HTC Hero – The Phone I Get To Play With At Work

One of the fun things about working at Morodo Group is that we have a lot of phones in storage that we have on hand for development to make sure that our application will work on different phone platforms; however if none of the developers are using the phones, then they’re pretty much just sitting in the storage shelf; unless it’s a new handset, then the CTO will use it as his main device (aka. the CTO took the Motorola Milestone that I was playing around with; sad, haha).

But, I’ve got nothing to complain about- I’ve been able to play around with the newest BlackBerry 9700, and I’m allowed to use the HTC Hero as my main handset now. It’s kinda funny because I carry two handsets with me at all times now; the HTC Hero (Android 1.5), and my own HTC Touch 2 (Windows Mobile 6.5 Pro). The only reason (well, two reasons) whey I still have my HTC Touch 2 on me, is because Pleco Chinese Dictionary doesn’t run on Android (the developer may support Android in the future, but until he sees a big enough adoption of the OS, he said he doesn’t want to spend the development time to develop a version of Pleco for the Android; sad). I guess I’ll do a plug for Pleco Dict; it’s straight up the best Chinese dictionary that I’ve used so far- the awesome thing about it, is that it has handwriting recognition, so if I’m walking around town and there’s a word I don’t recognize, I can do a quick Chinese lesson and learn the character.

The other reason I carry my HTC Touch 2 is because I’m trying to keep closer tabs of my spending habits. I’m sure there’s a similar application that I could use on Android, but currently I have a spreadsheet saved and set-up on Office Mobile that lets me track the date, category, cost, and sums up the total amount spent to-date at the top of the spreadsheet; pretty handy.

Anyhow- here’s a photodump of some images of the handsets that I’ve been playing with from work.

I’ll do a quick little run-through of some of the things that have made me a fan of Android.
Well- I’ll start off with one thing that I don’t like about Android (lol); that’s device/version fragmentation! The HTC Hero is still running on the oldest version of Android 1.5! Boo!

Google integration is ‘the’ main thing that I love about Android; especially because I have to switch between different devices at work when a developer needs to use a device for testing. I can just manage my contacts through Gmail contacts and know that I won’t have to go through the hassle of transferring contacts from one device to another- I’ll just have to log-in to my Google account and let the synchronization do the rest.
The same can be said of Google Chat (which is now my main mode of IM communications; gone are the days of AIM and MSN for me), and Google Mail.

Hello Google Maps and FourSquare! Well, I don’t use either of these very much because I usually forget to check in when I get to any popular locations. And I’m in 五道口, so there aren’t that many popular locations over here that are worth checking-in at; that and also because I usually just go from work-to-home, not very exciting places to check in to, heh.

I don’t have international calling on my mobile plan, so I use MO-Call to make cheap international mobile calls on my HTC Hero, which routes my calls to the Morodo network (disclaimer: I work for Morodo); shameless plug, or not, it gets the job done and lets me call back home to Singapore to let me parents know that I’m still alive =).
I also use Network Monitor to make sure that I’m not going over my monthly data quota; it’s been really handy and even allows me to set an alert when I reach a certain usage amount.

Along the same lines of reserving my data usage, I use Advanced App Killer (I think that’s the name of the app) to kill off any background running applications; I probably do a check about three times a day to make sure no pesky applications have snuck up in the background and are using data in the background. And if all else fails, I can always turn off the background data usage permission in my settings =).

That was a pretty geek-tastic post on phones. I really don’t know why phones have such a draw to me; bleh, idols =_=. Anyhow, that’s it for this post!

-Duncan