Help make my HTC Hero a decent phone! Please!

[osli]

lol, I keep calling it that. One of those things that's stuck in my memory that will apparently be hard to get rid of. I was on Cingular forever, which was bought by ATT.

Cellular South is the carrier I'm on now that offers the HTC Hero.

Sorry for the confusion. I seem to be mixing up a lot of words in this thread! Must need more sleep.

 

[osli]

Lockbot is an Iphone lock clone. can't use menu to unlock have to slide.
Done.

Pretty nice, and I love the hard button disable. But I had to uninstall it. Too slow and quirky... what's up with the lock screen not even covering the whole screen? And why see the home screen before it switches to the lock screen? I guess my biggest letdown was that it doesn't seem to have the pull down status bar at the top, which for now is as close to lockinfo as the Hero has.

So I'm back to using Lock 2.0, which I love, if it would only completely disable the hard buttons as an option.

 

[Tisnatch]

@osli I appreciate the effort you're making to point out issues with the phone in the hopes that someone at Google is reading the forum.

I love my Sprint HTC Hero. My wife has an iPhone and I have to say... the iPhone is still a more stable platform. My Hero still has a lot of rough edges that I hope will get smoothed out in the updates. In the hopes that Google or HTC are taking note:

1. Yeah, the weather widget is crap. It's 11PM and the widget shows that it's sunny. I finally dumped it for The Weather Channel widget.

2. On occasion the interface lags and it's annoying. I assume it's because there is too much running in the background so I use a task killer to clean things out, then the phone is more responsive. I like the ability to manage what runs on the phone (double plus good) but why can't the OS give more priority to the UI?

3. Sometimes the phone interprets a single home hard-button click as a long click, resulting in the keyboard popping up. I'm sorry, did I say "sometimes." I meant "often."

4. If I stand in 5 feet in front of my wireless AP at home I still only get 3 bars in the wifi indicator on the Hero. If I walk 20 feet away I lose the signal. Same problem doesn't happen on the iPhone or laptops.

5. Would be nice if Google gave the user the option to allow apps to autostart on boot. Every developer out there thinks their app is important enough to launch upon boot so I need go in and kill them all every time I restart the phone.

6. HTC Sense UI has to reload sometimes. I assume it's because the app/s I'm using is taking up too much RAM and the Android OS decided it would be fun to kill the Sense UI to free up memory. Since it takes 40 seconds for the UI to reload it suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't use the iPhone if AT&T was giving them away for free. I love the potential in the Android OS. But that doesn't make it perfect.

 

[VinceO]

Download Proximity Sensor from the Market. It works wonders on my Hero.

 

[Newbe]

Concerning the contacts. You can list last name, first name. In each contact just below the last and first name entry block is a block which gives you the option of how you want to display the name. (Roll the screen up) It can be first name last name or last name first name.

 

[rockcrawler]

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?

Did not read the whole thread, but "Lock 2.0" in the market will solve your problem. It is not free, and takes a second to come up sometimes, but other than that works well. Gives you an iPhony like horizontal unlock and you get the option to make the menu key bring up the lock 2.0 app menu instead of unlock the phone, so no more accidental unlocks !

 

[digitaldave]

Download Proximity Sensor from the Market. It works wonders on my Hero.

Installed this on my Hero (with Chin) and it works flawlesslllllyyyyy Very happy with it.

 

[osli]

Concerning the contacts. You can list last name, first name. In each contact just below the last and first name entry block is a block which gives you the option of how you want to display the name. (Roll the screen up) It can be first name last name or last name first name.

I don't have that option. I don't have separate first and last name entry blocks... only a single box for name. Contacts imported to my phone that had first and last names lost them in the transfer... only a combined field now. Any insight?

 

[osli]

Download Proximity Sensor from the Market. It works wonders on my Hero.

Works even better after the update. Not perfect, but way better than stock.

 

[osli]

Did not read the whole thread, but "Lock 2.0" in the market will solve your problem. It is not free, and takes a second to come up sometimes, but other than that works well. Gives you an iPhony like horizontal unlock and you get the option to make the menu key bring up the lock 2.0 app menu instead of unlock the phone, so no more accidental unlocks !

Been using it for a while (was mentioned in thethread). I wish I could disable the menu button entirely. I get random changes to settings because it pulls up that screen, and. still occasionally my phone unlocked completely and does all manner of undefined things because "home screen" is on of the options the menubutton pulls up.

Still worlds better than stock.

 

[osli]

I don't have that option. I don't have separate first and last name entry blocks... only a single box for name. Contacts imported to my phone that had first and last names lost them in the transfer... only a combined field now. Any insight?

Bumping to see if anyone has an answer to this. I'd love to organize the contacts by last name, but I don't see the optio- mentioned a few posts above. Am I missing something?

 

[HackerX5]

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?

Menu>Settings>Security>Set Unlock Pattern

Setting an unlock pattern should help

 

[osli]

Why do people just read the first post in a thread and reply without reading the rest? Geez.

 

[Tisnatch]

lolz

 

[Tisnatch]

Speaking of quirks in the phone. I've noticed that when I click on an MMS picture my Sprint HTC Hero jumps to another text message thread. For example, I get a text from Bob that includes an image. When I tap the image to view it, the system jumps to a text message thread from Alice, the last person I received a text message from. This happens on occasion and, when it does happen, the only way to stop it from doing that is to reboot. I've tried killing the Messages process but that doesn't work. The whole phone needs a reboot. HTC WTF?

 

[jamesdal1]

osli, you might have a bad phone, it happened to me, go exchange it or reset it with factory settings. also,

 

[osli]

I'll reset and see if anything changes

 

[HackerX5]

Why do people just read the first post in a thread and reply without reading the rest? Geez.

If you are referring to my reply. I only saw someone mention Lock 2.0 and that it wasn't a free application. I was mentioning a free one that is already on the phone. If I missed someone mentioning built-in security pattern...my mistake...Geez.

 

[osli]

Yeah, it wad mentioned. I wouldn't have said something if there hadn't been a flurry of similar posts before yours, and if you hadn't felt the need to include rolleyes at the end as If you knew better and couldnt believe I didnt.

 

[HackerX5]

Yeah, it wad mentioned. I wouldn't have said something if there hadn't been a flurry of similar posts before yours, and if you hadn't felt the need to include rolleyes at the end as If you knew better and couldnt believe I didnt.

I didn't realize that the smiley was an eye rolling one. So, obviously there was some miscommunication. But in the end, this is your post in order to receive help from others, so I wouldn't be such an infant about people actually responding to your questions...especially when other people were labeling you as a complaint launching baby.

 

[osli]

Lol, point well taken. Funny about internet smileys... have to watch those

 

[teds]

I don't have that option. I don't have separate first and last name entry blocks... only a single box for name. Contacts imported to my phone that had first and last names lost them in the transfer... only a combined field now. Any insight?

I'm having the same problem as OSLI with my contacts, which I imported from Outlook (and lost my last name alphabetization in the process). And, I, too, don't have an option to enter first and last names separately nor choose the order. Given all the phone books in the U.S. are organized by last name, wouldn't you think the software developers would take this into account? My lord...if MSFT can think to do this, one would hope anyone would!
I feel better with that brief vent. Most importantly, is there a solution that anyone knows of (don't call Customer Service...they don't know either)? Thanks everyone!