HTC Hero
Maxabout Review
Feature Rich Android Handset
Wednesday, September 09, 2009HTC Hero has been in news before for its first ever Android based user interface called HTC Sense. It has been officially launched in India and is available for Rs. 34600.00 in Maharashtra and for Rs. 31990.00 in rest of the country, through all leading authorized HTC resellers.
This handset comes with a special offer for the numerous Airtel users in India. Through this handset, Airtel users can get free data download of 100 MB per month for a period of six months. They can also avail to utility based applications such as Portfolio Manager, Hello Tune Manager, Weather Channel, Mobshare, In-mobile search and City Search on the HTC Hero.
In terms of overall design and layout, the Hero is very much a product of evolution. Like its forebears the G1 & Magic, the general stats like screen size, technology, and resolution, button placement, unit size and weight, and basic aesthetic are pure HTC. Like those previous devices, the Hero contains a smattering of hardware buttons on the base of the phone, including a home, menu, back, send, end, and dedicated search key. The device also sports a trackball in this area
The 65K-color capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution (320 x 480 pixels) is pretty much standard Android issue. Measuring 3.2 inches in diagonal as pretty much all other Android devices by HTC, the display pretty much meets all our requirements for sensitivity, colors, brightness and contrast.
As far as sunlight legibility is concerned, the HTC Hero fares just like the HTC Magic. It's close to the iPhone unmatched screen but is still more reflective and that can get in the way at times. Overall, the HTC displays used for Android phones seem way better than those on WinMo handsets.
Main Features Of HTC Hero:
- Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
- 3G with HSDPA 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps
- 3.2" capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution
- Qualcomm MSM 7201A 528 MHz CPU, 288 MB RAM
- 5 megapixel autofocus camera with video recording
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and GPS receiver
- Trackball navigation
- Accelerometer sensor
- Digital compass for automatic navigation of maps
- Multi-touch zooming in gallery and web browser
- Standard miniUSB port for charging and data
- microSD card slot with support for up to 8GB cards
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- Direct access to the official Android repository
- Web browser comes with full Flash support
On the inside, things are far more similar to HTC’s existing Android range. The Hero has the same 528MHz Qualcomm processor, paired with 512MB ROM and 288MB RAM, as its siblings, together with 900/2100MHz HSPA/WCDMA supporting up to 7.2Mbps downlink and 2Mbps uplink speeds (network depending). There’s also 850/900/1800/1900MHz GSM/GPRS/EDGE; we’re yet to hear any announcement regarding a US-spec version of the Hero. Other connectivity includes WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR with A2DP support, and of course USB 2.0, plus there’s A-GPS, a digital compass and accelerometer.
What makes the Hero particularly special is the work HTC have done on its user-interface, under the auspices of their “HTC Sense” project. Sense is the culmination of three years of UI work, that has taken in multiple iterations of TouchFLO 3D on Windows Mobile across the years. Given that TouchFLO 3D could arguably be credited with keeping the aging Microsoft mobile platform as relevant as it has been for the past twelve months or so, that’s no small lineage. Sense aims to take the basic Android OS and make it not only more visually appealing but functionally more immediate, bringing commonly-used services and features to the fore and, in no small way, making the fledgling Google platform more engaging “out of the box”.
HTC’s first, and perhaps most obvious way of doing that is through widgets. Previous Android devices have had a few widget options – search, picture frame, music, etc – and those are still present, but HTC introduce fourteen of their own, along with five “toggle” controls for connectivity options. These range from bookmarks and calendar, through a new mail app and messages app, to contact shortcuts, a Twitter app and a new weather app. As for the toggle switches, they cover airplane mode, Bluetooth, GPS, cellular connectivity and WiFi, and present an easy way to lock-down the Hero or simply shut off a potential battery glutton.
To accommodate all this flexibility, HTC have increased the number of homescreen panes from the usual three to seven; you can switch between them with a horizontal swipe across the touchscreen in either direction, or using the trackball. Your position in those panes is discretely shown by the arc at the base of the homescreen, which also has a direct shortcut to the phone keypad, main menu and widget control panel. Pressing the home hardware button also takes you directly back to the center pane, so it’s always straightforward to navigate your way around. HTC’s widgets share space with the usual shortcuts, which can be to apps, folders or bookmarks, and many of them have two different sizes to choose from. The music widget, for instance, has a small, basic option which will fit on a pane with other shortcuts, or a larger version which shows more track detail, album art, and takes up a pane to itself.
One of HTC Hero’s more impressive introductions is the new on-screen keyboard, and this is a real step up from what arrived on the HTC Magic with the Android OS 1.5 Cupcake release. Obviously both portrait and landscape orientations are catered for, each with well-spaced QWERTY layouts and secondary pages of numbers and symbols, while those secondary characters can also be accessed by pressing and holding the relevant letter key.
The Hero’s camera is a step up, offering 5-megapixels with autofocus though no flash. It records both stills and video, toggled between with a simple on-screen button, and has basic white balance, brightness and flicker adjustment. There’s also a self-timer and optional geotagging. Photos are captured as JPEGs while video can be H.263 or MPEG4; once taken, they can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or YouTube, or sent via GMail, HTC Mail, MMS or Peep (Twitter).
Seven panes, then, can be occupied relatively quickly, but to get around that HTC have added Scenes support to the Hero. Accessed by hitting the Menu button from the homescreen, Scenes basically allows for multiple layouts which the company expects will be used to differentiate between workday and social use. As standard the Hero comes preset with the standard HTC, Social, Work, Play, Travel and “Clean Slate" layouts, which you can leave as-is or modify and save with your own names. Each can have a different number of widgets, different wallpapers and other personalization. Or, of course, you can ignore them altogether and focus on just one standard Scene; as with the slide-to-unlock, which can be replaced by the standard Android pattern lock, Hero is about giving you more options not taking them away.
HTC supply a 1,350mAh battery with the Hero, 10mAh more than the Magic, but quote up to 420 minutes of WCDMA talktime or 470 minutes of GSM talktime. They also suggest up to 660 hours of WCDMA standby or up to 420 hours of GSM standby.