I am seaempty (also known as Chris) and this is a selection of my photographs and writing for you to peruse. I hope you enjoy!
This work by Chris Thornton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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As my Ipod Touch appears to be on its way out, and I was due a mobile phone upgrade, I have taken the plunge and got myself an HTC Hero. I could have gone for an Iphone, but my experience with the Touch has put me off getting another Apple product. I won’t go into too much detail, but the first Touch I had was faulty out of the box, and the second has only lasted two years. When I spend that amount of money on a product, I want it to be reliable, and not have to pay for additional firmware upgrades.
So I now have the Hero, and the first impressions are very good indeed. I think I timed getting the Hero quite well, as HTC recently released a new ROM update which makes navigating the screens and menus an absolute dream. Having used a Touch, it’s pretty close between the two, in terms of the touch screen navigation. I did have concerns that the Touch would be vastly superior in this department (as I’ve heard from some), but it really is too close to call. I did play around with the original ROM before I upgraded, and it was very laggy. The new ROM makes a very welcome improvement.
One of the main reasons I went for an Android phone, is my love of Google. I use a ridiculous amount of their products, and the ability to utilise them all on my mobile certainly appealed. From my Calendar and Contacts, to Google Maps with Latitude, it’s all set up at first start-up. There are even some nice surprises, like Google Listen, which can manage my weekly podcasts. I found a decent program called Salling Media Sync, which syncs my music stored in iTunes.
The Android Market lacks the polish of Apple App Store, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some very useful additions to HTC’s default offerings. Itsmoirob recently purchased a Hero too, and has detailed some of the apps on his blog. I would agree with most of his choices - TasKiller is very useful, especially as Peep, HTC’s native Twitter client, appears to be affected by “Twitpocalypse II”. I get the “com.htc.provider” error message when it’s active, so TasKiller comes in very handy. I downloaded Twidroid instead, and this is very, very good.
The HTC Hero is certainly better than I had expected. Battery life is good (better than my C905), and the GPS is excellent. My only disappointments so far are that Google haven’t made a Blogger app, or a Google Reader app. Oh, and that Opera Mini 5 beta isn’t available on Android yet. That is going to be amazing.
