Here is my 937th instalment of the DroidDog Hero series. Seriously though, I shipped the phone off today so if I missed a question that requires a video answer, it just isn’t happening. My speaking volume jumps up and down a bit depending on what time of day or night a given segment was recorded, so you’ll have excuse the Billy Mays effect.

EDIT: Why did I think you needed root to run Cose Everything, Advanced Task Manager, etc.? That is wrong.

A:

B:

You asked for it, so here it is. I’m not counting this one as a questions video because the segment is five minutes long. As I said, I’ve got one more Q&A vid (may be two parts!), the camera review, and then the phone is gone. Ask those questions, folks!

A resourceful user over at community.sprint.com has discovered the cause of, and solution to, a major juice suck evident in HTC’s Hero. Apparently, sending an SMS sends a signal to the dialer, then a bunch of complicated stuff happens, and your phone never goes to sleep. Thanks a lot, messaging app.

To see how this is affecting your battery usage, go to:

Menu < Settings < About Phone < Status < Awake Time

For more detail, download a free app from the Market called Spare Parts and go to:

Spare Parts < Battery History < Partial Wake Usage < Since Last Unplugged

Is your dialer out of control? Mine too! Time to download ChompSMS or Handcent SMS.

images from community.sprint.com




It will take me a day or two to determine the practical difference resulting from a switch to ChompSMS, but I do text quite a bit. So… I’m hoping for substantial improvement.

Big thanks to @erickarlpeters, @the_real_Newman, and everyone else who sent this to me.

I’ve had a lot of people contact me requesting that I run the speedtest app; both over EvDo and Wi-Fi. Results can vary wildly for both, so this really doesn’t reflect what you should expect. But you wanted to see it, so here it is. There is also a quick demo of the browser over EvDo.

I have two Hero videos left: the camera review and final questions. I still have some to get to, but now is the time to ask yours if you haven’t yet.

I ended up spending a lot of time on the browser because you all sent me a ton of questions about it and because it was the source of my most significant Hero complaints. After a factory reset, my focus has changed. The browser is actually fine under the right (unrealistic?) settings and circumstances. Sure, I’d like better performance, but this is no longer a deal breaker in my eyes.

I did my best while shooting this to address a list of about 25-30 questions readers and viewers have sent in. In the meandering part 1, I go from the ideal browsing environment to your average-to-heavy load. In part 2, I’ll beat that thing to death. (cont.)

Part 1:

This next one should be called Browsing the Bog. Here I push the Hero to its limit and offer some final thoughts on the browser. What it comes down to is that it pretty much won me over after a factory reset, although I would like to see a bit more processing power – more for the keyboard while browsing than anything else.

Part 2: