Going to get a htc hero , anybody have one ?

[Shpongle]

Im just wondering how it plays with linux , in terms of file transfers etc. Id like to hear your opinions on the phone and its pros and cons .
thanks

[gnomeuser]

I have one, I replaced it with a Nokia N900.

There are many good things about the Hero, the Sense interface e.g. is attractive. The centralized account system makes everything easy. I especially like the Calendar widget which I find extremely well designed and easy to use.

As far as I can tell in use everything just works Ubuntu, it's correctly detected and syncs with F-spot and Banshee. This is really great and one of the big attractions for me in general with Android. It just works.

Skype on Android is bit weird, it isn't allowed to use your data connection so it's rather useless since it just forwards calls to a regular phone number, which at least here in Denmark turns out to be very expensive.

The updates at least for my European model so far have only been able to be installed using a Windows only flashing program and HTC support is utterly unhelpful on the matter.

Every such update to date has wiped all your settings and basically restored the device to factory defaults which is a considerable drawback even if Android and the cloud storage for many important things such as contacts make this less of an issue.

The Hero currently comes only with Android 1.5 which precludes you from a number of Android features. While the Hero was HTCs top model just 7 months ago, it has yet to be updated to a more recent android release. They have also been dragging their feet on issuing such an update, constantly rebasing it to an ever increasing version of Android, adding delays. Currently the preparatory update for the Android update supposedly will be issued on the 7th of May, with the full 2.1 update coming in June.

The hardware is also last generation, it's fairly slow and laggy in use. The 2.1 update supposedly should make better use of the hardware. The camera also has a tendency to lag before taking the image making everything out of focus, and there is a halo issue as well.

I would personally forgo the Hero and go for a more recent model such as the HTC Desire (basically the Nexus One with Sense and an optical trackball).

[sydbat]

Im just wondering how it plays with linux , in terms of file transfers etc. Id like to hear your opinions on the phone and its pros and cons .
thanksI imagine because it runs Linux, it would play very nicely with Linux.

[tgm4883]

It mounts as a removable drive, so file transfers are really easy. Rhythmbox also detects it as a media player for easily transfering music over (I think banshee did it as well). I don't use this feature that much.

One problem I had with it is it comes with Android 1.5, which is terrible. This should be fixed this month for Sprint anyway. I've flashed it long ago to Android 2.1 and it is much better.

[Shpongle]

thanks for the replies , that is exactly what I was looking for. I would get the desire but id be stretching out for this as it is, (college student ;-)). It would be doubling as a music player too so I see it as a good investment in that sense. As it stands the cheapest I have seen it on pay as you go here in Ireland is 319.00
That would really be the most I could afford to fork out at the minute. I have a windows partition for games on my desktop if I needed it for anything

my phone broke last weekend and my ipod is on its way out and I refuse to be locked in by another apple product. I need to get a phone soon so im thinking the hero would be a good choice.