Visually rich and with a stunning user interface, dubbed Sense, it is arguably one of the most intuitive and powerful smartphones in the market.
Wed, Oct 07, 2009
The Business Times
HTC Corp’s Hero, the Taiwan phone maker’s third device to run on Google’s budding phone operating system Android, is the device many seeking an iPhone alternative have been waiting for.
Previews of the Hero on various blog sites, which highlighted its raft of new applications and bespoke user interface (UI) have teased gadget lovers for months. After testing the phone over the past two weeks, it is easy to see what the buzz is all about.
A relatively compact (112 by 56 by 14mm) but stout (135g) quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) candy bar phone, the Hero impresses with its good looks straight out of the box.
It sheds the plasticky feel and curves of older siblings Dream and Magic for a more metallic look and cleaner lines. The grey-brown model comes with a suede-like surface which coats the back and sides of the phone, making it comfortable to hold and banishing greasy fingerprints. The white model has Teflon coating to help keep dirt away. It is altogether very chic.
The only downer in the looks department is the angled-up bottom of the phone. While its older siblings sport the same design quirk, the ‘lip’ on the Hero is more pronounced. To me, it unnecessarily makes the phone feel more clumsy in the pocket.
The much-vaunted new UI from HTC, dubbed Sense, is an absolute stunner. Visually rich and intuitive, it improved on the already excellent Android UI and added many new useful functionalities to boot.
The changes are subtle – for instance, the tiny toolbar at the bottom of the desktop for easy access to applications, widgets and the call functions. But this makeover significantly enhanced the Android platform’s look and feel.
An especially nice touch is a slider icon that shows users which desktop, out of the seven, they are at.
The Sense also includes Scene, which lets users configure and save their own different desktop configurations. A rolling menu, ala HTC’s Windows Mobile-based TouchFLO UI, now appears on some applications. And multi-touch has been added, meaning you can pinch and flick on pictures and webpages to zoom in and out, like the iPhone.
Like the Magic, flicking on Hero’s screen to scroll long lists and webpages is a joy – serving up a free-spinning and responsive experience.
One of Android’s best feature is its support for widgets, which are applications that can be docked on the phone’s desktop. HTC has included a bag of well-crafted ones. Among them: widgets for calendar, email, SMS, contact, music, twitter, photo gallery and settings.The music widget, along with the improved music application, deserve special mention for their simplicity and uncanny ability to display album art. The settings widgets, which lets users easily switch on or off connectivity features such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Global Positioning System (GPS), are terrific conveniences.
Another useful refinement is the contacts application, which now consolidates your friends’ Facebook status updates, Flickr photos, text messages, emails and call history in a single place. Very neat.
On the hardware front, the Hero comes with a 3.2-inch HVGA (320 by 480 pixels) touchscreen that is among the best I’ve seen. It supports High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) and is no Web surfing slouch. The one-two punch of excellent display and good mobile broadband performance begets stunning results when playing high-definition YouTube video clips.
The 5-megapixel camera is surprisingly good – producing sharp and natural-looking photos. The video-camera is so-so. A 3.5mm headphone jack will be welcomed by music lovers.
Up to this point, the Hero has been a near-perfect experience. But there are several foibles that could dissuade potential buyers.
Perhaps the most serious among them is the phone’s laggard performance when pushed hard. To be fair, the Hero, which sports what appears to be the same class of processor as its older brother Magic – a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU – is generally nifty on bread-and-butter chores such as making phone calls, sending text messages and Web surfing. But performance slows when widgets are added. Playing music also drags down other functions.
Being right-handed, I also quibble at the placement of the front control buttons, more suited for left-hand operations given two of the most important buttons – back and search – are located at the extreme right bottom.
The soft keyboard can be frustrating, and my chat sessions have been typo-ridden. Battery life could be better. On my regular diet of music listening, email checking, chatting and Web browsing, I often find myself starring at a battery alert towards the end of the day.
The bottomline: foibles aside, the Hero is a breakthrough phone. If HTC’s Dream and Magic hinted at the potential of the budding Android platform, the Hero has fulfilled its early hype. It is arguably one of the most intuitive and powerful smartphones in the market.
The HTC Hero has a list price of $898, which includes a 2GB microSD memory card.
