SlashGear Japan
Don’t ask how, and don’t ask from where (though we’re guessing HTC, frankly), but MoDaCo’s Paul has managed to acquire the upcoming firmware update for the HTC Hero and installed it on his test device. As we hoped, his feedback is that it speeds the smartphone up no end, with menus far quicker to respond and panning between homescreen pages more smooth.
Video demo after the cut
The only other really noticable change from the original ROM is that you now get Java on the Hero, as you can see in the screenshot above. Otherwise there are a few bugfixes but it’s the speed that’s the headline feature here.
Paul says he thinks the ROM “takes the [Hero] to the next level”, and considering we called it the best Android device so far that’s a pretty impressive level indeed. Our only point of concern is timing for its release: HTC told us it would arrive “in the coming weeks”, but Paul seems to have been told “a couple of months”.
4 Responses to “HTC Hero new ROM gets video demo”
nxd August 22, 2009
Have they also tweaked the ROM to improve the photo/video quality ?
+2seems to me that your demo only shows a newly booted hero moving about on the home screen. the speed trouble only starts happening on the old rom when you start opening apps and they aren’t shut down properly. could you try this again showing opening a web browser, mail app, and maybe twitter app, then go back to the home screen and scroll about. my bet is you’ll have the same speed issues as everyone else. don’t get me wrong, I love my hero, even without this update, but I don’t think a software update can fix a hardware problem. fixing htc hero speed problems can only be done by installing a decent speed sdhc card, or them allowing a person to choose which apps close and which don’t instead of running all apps in the background all the time.
+3The software update is meant to make optimizations to the User Interface (UI), so that while apps are running in the background, TouchFLO isn’t so feature-laden and intensive. These optimizations are meant to fine tune the hardware, and how it works with the software. While the video doesn’t go into detail regarding apps, and it would help to see the things you talk about running, a lot of people were having lag just opening up the menu, or going from screen to screen, without running any apps in the background.
If you’re trying to kill running applications, I’d recommend running TasKiller or any one of the other task killing applications within the Android Market. While downloading a third-party solution might not be the greatest in some people’s eyes, it gets the job done, and it will make the Hero run a lot more fluidly.
+4hi there. I am from the UK and my htc herop does not have the Java widget displayed on the above screenshot. i have seen first-time glimpses at the Hero on youtube and theirs also featured the java widget.
Would there be any reason i don’t have one displayed? i have today upgraded my rom for my hero from the htc support website, so iv ruled that option out.
any ideas?
Neutral