so I will try your rec’s like not putting on new apps a dozen at a time for one, but I’m still worried because it seems that any time the battery is remov4ed from the phone, the cascade of forced close popups occurs when the phone is powered on again; it must be hard reset and I must go throutgh all the trouble of re-personalizing the phone any time the battery is removed. That doesnt seem right! If you know of any really good resources for not losing all of your settings when you must hard reset your Hero, like your custom home screen (x7 ‘cards’…) layout which I cant believe doesnt sync with the computer…Well thanks and any advice or suggestions you might have about my problem would be even more appreciated! Happy New Year to you. Thanks,
Rich

BTW I meant to write “Thanks, Rich”; my name is also Rich
Later!

Download on the app market “Task Killer” and it will really help your battery life.

My Hero is OK at best… I've had an issue with the battery dying, only to get it to a charger, power it on, and find out that it somehow hard reset itself! Everything was gone! Luckily my contacts are backed up through Google, but my email, photos, etc were gone. The typing is slow at times also. I'm working on Hero #3 as the first 2 had major problems as well… disappointing, I had very high hopes.

Also wish it allowed for voice dial via bluetooth… seems like a basic and easy feature since my older phones worked with it. The phone has the capability, just not via bluetooth device.

Frick, mine just did that tonight after taking a lot of awesome pictures! That's a shame because I was just starting to like it, and it goes all screwy and dies, then everything is gone! So stupid. Does anyone know how to retrieve this missing data somehow? Ugh.