Arnljot.com

Jeg har kjøpt meg en ny HTC Hero som jeg elsker.

Mine efaringer fra den første uken er veldig positive, men de negative momentene har jeg samlet i en liten e-post jeg sendte til HTC kundeservice.

Her er den vedlagt.

Hi,

I’m the happy owner of a HTC Hero phone. I’ve had it for one week now, and I’m mostly quite happy with it.

But there is a huge unleashed potential of improvement in this phone, and I’m quite surprised that no reviewers have pointed this out.

But I’m sending this experience report to you, hoping that you’ll take notice and improve it.

1) Gmail Application buttons
Why are “Archive”, “Labels” and “Delete” on the frontpage of each mail? The most used function reply is buried on the bottom of each mail. And when you click the “menu” button, all three functions are repeated again. With no “reply”, “reply to all” or “forward” in sight.

My suggestion to you:
Put “reply”, “delete” and “labels” on the bottom of the screen when reading mail.
Long clicking on reply should give the alternative to “reply to all” and “forward”. While long clicking on “labels” should give the alternative to archive. Long clicking on “delete” should give “report spam”.
This way all most used functions are available on the front page of a mail.

The gmail application is the application which gives me most grief as it’s to me the most central application of the phone, and clearly the one which has had a lax treatment by UI QA during development.

2) MMS authoring
Try explaining to a new user how to author an mms with pictures in it, and how to set the subject. This is way too akward. You need to atleast autoset the subject line from the first line of text from slide one, or reuse an email authoring editor.

3) Camcorder
The limit to 250K setting is way too buried on the phone. Put a settings widget for this on the viewfinder, and call it “MMS quality”, 250K is way to technical for most users.

4) Google maps
It can’t use gestures to zoom, PDF and browser can. This is an important missing feature.

5) Browser
How do you go to the homepage? It can be set, but after the browser has started, and browsing has been going on for a while, there is no way to get to the home page. This has to be fixed. Also a gesture to go back is needed.

6) Contacts
When you have contacts from multiple sources (google, pc synchronizing and exchange), and it’s clearly the same contact (name and numbers match). A scheme for merging should be offered. It’s frustrating to have people listed three or four times on the phone.

7) Exchange support
Needs to be improved. For the moment only RoadSynch will allow me to synchronize with my work server. My employeer allows all devices, but the native client still won’t do any synch with it, only authenticates and verifies the user.

These seven issues are the first ones that I’ve identified after one week of use.

I’ve noticed that you’ve prioritised to first fix the speed of the phone, very well. But please don’t forget usability too. The gmail issues are just simply too important to ignore. I look forward to you addressing these issues in some way.

Meanwhile, I’m in love with my HTC hearo and look forward to do Android apps for it!

Kind regards,
Arnljot Arntsen