Rob's Blog

Update: Before you try any of the following, make sure you have the latest ROM update (2.73.405.5) from HTC (UK version here). This makes a huge difference to speed and is highly recommended.

Original article follows:

I love my HTC Hero Android phone, but one of it’s biggest criticisms is its speed (or lack of it), and occasional lags. I too had noticed these lags more and more.

Don’t automatically blame HTC Sense though. There are some simple things you can do which may give you a noticeable speed increase. Follow these steps in order, until you get the improvement you are after:

Uninstall the crap

If you’re like me, one of the first things you did when you got your new phone was to get straight on the Market and install every free app that looked fun. You’ve probably not used most of these more than once or twice, if at all, and half of them probably don’t even work properly.

Most of these apps won’t be causing any problem, but there’s a chance that some of them use up resources even when you don’t know they are running. Whether they are or not, it’s worth uninstalling them – it will save space and make your “All Programs” easier to navigate!

Open up the Market, tap “My Downloads”. You will see a list of all the apps you’ve installed. From here you can select them and tap “Uninstall”. While you’re there why not update any apps for which it says “Update available” – newer versions may well be better behaved with resources.

I uninstalled a fart app, a bubble-wrap popper, and a few more.

Tweak some settings

Many apps run in the backgroud. Generally this is a good thing as it can give some great functionality (such as notifying you of new tweets, or monitoring network usage), but they all use precious system resources.

Work out what’s running (most will offer notifications or have options like “open at startup” which should give you a clue),  and decide whether you use the functionality. For example, the Babbler Facebook app can run in the background and give you notifications. This is great, but I get emails (and therefore gmail notifications) anyway so it’s not something I need. I reduced the frequency of Peep (Twitter client) updates, as I really didn’t need to know waht people are up to every 20 mins. I also set the contacts Facebook sync to every 12 hours.

Don’t forget all this widgets on your homepages se resources, so get rid of any you don’t use. The full page ones are nice, but is it much harder to open the app than to switch to that page (and wait for it to refresh)?

I don’t know how much of this made any significant difference, but if you don’t need it running, its definitely worth a go.

Search for a culprit

After trying all of the above, my Hero was still a bit slower than I would have liked. I decided there must by something causing the problem, and I eventually traced t down to a widget/app I had downloaded called QuickCalendar. It’s a great app (I wanted a homescreen widget that would display more than one calendar entry, and only from selected calendars), but unfortunaly has some bugs, and also seemed to be the culprit for my slowdown. I noticed a significant speed increase once I uninstalled this app. I would like to add that I’m not sure this was causing the issue – see the response from Jim in the comments.

It may take some trial and error to find the culprit. Try uninstalling or disabling one thing at a time and see if it makes any difference. It may of course be that there is nothing causing a problem and you’re just being impatient!

There are of course other things you could try. You could try switching to the standard home screen instead of TouchFlo, although I’m unconvinced it makes a difference. I also noticed that when my phone lost the Facebook login details (not sure what caused this) it seems a little bit faster. I may have been imagining it. Maybe it’s because I have over 500 Google contacts, and quite a lot of Facebook friends, and it was just a lot of data being syncronised? Either way, if you don’t use this feature much it might be worth disabling.

So, my phone is now much faster, and as an added bonus the battery life seems significantly better. Let me know how you get on if you try this.

One of the biggest criticisms I’ve read (and have) of the lovely new HTC Hero is the slow speed at times. This seems to be largely caused by the lovely TouchFlo home screen interface, which has lots of lovely features and effects, but can slow things down a bit. This home screen is just part of the HTC Sense experience.

It is however very easy to switch from using this custom HTC homescreen, to using the default Android homescreen. The upside is things get a bit faster, the downside is that you can’t use the lovely HTC widgets (contacts, clocks, Twitter etc), but there are equivalents for many in the Android Market. You do still get to use the HTC improvements to things like contacts (with Facebook and Flickr integration). I’m not sure how much switching homescreens speeds up other apps (I haven’t played with it for too long). It is also very easy to switch back to TouchFlo.

To switch homescreens:

1. From the Homescreen press [Menu] and select [Settings]
2. Select [Applications]->[Manage Applications] (this may take some time to load)
3. Scroll down and select [TouchFlo]
4. Once the application info loads, scroll down and tap the [Clear Defaults] button. You may also want to tap [Force Stop] to ensure it closes.
5. Press the home key and you will be given the option of using [Home] or [TouchFlo]. You should select [Use by Default…] if you want to fully make the change, or just tap [Home] if you want to try it out first.
6. There you go, a standard Android homescreen.

If you want to switch back, the process is very similar, except you select the [Home] app at stage 3 instead.

Let me know what you think. Personally I am going to stick with TouchFlo for now. I now just need to find how to disable Footprints, as I’m sure it must be using some resources!

After discovering The Mobile Outlet had gone bust, we decided to ring T-Mobile to reduce the tariff Abby was on since she doesn’t use all her minutes.

It says on the back of every bill we’ve received “You can move to a lower priced plan after your six months”, so we assumed this would be no problem. Abby rung customer services, who informed her that they changed the terms a while ago to mean you had to be with them for 11 months before you could change. After a bit of discussion Abby passed the phone to me. I pointed out that since it stated 6 months on the first bill, and at that stage we had the right to return the phone, the 6 months statement formed part of the advertising which made us continue with the contract.

The operator informed me there was nothing they could do, and that their systems wouldn’t allow it to be changed. I asked to talk to a supervisor. Initially she stuck to the same story and told me there was nothing she could do. That gradually changed to “If I could reduce the plan…”, eventually to “We will let you reduce your plan.”. They were totally unsympathetic to the fact our cashback fell through, despite the fact they were paying this company to sell their phones.

It’s only a saving of £10/month, but it’s some consolation. The lesson of the story is that even if they claim there is nothing they can do, and that their systems won’t allow it, that is a lie as they were able to action our request without even escalating the problem further. If you want to reduce your price plan, and you have it in writing that you can, stick to your guns and you will get what you want.

Please note, I have no formal legal knowledge, and they may have been in their right not to let us downgrade, but I doubt it. Let me know if you have similar experiences or problems.

In September last year, Abby bought a phone from The Mobile Outlet offering completely free line rental in the form of cashback.

The first cashback was due in January, but we heard nothing from the claim. I discovered today that Mobile Matters (UK) Ltd (T/A The Mobile Outlet) went into administration on 15 Feb. We’ve submitted a claim to the administrators, but I don’t hold out much hope, which means we are £420 out of pocket!!

The next step is for Abby to ring T-Mobile to see if they will reduce her line rental – I’ll keep you posted.

The Mobile Outlet site is not working at the moment, but I got the administrator’s details from Google’s Cache. If you can’t get those details, they ask you to send details to:

Begbies Traynor, Burley House, 12 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9NF or by e-mail to mark.pintar@begbies-traynor.com

Another thing worth doing is signing the Downing Street Petition to make the networks responsible.

Let me know if you’re in the same boat. I’ll keep this updated if we hear anything from the administrators or T-Mobile.

[Update: 26 March] : Abby got an email confirming she was listed as a creditor of the company -it’ll be interesting to see what happens!

[Update: 2 April]: We managed to persuade T-Mobile to reduce the price plan – see the main post.