With the Hero, HTC listened to the complaints about the earlier Android model HTC Magic. The changes are relatively few but definitely for the better. In addition, the focus is now firmly set on social media thanks to the new Sense interface.
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Look and Feel
It’s amazing how the appearance differs among the touch-screen handsets. The basic idea of a rectangular block can apparently be varied infinitely. The Hero has been given an odd bend at the phone’s bottom, and angle that gives it a striking appearance. It looks like it would be uncomfortable in the pocket, but that’s not the case at all.
Large parts of the handset is made of rubber-like plastics to give it a better feel in your hand, and the white version has also been Teflon-treated to repel dirt. It is not particularly heavy, but has enough mass to appear solid and durable. Unfortunately the trackball is a bit small and flimsy, but otherwise it’s hard to find issues with the build quality.
Not much has happened with the Hero in terms of hardware, but a couple of welcome new features include a regular headphone jack and a slightly better camera – still not a very good camera, but better. A cool feature is that you can zoom in and out with the trackball when taking pictures, which works surprisingly well.
The HTC Sense UI
The best new feature with the Hero, however, is the new Sense interface – a proprietary HTC interface that works like a skin on top of the default Android UI. Instead of Android’s three startup screens, you now have seven, giving you additional space for widgets and shortcuts. In addition, you can create different scenes that enables you to create specific profiles depending on what you do at the moment. For example, you can have one scene for work-related apps, another for entertainment and so on. There is some delay when switching between scenes, but not enough to be disturbing.
HTC has some proprietary widgets to go with the Sense UI and most of them are better than the original Android alternatives. There are Sense widgets for stocks, weather, music, email, Twitter and Facebook.All your contacts can be linked to his or her Facebook and Flickr account so that the profile pictures are updated automatically. A downside to having all of these widgets active and connected to the network is that the battery drains quickly, and occasionally the speed of the phone suffers when several apps are updating simultaneously.
Conclusion
In all, HTC’s Hero is a significant improvement compared to Magic (which was still pretty good) and it still holds up to most newer models. It is not the perfect phone due to the weak camera, but the Sense interface and other new features still makes it a good choice. Related phones: HTC Tattoo.
