The Update

To update your Hero, go to Settings->About phone->System updates->Firmware update.

The update took about 10 minutes to install, weighed 3.7MB or so, and rebooted the phone twice – once to install and once to reboot after the installation, so make sure you don't need to make any important phone calls during that time.

After the update, I immediately noticed the broken application icons (issue #4 on my bug list) fixed. The phone seems is definitely quite a bit snappier, which I hope points in the direction of some fixes in the battery and lag department (issues #1 and #2).

Since there don't seem to be any official details out from HTC or Sprint at the moment (I found out about the update by doing a random Google search and arriving at a random Facebook post), I cannot see the final bug fix and feature list, but here's what I managed to gather so far from my own observations and online [1] [2]:

What's New

Fixes

• broken app icons are fixed. This issue was also known as the boot caching issue
• broken app names are somewhat fixed. Some of mine weren't but I reinstalled them and so far they display correctly
• the major battery draining 100% awake SMS and letting the phone go to sleep after boot bugs are fixed. I've gone ahead and uninstalled HandcentSMS to see if my visual voicemail notifications will come back (they seemed to have gone away after I switched to Handcent)
• not receiving SMS when low on space is fixed
• memory leak related to bluetooth is fixed
• dialer app using too much CPU bug is fixed
• daylight savings time calendar issue is fixed
• the stereo headphone issue is fixed

Improvements

• the phone is a lot snappier – the lag is pretty much gone in a lot of cases but it's still there in others, especially in the Phone app and the browser. For example, I killed the browser and started it again – it took 20 seconds before google.com was loaded, 10 of which I spent staring at an almost completely white screen
  I have a feeling it is due to fixing something with the cleaning up of the old uninstalled apps. My theory is that the Hero didn't uninstall the apps properly, perhaps leaving their cache behind, thus slowing down more and more as I tried out more and more apps
• Update: I just charged the battery and I think the battery charged a lot faster than before, which is a really good sign
• loading of app lists seems to be a lot faster. By that I mean any time the phone shows a list of installed applications, it seems to show up a lot faster than before (Add shortcut, Manage, etc)
• camera quality is improved

New Features

• app search – if you push the search button from anywhere inside the Market app, it now pops up the app search dialog rather than the regular google search
• there are 2 new icons during a phone call: mute and speaker. I took a photo of this, which you can see below
• the green Android dude looks more 3D-ish now – a minor but nice UI change

Problems

• a lot of users are reporting that some of their apps, including paid ones, have gone missing
• the haptic feedback (vibrate on press) in the Phone app is now permanently on, even though I turned it off in the keyboard settings. I am fairly sure it's either a bug or a new "feature" that we didn't want, as it doesn't respect phone-wide settings

Miscellaneous Notes

• the update did not fix the all-day event 1 day too early notification problem
• I did not find an update for the voicemail app that some people mentioned (mine is at v5.0.0.32)
• the "linked program is no longer installed on your phone" problem that I'm having with my Twidroid shortcut every time I update it is still there (it goes away after phone reboot)

Overall, I'm very happy that Sprint and HTC are coming through. I was really afraid they would wait for the next big thing (Android "Eclair" 2.0) instead of releasing the necessary bug fixes but, thankfully, that didn't happen.

What else did you notice with the new upgrade that I missed? Is anything broken?

• The Not So Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: My List Of 20+ Problems With HTC Hero
• HTC Hero Coming To Sprint October 11th! $179.99, Powerful, And Sexy. Here Is Why You Need To Own It
• How I Doubled My Android Phone's (HTC Hero) Battery Life or Just How Much Email Polling Affects Your Battery
• How To Fix Redrawing Problems In Your VNC
• My New Android Phone Wants Me To Do WHAT?

HTC, first of all, what. the. fuck. The idea of a more attractive UI was great, by all means, but did it really have to come at the expense of lagging down the whole phone? And by that I mean LAGGING. I would much rather have no added pwetty fluff than to literally be amazed when using my Garmin GPS because its UI is so responsive (until I got the Hero, this thought would have never crossed my mind).

Why is it that I have to miss phone calls because the Hero only gives me one or two rings before they go to voicemail? And half the time, right as I pull down the message on the screen that tells me that's what I have to do to answer the call, it doesn't pick up. Instead, I'm staring at a missed call.

Before I go on, I'd like to clarify that I'm still enjoying the Hero, mostly for making me feel a lot more connected on the go. However, the experience could have been a lot more enjoyable had HTC done a better job on the polish of the Hero core.

Some of these issues might be caused by Android, some might be caused by the fact that even though Android 2.0 has been available for a few weeks and 1.6 for a few months, the Hero is still running 1.5 – all thanks to the Sense UI.

But let me organize my thoughts in a nice numbered list. Everyone likes those, right? Be prepared – when a device affects me so much, I've got a lot to say.

My List Of Problems

1. Lag

This phone lags. At least the Sprint version of it, running Sense UI. And by lags, I mean most of the time it's worse than the Pre. Yeah, I went there. If you love lag, you will adore the Hero.

I'm not going to argue about rooting it or not using Sense. No. This is what HTC is making thousands of consumers use – and most of them won't ever consider touching the underlying OS. If you have an underpowered processor, HTC, don't you think the best thing you could have done is to try to compensate for it by making things faster instead of bloating it with garbage? Sprint, you didn't help either with your force-fed Nascar and NFL Mobile Live that we can't remove.

The browser lag is just beyond bearable. 16 seconds on average to load my plain Google.com homepage (not even iGoogle – just google.com). That's 10 seconds of staring at a blank screen, 4 more of staring at "getting sign-in details" and 4 more of loading the webpage. This is compared to 4 seconds on the Motorola Droid, side by side.

The keyboard lags. Often. Both typing and flipping.

Flash (the Adobe one) is cool but its performance on the Hero is pretty much unusable most of the time.

The lag is everywhere but this one takes the cake – the lag operating the dialer and the phone in general. Because each button press is unpredictable and can take between 0.5 and 5 seconds, there is no way to tell if the screen just didn't register the click or if it's just lagging behind. Thanks to this, I've dialed wrong numbers, hung up, and performed wrong functions multiple times.

My favorite is that it takes about 2-3 seconds for the last dialed number to show up in the recent numbers list after I finish the call, which means it then pushes all of the recent numbers down by one. So if I click a number I want to dial during that period of time, after the lag settles I will find that I actually just pressed a number above the one I wanted.

This list goes on.

2. Bad Battery Life

I thought the 1500mAh battery would give me plenty of juice. How foolish of me.

Between such battery draining bugs as letting your phone go to sleep when first turning it on, simply sending an SMS message, and using the Hero for email a few times a day, I'm left with 0-15% battery life by 10pm (even after applying known fixes).

In the morning, between the time I wake up and the time I get in the car, my battery would sometimes run down to 85%. Sometimes, however, it would still be at 98%, without doing anything differently. Does that make sense to you?

3. Long Bootup Time

There's nothing better than staring at the bootup screen for good 3-4 minutes before the phone becomes usable. If you think the Pre load time is bad, check out the Hero for some added fun.

Fine – it loads a pretty complex Linux based OS, I get it. But damn – it sure takes its time doing so.

Well, at least it doesn't say "Droid" in a robotic voice.

4. Application Chaos

Some applications' names change to their Java versions (such as com.p1.chompsms). Without me touching or updating them – it just happens over time. Some examples include Unit Converter (FCs upon start), Astro File Manager, Estos, ChompSMS, and Voice Caller ID.

Some applications' icons are randomly changed and mutilated (for example, Remember The Milk and Flixster).

Some applications stop working and start force closing (for example, Flixster, WP To Go, Unit Converter).

Some applications say "shortcut is no longer available" when clicked from the home screen or the All Programs list (for example, Twidroid). This seems to sometimes go away after a restart but surely comes back upon the next program update.

Not sure who to blame for all these but it seems like non-Hero owners don't seem to be experiencing such issues.

And the solution? "Without rooting, the only workaround for the issue is to uninstall the app and reinstall it. Still, after rebooting, you may have the same issues. Again, a reinstall is the only fix," suggests a post on AndroidForums.

Someone on the XDA-Developers forums provides more details – this is, apparently, due to a mismanaged boot cache.

5. Voicemail/SMS Problems

Problem – "after Internal Memory reaches a certain low level of free space (one user heard around around 40MB free from HTC Support), you may stop receiving SMS messages and voicemail. No amount of clearing space will allow messages to resume" – description credit AndroidForums.

Solution? "The best method of prevention currently is to ensure adequate memory is available on the device to prevent the flag from being set" – SprintUsers forum.

On a related note, the following bug has also been reported: "Over time, Internal Memory free space dwindles and no amount of clearing apps frees the space. This will also cause the above issue of SMS & Voicemail messages not being received once a critical amount of free space is reached".

I stopped getting my voicemail notifications a long time ago. Texts are still getting through somehow but they should definitely be afraid of stepping on these landmines any day now.

There are 3 ways to get your voicemail – are you kidding me? You can use the visual voicemail app (mine doesn't work anymore), you can dial your phone number (which is the same as pressing on the envelope or holding the 1 key), or you can dial some 408-970-0000 number (which seems to be for voice SMS but yet handles my voicemail). Did you just hack voice SMS to do visual voicemail, HTC and Sprint? This is a job not so well done.

6. The Keyboard

Let me say this – the keyboard on the Hero kind of sucks. It is very inaccurate, even after calibration, and doesn't guess letters nearly as well as the iPhone does.

To be fair, the Hero shines at the spelling correction. I can type 5 letters wrong in a single word, and the Hero will still suggest the right correction most of the time. My complaint here is that it doesn't detect missed spaces at all, so 2 words run on each other would not be recognized and corrected.

Now, the keyboard flip – it is uncomfortably laggy (see point #1 again). 2-5 seconds per flip is not good enough.

7. Calendar Notifications Are Broken

Sometimes I'm alerted about a calendar event a day early.

Sometimes an hour early (that's what happened after the daylight savings time shift).

Some users reported that their Hero shifted to daylight savings a week early.

How in the world does this even get through QA, HTC?

No remind me on time option? A 5 minute reminder is as close as I can get. Bleh.

8. GPS Randomly Thinks I'm All Over California

At times, my Google Maps app can no longer lock onto the GPS signal and starts jumping all over the state. Last time it first told me I was in Sacramento (one of the turn directions next to it had a misspelling "Socramento", wtf?), then Santa Rosa, then as I kept driving and pressing My Location, it switched to a random street about a mile away, then dumped me in the ocean.

During this time, the GPS icon kept blinking and didn't stay solid. Also, once it picked up a location, it didn't continue to update it as it should do.

Only a phone restart solves the problem but not for long.

Sometimes, the Sprint GPS can no longer get a lock on my location at all and any route calculations get stuck.

Sometimes, the blinking GPS icon stays on all the time, thus, I'm assuming, draining the crap out of my battery.

9. Usability: No Easy Way To Switch Between Running Apps

Alright, here's where the Pre has everyone beat – the card switching is superior to any app management I've seen. Here I was thinking Android would have a decent way of switching between apps – at least as good as Palm's.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that switching between running apps is completely impractical on Android. You simply can't do it. Ever use Alt-TAB in Windows? Feel like you feel powerless without it? That's how I feel on the Hero.

The closest things I figured out so far are:

• hold the Home button, which brings up a list of 6 most recently used apps. Not only is this longer than I am comfortable with, but it also fails to actually accomplish what I want – and that is switch between running apps
• get a task manager app, such as Advanced Task Manager. This works but this is even slower than the previous method and requires even more clicks
• go back to the home screen/app list and run the program I want again. Chances are, this would summon the sleeping program from the background. Not the best approach either.

Of course, this is not HTC's fault – Android really let me down here (take note from Palm on this one).

10. The 5MP Camera – It Sucks

The Hero has a notoriously bad camera, which doesn't even have a flash (a big drawback). It does a pretty bad job at autofocusing. Both the camera, the camcorder, and the albums take uncomfortably long to load (see point #1 again).

11. Plastic Chrome Trim Cracking And Falling Apart

Out of nowhere a pretty large chunk (1/2 to 3/4 inch) of the plastic chrome trim broke off around the USB plug. I do not seem to be the only one.

I do not expect the case to last much longer either. The "teflon" does feel nice to the touch but it's still plastic.

12. The Phone Unlocks In My Pocket

Did you know the double press on the Menu button unlocks the phone? It's a great feature, isn't it (until it unlocks the phone in your pocket)?

And no, it's not possible to disable it.

13. Out Of Space? No More Apps For You

I ran out of the built-in [measly] space recently. Why? Because it's not possible on the Android (even as of 2.0) to install apps to the SD card, unless you root the phone. This is not an HTC issue and more of an Android limitation but it is definitely part of my Hero experience.

14. Dust Under The Glass?

Many users are reporting that dust is getting under the Hero's screen. Thankfully, I'm not one of those users. For now.

15. Can't Remove Words Added To The Dictionary

The keyboard suggest mechanism in the Hero is great – I can't argue about that. In fact, without it, the Hero would be doomed.

However, sometimes a mistyped word gets added to the internal dictionary and there is no way to get it out of there, without clearing the whole thing. Annoying.

16. No Way To Turn Screen Off During Call

The Hero doesn't have a proximity sensor, which results in a few problems:

• sometimes I press buttons with my face
• sometimes I want to turn off the screen to at least try to prevent my face from doing the above, except there is no way to do so. The reflex to press the Power button which usually turns the screen off results in an immediate end of the current call. I am embarrassed to say how many times I've done this. Oh, and to end the current call when the screen is on, a single press of the Power button is sufficient but two are needed when the screen is off – took me a while to get this right.

17. No Application Access To Bluetooth

I know this is purely an Android 1.5 issue as Android 2.0 has the new bluetooth API but we still can't utilize it because we're stuck at 1.5. Thus, I can't have bluetooth turned on and off on a schedule (via Timeriffic, for example) and, of course, the biggest issue – no bluetooth tethering.

18. High Latency Wireless Network

From what I can tell, there's a much higher latency (the time between a request is sent and a response is on its way) on the Hero than on the Droid. I'm willing to actually accept that it's probably 90% due to Sprint's 3G network vs Verizon's. I never imagined the difference was this vast, however. When I was playing with the Droid, it seemed like I had a device from the future in my hands.

WiFi performance is not great either – in fact, the Market application downloads often hang in the "starting…" mode until I turn WiFi off.

19. Trackball Almost Useless In Text Editing

I like having the trackball, in theory. However, when editing text, it is almost unusable, unless I want to move only a few characters over. If I want to go to the beginning of the line from the middle, it will take ages, as each swipe only moves one character at a time (there is no built-in acceleration).

I'm not alone in this conclusion.

20. Unneeded Junk Keeps Running

I don't need some of the apps that come stock but they insist on running every time I start the phone. Some insist on running all the time, even if I set up Taskiller or Advanced Task Manager to hunt them down. A few good examples are: Peep, IM, Footprints, Gmail (I use the Mail app for gmail), Messages, and Stocks.

Conclusion

The Hero changed the way I do things on the go. The email, calendar, all kinds of syncs, apps – they've all changed my life and I love the Hero for that. I will not be able to go back to a regular phone. I feel too… connected.

There are lots of bugs. Lots. Perhaps Android 2.0 will fix some of them and the rest will be fixed over time. However, I am not sure HTC will be ever able to fix the lag without revamping the Hero's hardware. Although, I also heard that the HTC Droid Eris, which runs the same hardware, is not nearly as laggy. I will have to check it out to confirm.

I apologize in advance for any omissions, inaccuracies, or grammatical errors but it is 3am now as I'm finishing this article. Also, if you find the language harsh – well, that's just me.

Are you happy with your Hero? Are you experiencing any of these problems? Share with me.

• Sprint And HTC Release The First HTC Hero Firmware Update 1.56: Fixes Major Bugs, Adds Small Tweaks
• How I Doubled My Android Phone's (HTC Hero) Battery Life or Just How Much Email Polling Affects Your Battery
• HTC Hero Coming To Sprint October 11th! $179.99, Powerful, And Sexy. Here Is Why You Need To Own It
• My New Android Phone Wants Me To Do WHAT?
• Meet Firefox For Mobile [Video + Feature Highlights + More Info]

The main reason to use Digsby

1. Digsby saves all information, including IM names, groups, nicks, its own client settings, themes, etc (of course this excludes the password). If I'm logged in from two places, Digsby shows both away messages (at least in the widget). It just god damn works. Remember Trillian or Pidgin? You make 10 groups on your home PC, stick 50 people in each, then go to your laptop at work and nothing is the same as it is at home! Digsby to the rescue.

Notice how I'm logging into a Digsby account, which will be used to retrieve and sync all of my settings.

Other reasons (everyone on Digg loves top 10 lists, right?)

2. Digsby seems to have great fast developers really in touch with the community. Any time there is a problem, they push a message to all users that comes in a form of a Digsby announcement popup. They try to fix problems and usually do it fast. There are bugs here and there but they're nothing critical. If you tried Digsby a few months ago and didn't like it for some reason, I encourage you to give it another try – they really do develop fast. From revision numbers, it seems Digsby developers use SVN in the 15,000 revision number range (that sounds pretty active) – hooray! I can monitor how relatively active Digsby is by comparing this number from time to time. When was the last time Trillian released anything that wasn't a miniscule bug fix? Trillian Astra reminds me of Perl 6 (ha ha, programmer joke).

3. For the first time ever I feel comfortable combining the same people that have multiple IM accounts into one entity (and renaming them whatever I want). I don't really care what IM pops up on their side as long as it reaches the destination. I can also arrange the IM accounts for that person in the order of IM preference, so if AIM is on top and MSN is on the bottom, Digsby will show the AIM icon next to their name, and if they're not on AIM, then MSN. You get the point. I can always pick which account to send from and to at any point during the conversation.

Thaya, you're now popular (Sorry!). And a freak, with so many accounts. Do I give a crap which of his 7 accounts Thaya is logged into? That's right, I don't.

4. Digsby supports Facebook chat just as if it were AIM or MSN (except people sign on and off a lot more often and you can't delete them from the list). It also supports Facebook, twitter, and MySpace (ugh) mini-feed-like updates straight to my desktop. In fact, I get to actually see every Facebook update, which is not the case with the mini-feed (it filters way too much). Additionally, I can set my current status without logging into facebook.com.

5. The Digsby widget, yeah, check it out on the right. There's no need for you to be logged into anything to send me a message. And the cool part is that all visitors show up right in my list the moment they enter the site and disappear the moment they leave, so I know how many people are online at any given time. Feel free to try it out. I already had a few interesting discussions with visitors who are complete strangers and I'm loving it. You can even consider it a mini live tech support.

6. I LOVE how you can customize where and which icons show up in your IM list. Online status, IM network, and a mini buddy icon, left, right, any combination. Such a fine grained seemingly small feature but a very nice touch.

7. Reply box in IM popups. I just type my short answer in there if I don't want to bother popping the main chat window back up. Now if only there was a keyboard shortcut to activate that little box (who wants to mouse any more?)…

8. The first client where updating my Winamp status to all the networks actually works. Yes, others may have it too but so far everything I've tried was buggy. For example, Google talk updates once, and then forgets about it. Digsby never forgets.

9. Skin support with many customizations. http://digsbies.org/site/project/Skins is a good place to start.

10. New email notifications support for Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, IMAP, and POP3. The last 2 are of special interest.

Now my wishlist

Come on Digsby, you can do it!

• a Linux client. It's supposedly coming soon, but how soon? Windows is the only platform supported today.
• Edit: steve from digsby messaged me with this: MSN reconnect bug is fixed and will be pushed in the next update. Reconnect doesn't always work when I get my network back or come back from sleep mode. Just make it work, Digsby. Especially bad is MSN, it just never wants to reconnect (but hey, that was my main complain with Trillian for the past 3 years). I see this a lot:

• RSS feed integration, similar to how Facebook integration works. I want to read planetmysql.org posts as soon as they get there.
• transparency. What's up with that? I want everyone to at least squint trying to read my messages behind my back. Ideally, a window would solidify when it gets focus and go transparent again when it loses it (put it all into settings, though, let me control it).
• I can't italicize, bold, etc a word or a selection. It just does it to all the text I'm typing. That should be common sense.
• Added 06/15/08: off the record mode + encrypted conversations would be really sweet.
• sometimes the contact list changes don't sync fast enough, so if I close Digsby and reopen it, they won't be there. I'd like to see a live save status, something that turns green once everything is synced.
• minimize to tray. I can already close to tray, but I want to minimize to it too – hey, I'm used to it from AIM. Wanna fight about it? Fixed a long time ago.
• I'd like to have a setting to not show Digsby in the task bar, like Trillian. There’s a setting for this already that I missed, it’s under ‘Buddy List’, thanks steve from digsby.
• It's not always obvious inside the chat window when a friend goes offline, for instance for AIM. It's also not always obvious if you're IMing someone who is not available (there should be a warning back in response to an IM).
• it's not clear if a person who IMed me is in my contact list. I'd like to know that, as well as which group they belong to.
• the close button that suddenly shows up on each tab when I hover is very annoying and sometimes I close IM windows by mistake.

So take Digsby out for a spin, I guarantee you'll like at least something about it.

• How To Fix Palm Pre's "Error Sending Mail" Problem
• [Updated x3] Goodbye Outlook, I Don't Need You Anymore – Gmail Now Lets You Paste Images Directly From Clipboard
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• How I Doubled My Android Phone's (HTC Hero) Battery Life or Just How Much Email Polling Affects Your Battery
• Sprint And HTC Release The First HTC Hero Firmware Update 1.56: Fixes Major Bugs, Adds Small Tweaks

• the database
• CPU
• memory
• IO
• disk latency
• network latency
• slow queries

• 300 platforms (300 remote agents collecting data)
• 2,100 servers
• 21,000 services (10 services per server), sounds feasible
• 468,000 metrics (20 metrics per service)
• 28,800,000 metric data rows per day
• larger deployments have a lot more of these (sounds crazy)

• measurement_id
• timestamp
• value
• primary key (timestamp, measurement_id)

• agent collects data and sends reports to server with multiple data points
• server batch inserts metric data points
• if network connection fails, agent continues to collect but server "backfills" unavailable
• when agent reconnects, spooled data overwrite backfilled data points (why not use REPLACE for all inserts?)

• INSERT INTO TABLE (a,b,c) VALUES (0,0,0), (1,1,1),…
• using MySQL batch insert statements vs prepared statements with multiple queries in other databases seems to improve overall performance by 30%
• batch inserts are limited by 'max_allowed_packet'

• set unique_checks=0, insert, set unique_checks=1 (definitely need to make sure data is valid first)
• set foreign_key_checks=0, insert, set foreign_key_checks=1 (same concerns as above)
• Hyperic doesn't use the 2 above

• when regular INSERT fails, retry batch with INSERT ON DUPLICATE KEY syntax
• it's much slower but it allows

• queue metric data from separate agent reports
• minimize number of inserts, connections, CPU load
• maximize workload efficiency
• optimal configuration for 700 agents
• 3 workers
• 2000 batch size seems to work best
• queue size of 4,000,000
• this seems to peak at 2.2mil metric data inserts per minute

• inspired by rrdtool
• lower resolution tables track min, avg, and max
• data compression runs hourly
• size limit 2 days
• every hour, data is rolled up into another table that holds hourly aggregated values with size limit 14 days, then that one gets rolled up into a monthly table, etc
• this is is a good approach if you don't care about each data point

I'm overwhelmed by the amount of "you know"s from the speaker. Parasite words, ahh! Sorry Charles

• measurement data split into 18 tables, representing 9 days (2 per day)
• they didn't want to do more than 2 SELECTs to get data per day, hence such sharding
• oddly, Charles didn't actually use the word 'shard' once
• tables truncated, rather than deleting rows => huge performance boost
• truncation vs deletion
• deletion causes contention on rows
• truncation doesn't produce fragmentation
• truncation just drops and recreates the table – single DDL operation

• every InnoDB table has a special index called the clustered index (based on primary key) where the physical data for the rows is stored
• advantages
• selects faster – row data is on the same page where the index search leads
• inserts in (timestamp) order – avoid page splits and fragmentation
• shows comparison between non-clustered index and clustered index (see slides)

• [MySQL] Deleting/Updating Rows Common To 2 Tables – Speed And Slave Lag Considerations
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: EXPLAIN Demystified (Tuesday 2:00PM)
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Performance Guide For MySQL Cluster (Tuesday 10:50AM)
• Swapping Column Values in MySQL
• MySQL Indexing Considerations Of Implementing A Priority Field In Your Application