HTC Hero to get Android 2.0

Out of the box, this phones lag will kill you. I flashed my rom with modaco’s custom rom, and its literally 10 times faster. I’ve challenged my friends droid, and my phone does everything faster.

And without a taskmanager, your screwed. Programs dont close when you click home, they stay open and kill your battery and slow your phone down. A little stupid how this works, but with a task manager its no problem. A little annoying though.

On my UK Hero, I’ve just updated to Madaco’s Custom rom 2.9 (with a newer one actually scheduled to be released today) just to test the waters. I have to say that it really is night and day over the stock ROM or even the update released Sept 11th. Everything is runing faster.

The key to a faster phone on the Hero is in the Class of MicroSD card you get for your phone. If you’re out there getting Class 2 or 4 cards then you’re wasting your money. The Class 6 cards are the way to go.

Root your phone on the theunlockr.com they’ll also have lnks to the Madoco ROMS go there and load the new ROM. And if you update your phone “radio” to the newest radio ROM from there, you’ll see a huge difference in web performance speeds. Especially over WiFi.

Once rooted, run aps2sd and also swapper on the phone to move all the apps off of the internal rom onto the sdcard newly partitioned space (the root method will walk you thru this, and madaco’s custom rom fully supports it). The swapper application will use the sdcard as a “swap” drive for memory. When I did this, the “lag” anyone has referred to. NON EXISTANT!

Now compaired to the “droid”. My brother got one and yes it(Driod) DOES run faster. It’s got twice the processor (893mhz vs 433mhz), double the available running rom as well as internal program space, comes with a 16GB SD Card (upgradable to 32gb) and runs fast. It’s andriod 2.0 so there are some differences. The droid has but three screens (home, and one to the right and one to the left) while the HTC has a total of SEVEN (home and three to the right and three to the left).

Why the “droid” is limited to three is beyond me. Perhaps it’s a choice for optimization or it’s just Verizon’s normal routine of “limiting” the phones capabilities that run on their network.

It is a HUGE phone. Thick. Much thicker than required, but that’s to support the physical keyboard you get (even though the “touch” keyboard is still there for you as well).

Andriod on Verizon will udoubtably put a big damper on the verizon online stores and other features you “used” to pay for while the rest of us got it for free.

Things like the Navigator from Verison you used to pay for, but now are free with Google maps. However other apps like AndNav2 and CoPilot which are both great GPS programs, will not run on the “Droid”. There is a specific “google market” that is made (limited) for Verizon that limits what the poor verizon folks can download. Trust me, I’ve compared them and the differences are fairly significant. Anything that Verizon wants to charge you for, they programatically disable being available from getting from the “Verizon/Google market”.

but all in all the driod looks to be a good phone. Despite it’s rather large style, I have to admit. It stands OVEr the Hero with it’s faster performance, more memory and the Andriod 2.0.

it’s biggest down fall. Verizon’s limitations. If Verizon would get off of the money hungry horse and let people just have a good phone with awesome capabilities without charging for every tiny bit of service they can, then I’d have say the Droid would easily be the phone of the year. That 3G map is impressive and fast. (Yes I know Sprint has 4G now, but… compare coverage and with so little 4G areas right now – who cares?)

That iPhone has a lot of competition with Andriod phones. And ATT is just killing themselves by not allowing Apple to open the iStore to ANYONE/ANY APP TO SELL ANYTHING thru the store. I mean the second you have to “mod” your phone to get what “you” want out of it. Is the second you should just look for a new phone!

However sadly, the Google Market has started to follow this in a few respects by allowing carriers to tell/buy them off to only allow what the carriers want to be sold. As the only goal of the carriers is to nickle and dime their customers to death. So get rid of the free stuff and start making stuff they can charge for is what the carriers are shouting. Google (like Apple) is listening to them. The almight $$$$$ works it’s way into anything these days. Even open source!

I forgot to mention. The “rebranded” HERO that Sprint is selling is not the orignial HTC HERO that I have. They are different phones with different capabilities as well. The updates released on htc.com/uk are not available for US phones (WARNING – WILL NOT WORK ON US PHONES). And it’s my understanding Sprint isn’t going to allow an update to 2.0. I don’t think they want to for the “support” that will follow if they had to “push” it out.

yes, I’m in the US, I just thought why get a limited phone, the UK HTC Hero is a WORLD PHONE so I get GSM coverage and EDGE, WCDMA, HSPDA where ever available. AND I actually get updates withouth worrying about the carrier’s denying it.

some info, i just ordered my htc hero and it will be here tomorrow. it WILL have android 2.0 already on it. spread the word that sprint htc hero’s shipped from this point on will have the 2.0 version of android. i had helio which was bought by virgin mobile then bought by sprint was giving me a deal to stay and that’s when i was told about the update on the new phones.

snif snif…what’s that smell? Oh i know it’s stink like BS!
Hey Andy, u made that post on 17th said that u’d get the phone on the 18th…let see some pic, eh? or is it BS i smell? yeah thought so…

It best be BS! I just got mine on the 29th of December and it doesn’t have 2.0! I’m sure the members of the many prominent “Droid” forum sites would have made a huge announcement if this was true. Idiot.

it is surely bs!! there is no android 2.0 available for the htc hero at this time… htc is still working on an ecliar 2.1 update for the hero.. there is no confirmed release date as of yet…

someone please tell me can u get the same apps the iphone has for the htc hero like pretty much all of them