HTC Hero – Review

17 Aug 2009  17 Comments

Now that I had my Hero for 2 weeks, I can start blabbering about it.

let me start with this, I had very high hopes for the device before it got released. I wanted a device that could do things the iPhone couldn’t do. The android platform didn’t disappoint.

Build:

The build quality of the device is fantastic, is very sturdy and feels solid, its leaps and bounds over the G1, its on-par with the iPhone if not slightly better in my opinion. The whole back acts as a battery cover, you don’t have to slide anything, you just pull it apart. And it has the whole teflon thing going for it too, it prevents the phone from getting any skin oil from your greasy sweaty palms, and it feels great. Other reviewers went as far as calling the iPhone as junk compared to powerful and convenient teflon coating on the HTC Hero.

Design:

HTC went almost with the same basic design as the G1, there is a slight chinny look at the bottom, but the Hero is ten times better looking than the G1. I can actually go ahead and say its one of the best looking smartphones out there. The curved bottom protects the phone if you place it face down on a surface, it prevents the screen and trackball from making contact to the surface.

The device has 7 buttons (including the clickable back-lit trackball which looks really nice) on the front and the volume controls on the left of the device.

Phone Size:

It’s slightly smaller than the iPhone in both height and width, but also slightly thicker. It has some curved edges on the back which makes it fit comfortably in the hand.

HTC Hero: mm 112 x 56.2 x 14.4

iPhone 3G/3GS: mm 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3

As for weight, both the HTC Hero and the iPhone 3GS weigh the same, 135 grams 3 grams heavier than the iPhone 3G.

Camera:

The 5 MP camera is great, coming from iPhone 3G (2MP) and a Blackberry 8900 (3.2MP but pretty good) this camera is leaps and bounds ahead “in well lit scenarios” I say this because HTC are known for not including any type of flash on their devices, so dark/night shots are a no-no here.

Check out Engadget’s photo gallery here.

Operating System/User Interface:

The HTC Hero uses the Android OS with HTC’s own Sense UI running on top of it, HTC likes to call it a user experience rather than user interface and I agree, It implements a number of functionalities rather than it just being eye-candy.

The Android -in theory- is the ultimate mobile operating system for 2 main factors, which are:

1) Its backed up by one of the largest companies in the world, yes this is important, just look at Palm. They have a wonderful phone/os, but because of the limited resources, they cant expand/gamble on a large scale. Palm already are putting everything they have (literarly) on the Pre. so if the phone flops, the whole company would go down and that would be the end of it, you just cant see that with the Android. Of course the same can be said about Windows Mobile and the iPhone OS, which brings us to the second point.

2) The Android is an open Operating system, which means that it has everything going for it if it’s competing with the iPhone.

Multitasking:

This is a biggy, I can’t see a phone calling it self a “smartphone” without the ability of doing more than one thing at the same time. Thats what I hated about the iPhone. On the Hero, I can have multiple apps running in the background, thats what’s I think is causing the slight sluggishness other reviewers pointing out. iPhone, what’s your excuse?
you can also download an app task manager app and kill unwanted applications to regain some performance.

Home Screens:

One of the first things that I noticed on the Hero was the home screen, it’s so much more useful than the iphone’s empty home screen, I can see live weather, my upcoming calendar event, and the usual IM/SMS/email numbered notifications on their icons respectively . Plus you can download a number of widgets that boosts the functionality or just use the stock widgets that came with the device.

Notification Bar/Area

Gtalk, SMS, facebook, twitter and email notifications are just one slide away no matter on which of the 7 screens you are on, you can view all of your notifications, as I said IM, email, downloads and even installs all show up here. It’s just great, in any other phone, if I had a few missed calls, a number of unread IM’s, SMS’s and emails, I had to enter each app to check who was the sender. On the Hero, I just slide down the notification bar and I’m shown the sender and a snippet of each message and email. It’s a god send.

Facebook/Twitter/Flickr Integration:

All these services come preloaded on the HTC Hero and are very well integrated. Twitter is fully integrated into the OS, with a full featured application, as for Facebook and Flickr, the integration is more contact centric, as you can link facebook contact to contacts in your contact manager and get a full featured contact card for every contact, complete data is synced like birthdays, events, photo albums and status.

Google Integration:

This is what the phone is about, it is a Google operating system after all, and it is done very well. gtalk, gmail, gcal and contact gets push service. so any changes on any of these services an any internet enabled device, your data gets synced across the board. very nice considering its free unlike Apple mobileme service which is basically the same thing but costs $100/year and it’s not showing any love to any other mobile device.

Android Market:

The Android market is not as deep as Apples App Store (no other mobile store is). you wont find beautiful looking games here because the phones cant support them yet. What you will find is a large amount of really unique and cool apps that are only possible on an Android device, like “Locale” for instance, simply put, you can use this app to set different profiles for different locations either via cell tower or GPS. It also does much more it needs its own review, google it.

You will also find a large amount of widgets, which is what the OS is all about too, bringing even more functionality to the phone.

It also looks like that the market content is filtered by IP address, so here in Kuwait you might only get access to free apps. Will check on that later.

Browser:

The HTC Hero has an edge here, none of its main rivals has a built-in flash support for its browser. iPhone, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre and the RIM phones all do not support flash, natively in WM’s case

Other Stuff:

Battery life is on-par with other smart phones I’ve used like the iphone, iphone 3g, and the HTC Touch HD, I can go a day with a single charge, but not likely.

Internal specs are somewhat dated, it has the same specs as my almost 1 year old touch HD, with a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU, 288MB RAM, 512MB ROM, WIFI B/G, Bluetooth, GPS and a quad-band HSPA cell chip. The heavily skinned OS takes its toll of the CPU and RAM showing slight sluggishness here and there.

Love the dedicated search button, press it when in the Android Market to search for apps, press it when in the contact manager to search for a contact, press it in the SMS app to search SMS’s and press t any where else to search the web.

Conclusion:

The phone is amazing, It’s ALMOST every thing the Hero/Android have to offer. I say almost because of the dated internal specs, the year+ old specs are holding the device slightly back. But for what you are paying (the phone costs 175KD compared to the iPhones 300ish KD) the phone is the number one choice hands down, even if the prices of the iPhone are lowered here in Kuwait, I would still go with the HTC Hero.

Rating: