HTC Hero: a short review

Text and pictures © 2009-2024 Guillaume Dargaud
Last updated on 2021/11/05

"To be happy in this world, first you need a cell phone and then you need an airplane. Then you're truly wireless."    — Ted Turner (1938-), US businessman.

Quick review

I thought about writing a longer review of the HTC Hero phone but there are plenty of them already. Let me just say that it is a good phone, very usable, with great software and fewer limitations than the Apple restricted plastic thingie. Before you do anything with it, make sure you update the firmware because you'll lose all your settings.

The good:

• The user interface it pretty good, although you need to figure out some of its tricks by yourself (hold down the [Home] button for instance to recall a list of recently used of still running apps). Remember that the [back] button is a way out of most situations, and the [search] button work most times you have a list in front of you.
• I must say that for me the jury is still out on wheter or not touch screens are a good thing or not. I hate the greasy finger marks always visible on it and wipe the phone on my pants before I do anything with it, and you can't type anything on it without looking at the screen. On the other hand (the one with the other greasy fingers), you get more screen real estate. Still, it's good to have a few real buttons on it and with some self control the trackball can mostly replace a dirty finger on the screen.
• There's some excellent software easily accessible via the Market application. o give just one example, Google Sky map blew me away in its sheer simplicity and power.
• The Android development kit is pretty easy to install on Ubuntu. Developing for it is another problem ! I just got started.
• The phone has a strangely shaped USB plug and comes with its own cable. But apparently any mini-USB cable can plug in it, be it only for power or for full PC access.
• There are 3 different connection modes to a PC via USB: USB mass storage for access to the memory card filesystem, sync mode for letting the PC-side software do various synchronizations, and modem. The first two modes can be switched easily from the reminder menu, but the last one is hidden in the 'wireless' menu.

The not-so-good:

• The battery lasts only about 2 days if you don't use it (passive phone only), about a day with light use of phone / wifi (say one hour of use), and barely 2 hours at full use. You can watch about 3 hours of video (2 movies) in airplane mode on a full charge.
• It takes over a minute to boot, which is annoying if you want to preserve the battery and only turn it on when you really need it.
• When it's off, it's really off. A opposed to a Nokia that will still be able to ring an alarm clock when off. On the other hand the FBI can't remotely spy on you when the phone is 'off', unlike some older models of other brands (yes, it's not a urban legend).
• The HTC Sync software runs on only half of the XP PCs I've tried it on. It just crashes on start on the others.
• There's no specific Linux software, but you can still connect the phone in mass storage mode. Using it as a modem on Linux may be possible but it hasn't worked for me.
• You need to root the phone for some of the most interesting functions, like running a wifi router over 3G (see below).
• It doesn't play .avi files (see below).

How to get videos to play on the HTC Hero ?

Forget about installing the many different avi codecs on your phone, instead you are better off converting your videos to a format it understands: mp4 or 3gp. Ffmpeg to the rescue, here's the basic command to transcode videos for mobile use: ffmpeg -i file.avi -s 480x320 -b 300k -vcodec mpeg4 -ac 2 -ab 128k -acodec libfaac File.3gp

It works but it will probably change the image ratio of the video, so you probably need to lower the '320' value in the above line if the image appears too tall. Keep in mind that on some videos the pixels aren't square, so that confuses things further. If the original video has a proper aspect ratio when watched on a PC, you can issue a ffmpeg -i File.avi to get the frame width and height (the line that says "Stream ... 640x272"). For instance the video has WxH = 640x272 so you correct the ffmpeg factor accordingly, here ffmpeg -i file.avi -s 480x204 -b 300k -vcodec mpeg4 -ac 2 -ab 128k -acodec libfaac File.3gp where the 204 comes from 480/640*272. Round to the nearest integer or multiple of 2. Capici ?

Note that if the original image ratio is less than 4:3, you need to lower 480 instead of 320 using the formula 320/H*W, but that's rare. I've managed to use the an alternate commands with the better quality x264 codecs but it's more complicated and doesn't always work.

Read this if you have trouble setting up ffmpeg with the proper codecs. Note that ffmpeg works on both Linux and Windows.

Here's a script that does the conversion at once, just save it as AviTo3gp.sh, mark it as executable and call it as AviTo3gp.sh File.avi File.3gp.

#! /bin/bash
# Script:  AviTo3gp.sh
# Purpose: Video conversion for smartphones, keeping the ratio
# Author:  Guillaume Dargaud - www.gdargaud.net
# You need (at least ffmpeg and libfaac on your system)

# Resolution of the target phone screen
DestWidth=480
DestHeight=320

if [ $# -ne 2 ]; 
then
	echo 1>&2 "Usage: $0 File.avi Dest.3gp"
	exit 255
fi

# Resolution of the video to convert
Width=$(  ffmpeg -i "$1" 2>&1 | egrep -i "Stream.*Video" | sed "s/.* \([0-9]*\)x\([0-9]*\) .*/\1/" )
Height=$( ffmpeg -i "$1" 2>&1 | egrep -i "Stream.*Video" | sed "s/.* \([0-9]*\)x\([0-9]*\) .*/\2/" )

if (( $DestHeight * $Width > $DestWidth * $Height ));
then
	DestHeight=$(( $DestWidth*$Height/$Width/2*2 ))
else
	DestWidth=$(( $DestHeight*$Width/$Height/2*2 ))
fi

echo Converting to ${DestWidth}x$DestHeight
ffmpeg -i "$1" -s ${DestWidth}x$DestHeight -b 300k -vcodec mpeg4 -ac 2 -ab 128k -acodec libfaac "$2"

Tethering your PC

You can use the Hero as a modem for your PC. First of all, it works only if you have a 3G connection active. Then you must have the HTC drivers installed on the PC. Then have the phone connected in either mass storage or Sync mode (for the 1.6 version) or modem mode (for the Android 2.1 version). Then activate the fairly well hidden option found at the bottom of the Wireless settings called "Internet connection sharing".

I couldn't get tethering to work on a Linux PC. Apparently the driver should be able to work with ndiswrapper... More on this in the next chapter.

So I get my connection on Windows, ssh works, ftp works, ping works, email works... But when I try to access the web, all I get are blank pages. Weird, huh ? As it happens, my operator states in their contract that I'm not allowed to use their 'unlimited' 3G connection to connect a PC. Well, fuck that, I pay for it and I'll use it any way I want, right ? Well, not quite: they try to enforce it by detecting if the access comes from the phone or from a PC. The only way they can do this is by checking the user agent field of the browser request. So an easy workaround is to use the User Agent Switcher Firefox add-on. Then you can either try with a blank user agent (usually the preferred way), or you can go to check your user agent with your phone, write it down and set it on your PC. The only downside is that some websites (facebook, Google News...) are optimized for the Phone and display in a simplified way.

Rooting the HTC Hero

A lot faster and easier than you can imagine, it can be done in under a minutes and 4 steps.

1. Go to the phone's [Setting][Applications] and allow the [Unknown Sources] option.
3. Go get AndRoot and download the xda file to the sda card of your phone (either connect the phone in disk-drive mode or put the card in a reader).
4. Mount the card on the phone and use a file browser such as OI File Manager to open the xda file.
5. Follow the instructions. Your phone is now rooted. You can run the app again to unroot the phone.

You can now go download applications that require root access such as the following essentials:

• Harald Mue's Wireless Tether. You can then access the Internet with your Linux PC without bothering with strange modem drivers or expensive 3G dongles. And share the connection with everyone on the bus if you wish !
• AdFree from BinTinCan for obvious reasons.
• Move Cache that will save space on the internal memory by putting some apps' cache on the card.