Tony Cordova

After dealing with AT&T’s mediocre service, expensive plans, and annoying business practices I officially decided to switch carriers and get a new phone.  My smartphone experience included a Samsung Blackjack and a Blackberry Curve, both of which were solid phones but lacked personality. The iPhone was ever present but I didn’t want to have to stick with AT&T, plus what better way to give up personality than to buy an iPhone.  When I was seeking out a phone that would give me a feature rich experience as well as being open ended and customizable the answer was obvious: Android.  A friend of mine has the T-Mobile G1 and loves it show it off, especially to iPhone toting friends.

So, to make a long story short I had my eyes set on the HTC Hero. When I became aware of it the phone was only available in Europe and had not been announced for the US yet, then Sprint announced it would be available on October 11th exclusively with them. The phone was styled differently specifically for Sprint, but I though the new design was actually better than the original. Enough talk, here’s the phone:

In the week that I’ve had it I have discovered the really great things about the phone and the not-so-great things. I will outline them simply here:

Pros:
Incredible amount of functionality
5 MP camera
Healthy amount of apps
Customizability
Great GPS including turn-by-turn
Most apps are free
Touchscreen is responsive in the right ways
Background applications
Standard mini USB cable connection.

It’s hard to say much else because this phone has pretty much everything you can imagine. You name it, it probably has it.

Cons:
Battery isn’t as great as I would hope
Phone can be kind of sluggish, I don’t think the handset can keep up with the operating system
Not a gaming platform

Here is a video and come more pictures:

These pictures were taken with the phone:

My Macbook Pro:

System uptime:
25 Days, 4 Hours, 41 Minutes, 15 Seconds

Total bandwidth in:
48.57 GB

Total bandwidth out:
30.22 GB

Memory usage:
iTunes 107 MB
Firefox 79 MB
Twhirl 58 MB

CPU:
Tasks 77

Hard Drive:
Total 200.88 GB
Free 6.60 GB

The most interesting thing is the bandwidth.  In less than a month I have used 48.5 GB of down bandwidth, which is not as bad as I thought.  But there’s also my desktop, my roomate’s desktop, and the PS3 that all download things on a daily basis.  I am curious to see how much we download altogether.

Looks like I have a month to save up.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

I am apartment hunting now, looking for something in the Clovis/East Fresno area, preferrable close to the 168.  So if you have any recommendations please send them my way.

Mario Kart is really fun, singleplayer and multiplayer.  3952-7861-3557

Also, I am both a Mac and PC user and I cannot understand why Microsoft uses this ridiculous architecture for their operating system.  namely the registry, pagefile, and ntldr.  I am not an expert by any means but I do know how all three work conceptually.  I constantly work on computers that have corrupt files that render the OS immobile and there is no easy way to fix it.  In OS X there is no registry, ntldr, or pagefile, therefore there is a better chance of getting the system back up and running the way it used to be if there is corruption.  Obviously it is not black and white like that but after an extensive amount of tech support for both I appreciate Macs so much more, just hope they don’t bring back the eMac.  I think if Microsoft took a few tips from the *nix architecture we would all be much happier.

I wonder how security would be affected though.