HTC Hero

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Taiwanese company HTC was honored be the first mobile phone manufacturer  that running Google Android mobile OS last year. Ever since, the company has released three Android phone – the HTC G1, HTC Magic and the latest one HTC Hero. For having experiences of previous two Android phone, can this HTC Hero goes beyond its predecessors.  Read the review after the jumps.

Design

HTC Hero is still having the similar design with HTC Magic. Measuring  112 x 56.2 x 14.35 mm, the Hero is about as big as the iPhone but slightly thicker and slightly shorter. Up front, there’s a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen running at 320 x 480 HVGA resolution. It is clean under daily use thanks to an oleophobic screen. Below it is six Android buttons: call, home, menu, call-end, search and back and the center is the trackball navigation button same as in Dream. Overall, the handset in general is very comfortable to hold and fits nicely in your hand.

User Interface

The Hero applying the new Sense UI which is tweak the user interface of the Android operating system. Basically there are seven home screens that you can swap with the swipe of a finger to select application. You can also add a range of widgets and shortcuts and it is the most significant features of the UI. It offers tons more widgets and even multiple homescreens, making it easy to switch between work and play. For example the Android widgets, and download more from the Android Market and the email widget lets you flip through your email right from the home screen with a flick of a finger. The Sense UI also adds social network awareness to your contacts. This means you can watch your friends in real time, picking up tweets, updates, and Flickr images without thinking about it. There’s literally too much to list. The Sense UI is really smarter than the previous version. It is more visually appealing but functionally more immediate, bringing commonly-used services and features to the fore and we love what it’s done.

Camera

The HTC Hero offering 5-megapixels camera with autofocus though no flash. It can records both stills and video where photos are captured as JPEGs while video can be H.263 or MPEG4. All these can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or YouTube, or sent via GMail, HTC Mail, MMS or Peep (Twitter). The shutter speeds and processing of the camera has improve too, it is faster than G1 and Magic. The quality is quite good though it is can’t replace those dedicated cameraphone and digicam. And again, it still better than G1 and Magic.

Music

HTC has also improved the music player here make it more simple to use. It is able to play MP3/AAC+/WAV/WMA9 music files. Audio quality from the built-in speaker is loud but not great. It is loud but not clear enough. Thankfully  there is a 3.5mm headphones jack available and it work is just fine.

Conclusion

The most significant feature in HTC Hero would be the Sense UI. It prove that the potential of Android OS to be fully tweaked. In this handset, HTC is perform a very valiant effort and done well job. Of course, Hero has some drawback and but it still the best Android phone for the moment.