HTC Hero reviews are flooding the web, I have chosen some points from the Stuff.tv and Engadget reviews to go through how this latest Android phone from HTC will fare.
HTC Hero Review
At first glance, it comes across as a lighter, slimmer lovechild of the G1 and Magic. Just like the G1, the Hero has an angled mouthpiece, but like the Magic, it dispenses with a QWERTY keyboard in favour of a 3.2in capacitive screen.
Where the G1 felt like a clunky brick and the Magic was no great shakes in the design department, the Hero feels comfortable and light in the hand, and the Teflon coating makes it tough and rugged.
Just like the Magic, the touchscreen is iPhone-rivalling – it’s fast, responsive and a joy to use, with the trackball at the bottom giving extra navigation options.
Features boost
Many of the features that were lacking on the Magic have been rectified on the HTC Hero – there’s now a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as A2DP Bluetooth and the camera has been upped to a respectable 5MP with autofocus.
There’s the same dedicated search button below the screen, which will perform a contextual search of whichever screen you happen to be in – for example, Twitter, email or the web.
Seeing Sense
But it’s the all-new user interface that’s got us most excited. Dubbed HTC Sense, it’ll be rolling out on all HTC handsets beginning with the Hero and it gives the user a whole host of options to make your handset ultra-customisable.
The concept is that your handset is a blank slate and, like on Nokia’s N97, you decide which live, widget-based apps you want to add to one of your seven – yes, seven – homescreens.Instead of launching an app every time you want to check your Twitter feed, emails, weather or stocks, you simply choose from the HTC or Android widgets and drag and drop them onto one of your screens.
Customise your widgets
The huge time and effort that has gone into widget design – there are 12 different clock styles for instance – means that you’ll never have a phone exactly the same as anyone else.
You can rig up a homescreen for all your multimedia apps – for example, one for business use, one for all social networking and one for weather and transport information. It’s a synch to flick between them too.
Another neat touch is that your contacts screen contains all information on how that particular mate has been communicating – you’ll see their SMS, call history, emails, Facebook updates, Twitter and Flickr feeds all in one place.
It’s then up to you how you want to get in touch with them. This is a brilliant touch and dispenses with the need to launch loads of separate apps to see what your mates are up to.
Flashy browser
Web browsing is also a seamless experience, with pages neatly reflowing and full Flash browsing supported (take note, iPhone). From what we’ve seen, the Hero coupled with the Sense interface is the first phone to fully capitalise on Android’s massive potential, while live widgets, Flash support and a 3.5mm jack give it an edge over the iPhone.
If Android can get together a decent app store that doesn’t lag behind Apple’s, then the Hero could be our new favourite handset. The HTC Hero will be available in July, no word yet on carriers and we’re told it’ll be available in white and black/brown models on launch with possibly more to follow.
According to Engadget HTC Hero review:
- The beveled edges along the back makes the handset sit comfortably in the hand, and while the teflon coat doesn’t necessarily feel revolutionary, it’s going to make a world of difference after a couple of months riding in our grubby pockets. It’s certainly solid, but much more so than other “brick” phones.
- The Sense UI (or as HTC terms it, “user experience”) riding a capacitive touchscreen offers a people-centric approach to managing your information that is absolutely dreamy at first blush — though it shares a lot of TouchFLO heritage. In fact, HTC promises to have a very similar Sense-branded experience for Windows Mobile.
- The on-screen keyboard also seems quite useable with a nice simulated haptic forced-feedback bounce when you strike each key in either landscape or portrait mode (which can naturally be deactivated). HTC has built its own touch keyboard from the ground up, and in our brief couple of tests we’d say it’s probably the best touchscreen typing experience we’ve ever felt. It never lags behind, and has great colorful visual cues for its auto-corrected words — green means it’s suggesting a correctly spelled word, red means we’ve gone off the beaten path, and the T9-style multiple suggestions are heavenly.
- This intuitive one-hander isn’t shy with the specs either as we’ve already seen in the official press release. Our only concern is possible sluggishness from the Qualcomm processor that cause the graphic transitions to stutter a bit and results in screen rotations that feel dangerously uncomfortable.
- We were told that the device we saw was running pre-production firmware so there’s still time to tweak — though not much with a July European launch.
- The Hero is not a “Google Experience” device. As such, you won’t find the Google logo anywhere (no big deal) but you also won’t be downloading any firmware updates over the air — sideloading only kids. Not a deal breaker but an annoying and seemingly arbitrary limitation nonetheless. There’s still a small lack of clarity of how updates will work with HTC’s “mods” living on top of basic Android — even if they’re able to port in new Android versions seamlessly, we imagine there will be some breakage.
- For a device without a physical keyboard, the Hero seems a little thick up against its HTC Magic, Nokia N97, and iPhone 3G counterparts, but not overly so.
- HTC has confirmed that whichever (unspecified) carrier gets the phone in the US will have a modified version, both in software (carrier-specific services) and in hardware chassis tweaks. Just don’t take our teflon away, ok HTC?
- Battery is the same larger slab that’s in the myTouch, and HTC also claims to have done some vague, unspecified things OS-side to improve battery life as well. “Heavy users will be able to get through a day.”
- The camera is responsive and seems to do a fine job at autofocus, but wasn’t astonishingly great at first glance.
- The phone will be available for free on T-Mobile UK — if only we could be so subsidy lucky in the US.
