Hardware, HTC Sense
Only small changes were made on the inside, the CPU is a 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM 7200A, there is 512 MB of ROM, the amount of RAM has increased compared to Magic, as now we can use 288 megabytes. This is the hardware of an average Pocket PC, so Android is again a great example that we don’t need a 6-800 MHz processor to gain speed. Hero is at least as fast as any other Android phone was, it only slowed down when I was listening to music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.
Series of standby screens with widgets — click to zoom!
The phone has the latest version of Android, which is completed with HTC’s user interface called Sense. It’s something similar to TouchFLO, as Sense is not just an addon for Android, as it makes some changes to the system as well, for example on the standby screen. We can’t “pull” the menu from the bottom of the screen, it pops up only on tapping, but there are three buttons on the bottom: the left one opens the meny, the middle takes us to the call log and phonebook (where we can dial as well), while the one on the right can be used for putting widgets and shortcuts on the standby screen…
…which has also been extended, as it doesn’t have three, but seven pages and we can still flip them horizontally. We do need the space, as besides the five default Android widgets (analog clock, calendar, music player, photo frame, search) we also find dozens of HTC widgets like a bookmark, calendar, clocks, Footprints, e-mail, messaging, music player, speed dialer, photo album, photo frame, search, some settings (one-click WiFi/BT/GPS switch), stock quotes graph, Twitter feed and weather forecast. All of them are flawless and professional, HTC kept its habit (unlike its rivals) and didn’t implement tons of useless widgets. These were really made to be used – in turn most of them takes up three quarters of the screen – and they look very demanding as well, for example there are twelve types of clocks, let’s see three of them:
We can unlock the screen not only by pushing the menu button, but also by stroking the screen downwards, but the function of the key and the menu structure didn’t change, even though there are lots of icons, we’ll see on the next page what are they used for. The “tray” on top of the screen can be pulled down, this is where the notifications appear, these can be deleted with a single tap – I like this feature a lot, as in case of a missed call I don’t have to access all kinds of submenus to make the small icon disappear. We can choose between grid and list views, the main menu displays the icons in alphabetical order and on its bottom, just like on the standby screen, we can see the add widget and virtual phone keys, which disappear when accessing submenus, probably in order to conserve space.
Although the level of customizability is not bad, we can’t change the dark menu. A good thing is that HTC packed the phone with lots of cool wallpapers, most of them have vivid colors, which balances the dullness of the dark grey menu. It’s really fun that the manufacturer implemented many kinds of widget layouts, so we can practically change between modes, if we like such things – otherwise we can save our own layouts as well.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
