HTC Hero Review

I’ll start this review by stating that I’m reviewing the HTC Hero beeing an ex-iPhone owner, and since the iPhone was my first “smartphone”, my expectations and needs are based upon the functionality and usability that of the iPhone.

I got the Hero roughly two weeks ago, and I feel my usage of it is sufficient in order to give a proper review without being unfair. The first week i constantly used it and it resulted in serious battery drainage, so all in all I think I give justice to the experience of using the Hero.

The Hardware

The Hero is as the iPhone basically a large capacative touchscreen, the Hero differenciates itself by having more than the single home button. It has 6 buttons on the front, and volume controls on the side.

Buttons

The buttons are: pick-up-phone, home-button, menu-button, hang-up/power button, search-button and back button. And ofcourse you have the trackball.  In my oppinion some of these buttons are just a waste of space. The search button for instance, i understand that google is responsible for android, and that google likes search, but who the hell needs a dedicated button for searching ? All in all these two weeks I’ve used that button once, and that was just to try out what it did. The same is true with the trackball, you really do not need a trackball when you have a touchscreen, but it might offer some cool gaming controls.

The other buttons have a logical purpose, the pick-up button picks up the phone, the home-button brings you to the home screen, the menu button is context sensitive and depending on what application you’re currently in, it brings up some sort of menu. The hang-up/power button just locks the phone, or if you hold it down it shuts the phone down.

One thing I struggled a bit with, was the back button. I could not really figure out how it works, sometimes it took me back to the homescreen, sometimes it brought me to the browser, and sometimes it took me to some “random” application. So i read up on it, and it is the clever scheduling system in android that is to blame for this percievingly weird behaviour.

Display

The display, its a 320 x 480 lcd led-backlit capacitive touch enabled display. The physical dimensions of the display of 3.2 inches makes this resolution good enough, at least for me. Everybody keeps whining about low resolution on phones, both the Hero and the iPhone have been criticized for low display resolution, but the fact of the matter is; the physical pixels of such a small display are so small, that you probably would not notice if someone upped the resolution of that display.

The brightness of the display is good, not great. I can use it in direct sunlight, but its hard, I ended up disabling the automatic backlight feature while using it outside, because it just was to dim.

The display is covered with an oil resistant layer, this works really well, I don’t experience the same “smudge-grudge” as I did with the iPhone. It does collect some finger marks, but a simple wipe with a finger or on the sleeve removes any trace of oils or fats. The drawback of this layer is that it seems that it has higher friction than a simple slate of glass, this is a bit annoying, especially when you have dry hands, the fingers seem to stick to the glass, and its hard to drag them across the display.

GPS and Compass

The GPS is good, it is a bit slow to get reception in order to calculate all z,y and x positions, but when it is up and running it has a good update frequency, and does its job. The compass feature is cool, and it allows for some cool applications, like Google Sky Map, but out of the box it isent put to any use, in Google Maps it is not used to rotate the map, but if you update to the newest version of Google Maps for Android it is put to use in the street-view part of GM.

Camera

The Hero boasts a 5mp camera, but it is not good. The resolution is ok, but the optics are crappy, and the autofocus feature is slow, so in none-optimal light conditions pictures tend to get a bit blurry. Overall the images lacks contrast, but the color is good and it outperforms the iPhone camera in low light conditions.

The Hero also has a video feature, this is good, better than anything I’ve seen on a cellphone for a while, but it suffers from low fps in low light conditions.

Battery

1350 mAh is not a huge amount of power, but if used wisely (ie. turn of gps and wifi when not using it) it lasts for a long time, I usually charge my phone every night, but I used the phone quite a bit last weekend without charging with no problem, but if you’re on wifi and use the GPS the battery drains very fast, with frequent use of these features it usually lasts about 24 hours.

Connectivity

One of my favourite features with the Hero is the mini USB connection, no need for a crappy proprietary connector, its awesome! And another plus with the mini USB plug is that everyone has a USB to mini USB cable lying around so, if you forget the charger/cable at home you probably have better odds for charging a Hero compared to an iPhone.

It also has a standard TRS connector/3.5 mm jack plug for headphones, wich is nice. And in the box you get a hands-free set with buttons, that plug right into this connector. This hands-free set is C.R.A.P. but with a soldering iron and a pair of quite cheap in-ear Koss plugs i have a hands-free set with good sound, that works perfectly.

The Hero also has a MicroSD slot to expand the storage, it works well, and there is no need for additional software to tranfer content to and from the device, so you can use your preferable way of transfering content, also over the air if you load it with some software. MicroSD cards are available up to 16 gigabytes and they’re cheap, so there is no risk of running out of space, just keep a couple of cards with you at all times and you’re safe!

The wireless conectivity is good, the wi-fi module performs very well, and its blazing fast, faster than anything I have used on a mobile device before, it supports all popular wifi-security protocols.

Mobile connectivity is the standard quad band mobile network ability. And it sports a hefty HSPA/WCDMA mobile internet connection, and that is truly fast, its almost like beeing on a wi-fi network.

It also has a bluetooth connection, but I have not used it yet.

Overall build quality

The phone is a bit heavy, but it feels good, and it feels expensive, with is a good feature. The build quality seems good,  on the front the display is framed by colored aluminium, and the back is covered with some rubberlike plastic. The plastic parts are very sturdy, and with a couple weeks in my pocket toghether with keys there are no visible scratches. The buttons feel solid, but only time will show this. Overall it feels solid and well put toghether.

The Software

The softwarestack on the Hero is a traditional Android OS with HTC’s Sense UI on top. It works fairly well, and it looks VERY good.

The Sense UI gives you, 7 home screens which you can customize with application shorcuts and widgets. In theory this is a good idea, but, if you load more than 3 of those screens with things the phone becomes slow and sluggish. And this is unfortunately often the case,  it seems like the Sense UI system draws too much resources and that the hardware of the phone is not scaled up properly in order to support the complexity of the sense UI. (rumors say that HTC is releasing an update to fix alot of these issues).

HTC has written alot of apps that ship with the phone, calendar, contacts, clock, mail, twitter, facebook etc.

The really interesting thing with the Sense UI system is the contacts application, and this is the main selling point of the phone. It allows you, for each of your contacts, to specify their facebook, twitter, flickr++ acoounts, so all status updates, galleries and other social media things are right there in your contact list, it is truly awesome, and I really cant understand why nobody has thought of this before.

The calendar application is good, it syncs with google calendar and does what a calendar should do. It has a home-screen widget with different designs, you can either display upcoming events, the current week or the current month. This is really useful and i use the widget alot.

The mail application also has a cool widget, but unfortunately its crap, it does not support Gmail like the Gmail app from Google does,  it only supports IMAP and Exchange, and i dont really use it, unfortunately the Gmail app does not have a widget, but I still continue to use it.

The clock application is great, it has support for an arbitrary number of alarms set to certain days of the week. When you enable an alarm it tells you how many hours, minutes and seconds there are untill the alarm rings, this simple feature is very nice, so you can prepare yourself for sleep deprovision.

It has world-time support for multiple cities, and a neat autodiscover feature so it autmagically sets the time zone to the current city based on gsm,wifi or gps positioning. It also sport stopwatch and a countdown timer.

All in all the software is good, but it has the gost of lag lurking in the shadows, and it is really annoying because it ruins a potentially very-very-very good product. But hopefully HTC will fix this soon!

Conclusion

I’m glad I made the switch from iPhone to the Hero, I was tired of being forced to use itunes, and i was tired of the lack of customizability. All in all i would recomend it!

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