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Comment by paul9290 | Hacker News Reader

Last weekend I spent buying, customizing, replacing and then a few days later taking the HTC Hero(Android phone) back to Sprint. I ended up getting an iPHone after all that, as 2 Hero's headphone jack malfunctioned and the thing runs extremely slow/laggy & not as responsive as the iPhone when typing/interacting with it.

Though one thing I do miss about that Andriod phone was real time updates of Twitter, Facebook & Gmail, as well as background apps capable. I have not found an iPhone app that provides real time updates of the aforementioned.

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I'm a gadget nut and after a couple years as an iPhone user... I decided it was time to take the jump to an android powered phone. Aside from the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack w/o a usb adapter, I really like the phone I chose, the MyTouch from T-Mobile (HTC Magic).

Prior to rooting (you can think of it as equivalent to jailbreaking on an iPhone) my phone and installing Cyanogen's mod I was pretty unhappy with the phone overall. Sure it was a great device, but it was still shadowed by my iPhone experience. The keyboard was slow, not as responsive. I can type real fast on an iPhone, but on the Android phone I felt handicapped.

After rooting the phone and installing Cyanogen, as well as the HTC keyboard (instead of the base Android one), I absolutely love it. I have a slight glitch which has been apparently found out to be a small kernel bug (http://code.google.com/p/cyanogenmod/issues/detail?id=329), but my experience hasn't been bad as some of the other people.

Performance is on-par with my iPhone now, especially with the keyboard. I really like HTC's keyboard. Lots of enhancements with the Cyanogen mod as well. That's one thing I really love about the Android community, is the open-ness (duh) and the number of ROM's out there you can play around with.

One thing I don't like (which isn't so much of a problem with a rooted phone and the underground hacker community) is all of the platform specific stuff out there from companies like HTC and Motorola. The HTC Hero is a perfect example of a phone with a totally modified Android OS that looks great, but is specific to that device. Why can't I run that on my Magic? Why can't someone run it on their Moto phone? You can of course, as I mentioned previously thanks to the community, but why aren't all of these awesome things being made available to everyone? It's an open handset alliance after all.

Anyway, sorry for that incoherent blob of text. I was so happy to scan through these screenshots today, I'm super excited for 2.0!

The various Android handset makers are not only competing against RIM & Apple but also with each other. A good UI is a huge competitive edge. It would be interesting to see HTC for example offer their UI on the Android market place for any handset. I wonder if that's something Google would allow into the catalog?

UI's like that are not applications; they are actually built into the core of Android. Changing system themes, even on a rooted phone, requires downloading an image specific to the ROM you're running, and flashing that over top of your current ROM. Changing to another theme, or reverting to the standard theme, requires re-flashing your phone every time.

That said, I would love to see installable themes where the user can download/select/apply multiple themes on the fly without flashing/rebooting their phone, but at the moment, I think it's a result of Android taking the simple/efficient route for implementation.

I got an HTC Hero this week and love it! Haven't had any problems :)

It would be interesting to know if paul9290's Hero had the latest software update on it. The update certainly helped my Hero feel snappier, and has improved battery life a bit. Pre-update I was pretty happy with the Hero, though it was a little laggy at times, post update it's much smoother.

That said, I don't run many widgets which constantly update. When I was running a lot of widgets some of them slowed the phone down a lot more than others and it feels to me like one or two dodgy widgets could destroy the experience of using this phone.

As I've been very busy recently I've turned off a lot of the things that update constantly on my phone as I found them a distraction. From that angle, I can understand some of the thinking behind the iPhone not having programmes running in the background, though that's a different conversation.

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