Help make my HTC Hero a decent phone! Please!

OK, I've had my Hero (Cingular South) for a couple of weeks now, and have learned how to use all of the features and applications that are important to me, and have given myself time to adjust to the new phone's quirks and abilities.

And I've collected a list of things that really annoy me that keep this from being a good phone. Googling each of these topics for suggested fixes either turns up nothing useful, or turns up suggestions that raise as many questions as they answer. So I'm posting here, the entire list, hoping that the community can help me eliminate these issues and transform my phone into something truly decent. Maybe one "big" fix will address many of these. Oh, but please don't tell me to wait for 2.0... no idea how long that will take, or if it will fix all of these problems.

1) Phone unlocks, dials, etc. in my pocket. What good is a slide to unlock screen if there are ways to unlock with hard buttons? Can I disable that behavior of hard buttons so that the phone only unlocks after a slide?

2) Phone hangs up, dials people, opens random apps etc. while I'm on a phone call. I guess this is what you get for not having a proximity sensor. If I don't hold the phone away from my face for the first fifteen seconds or so, my chin might do all sorts of weird things. I've been on hold by "company X" and the next thing I know I'm hearing my wife's voicemail message. wtf? Is there any better solution out there than having to be very very careful about how you hold the phone when you call people? God forbid you need both hands and have to hold the phone with your shoulder... all bets are off... you might get Obama, or worse.

3) Keyboard just sucks at knowing what letter you've pressed. I'm using BetterKeyboard paid version now, and it looks better and has more options, but I'm not sure it really does any better as far as wrong keypresses go. Even in landscape it messes up on essentially every word. Is there any better alternative out there? I've used a touchscreen phone with only marginally larger screen in the past and had no trouble, so I can't imagine that it is the physical key size but rather software determination of what your intention is. I've gone through the calibration with no improvement. In fact, I've noticed that in general the screen thinks I'm touching about an eighth of an inch below where I really intended to touch. Any ideas?

4) Can I alphabetize my contacts by last name? I've looked everywhere and can't find that setting. This would really put me in a better mood when looking for a phone number.

5) Is there an option or application similar to LockInfo for the iphone? i.e., a way to get a listing of calls, messages, tasks/calendar events, weather, mail etc. on the lock screen? I really miss being able to glance at the lock screen and get a pretty comprehensive update on all the important stuff without having to unlock and go through each application. I didn't see that on the stock lockscreen, but admittedly I've been using an iphone style slider lockscreen for the last two weeks or so and perhaps I overlooked it?

I've left out the numerous complaints I might have about lag in the UI, lag in dialing numbers, lag in updating the recent call list that causes me to dial the wrong number, a weather widget that says it's sunny in the middle of the night, etc. because I've either found a third party app that works better than stock (SuperDial, WeatherWidget), or am just dealing with it until 2.0 arrives to see what I've really got. If suggestions involve a custom ROM (which I'm fine with), I'd like to know if the Sense UI remains or if I have to use the stock Android or one of the alternative home apps (like open home, or dxtop, both of which I tried and didn't like).

I just want my phone to be a decent phone. Right now, it isn't. After that, all the pretty stuff is pretty, and cool, and all of that.

 

Not entirely sure. Cingular south offers the hero. It doesn't have the chin like the euro version for what that's worth.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it out... some good things about it, some not so good. I'd rather have everything listed on one screen instead of scrolling through to each widget, but I haven't tried many of the themes/skins for FlyScreen... perhaps some of them group things together better.

In any case, it still allows the hard buttons to unlock the phone, which is one of my other major complaints. I'd have to put a security number in to prevent that.

 

Thanks for the honest feedback. For now, it wasn't exactly my choice to use this phone, but since I have it I want to give it a solid evaluation and try to get used to it and/or improve the things that bother me. It seems to have great potential, and with the open platform I have high hopes that the community will address the many shortcomings. Some already seem to have been.

If I can't either get used to it or fix it after several months, I'll decide then whether to change phones.

 

Some people just want a phone that is above all a good phone. I like the idea of my phone being a good "everything else" but it needs to be good at being a phone first. Which means easy to turn on or unlock, easy to find numbers, dial numbers, etc. without any serious quirks in how the phone works.

And apparently some people just need to post useless statements that do nothing to actually help people. But thanks for your valued input.

 

Glad you don't have any problems with the phone at all, but does that really mean that no one else is allowed to? With an open platform, I'm banking on the power of the community in addressing the problems I have, so that the phone is just as wonderful for me as it seems to be for you.

Well, I do. Pressing a hard button brings up the lock screen. Pressing the menu button after that unlocks the phone. Or a long menu press brings up the recent application list, which is just a bump in the pocket away from launching an app. It happens to me all the time. I could put a lock pattern or pin on my phone, but I absolutely hate those. I'd like to unlock my phone quickly when I need it, and not have it unlock itself when I don't. Seems a simple enough desire. I could also use a belt holster/case, but I hate those even more.

Happens to me all the time. I think it is my ear that is usually the culprit, sometimes my cheek. The most common result is hanging up on whoever I'm talking to. Sometimes I get another application launched, another number dialed, or a contact added to my list randomly. Very annoying. Can the screen blank delay be changed to a shorter interval? Fifteen or so seconds seems way too long. If I could change it to like three, I'd be happy.

Maybe. I'm about three weeks or so in, and only get more frustrated by the day. It misses my keypress about once per word. The Hero has a terrific word prediction and spell correction, which has kept me from going absolutely bananas! But I'm hoping that this is a software thing that has been or will be fixed. I thought Better Keyboard would really help, but I'm not so sure it has. Speaking of... does the calibration for keyboard input apply to the Better Keyboard application, or just the stock keyboard? Bottom line... screen size is adequate and physical button size no different than what I was coming from, so there is no good reason why the Hero is that much worse. I've never seen this praised in a review, so I know it isn't just me.

The Hero is certainly pretty. And I'm happy with the Browser, contacts syncing with outlook, Google, and ActiveSycn accounts, games, and the multimedia stuff isn't too bad. But as a phone, it is just falling short. There is no reason I should be dialing several wrong numbers and typing hundreds of wrong words every single day.

 

It wasn't exactly my choice to switch to the Hero, but I thought it was going to be a more pleasant experience than has been the case. I don't want it to do things like another phone, I just want it to do things well, period. Different is fine. There are many aspects I like much better, like the scenes and locales, customization, open platform, etc.

 

I had to go back and look at my original post to see if I actually said that. To my amazement, I did. I obviously meant cheek, not chin. If you had read on to later posts, you might have noticed that I said both my ear and cheek were the culprits.

But the pics were good for a laugh anyway. I think I remember that rubberband hands-free phone holder... wasn't that an ebay auction from about ten years ago? lol!

So any useful tips for the problem I'm actually having with body parts that actually do contact the screen when held properly, per your instructional photos above?

 

I'm thinking that the ability to shorten the timeout delay would go a long way. Maybe I'll post that as an app request.

 

I guess there aren't any practical solutions for now. FlyScreen is pretty, but way overcomplicated and no quicker than just unlocking the phone - and it doesn't prevent the accidental unlocking. Using a security code I suppose is practical, but I can't stand them and shouldn't be forced to use one. A better contacts app might be out there that allows alphabetizing by last name, but that doesn't change the behavior of the contacts list in the dialer apps - which is by far the primary place I need it.

I think there are suggestions that could solve many or most of these problems, but I'm not a programming jack so I'm unlikely to implement them myself. For anyone interested, here's what would be really nice:

1) Disable the second menu press and long menu press to unlock behaviors. Simple, effective, no brainer.

2) Offer a settings options for the screen timeout during call delay, from the stock 10-15 seconds down to two or three. Or, even better, modify/replace the stock phone/dialer app so that during a call the screen stays active but instantly swaps to one with a couple of sliders to access common functions (as opposed to simple tap buttons), such as "hang up", "keypad" and either home screen or main call screen access.

3) Settings toggle to alphabetize contacts by either first or last name, and have the behavior universal across any app that accesses the contacts list such as phone/dialer replacement apps. Alternatively, offer that settings option in a replacement phone app like SuperDial.

4) Write an iPhone "lockinfo" app clone. Or something similar... simple yet informative, one screen, just an overlay of your current lockscreen.

5) Offer a global screen calibration tool. I think this would go a long way towards making the keyboard work better. My problem is that I consistently touch higher than where it thinks I have, or conversely I consistently touch lower than where I think I did. Didn't have this problem on other phones, so I'm not sure exactly is responsible. But I'm always accidentally hitting the character below then one I intend. Happens on the keyboard, phone dialer, and even when selecting icons or moving them around and during games. Keyboard touch calibration doesn't really seem to change this at all, so I'm not sure exactly what it is doing. My guess is modifying the overlap settings or something - it doesn't seem to be remapping touch areas at all, because I have intentionally typed the phrase one letter off to the left and didn't remap those characters one letter over. In fact, I can't tell that it changed at all. And I also doubt that it is applying this calibration to other apps like BetterKeyboard, much less globally. Please offer a global calibration function. One that was variable depending on screen angle would be really slick, and make way too much sense to ever find its way to fruition!