The HTC Hero. (Click to enlarge.)
[PHOTO courtesy of Sprint]
Sprint's first Android phone, the HTC Hero, will debut on October 11 for $180. The Hero resembles another Android-powered HTC phone, the T-Mobile myTouch ($200), but has additional features that put it in a league with the upcoming Motorola Cliq and Apple iPhone. We took a look at a pre-retail version of the Hero. But as we found, the Hero wasn't quite a match for either of them.
More for less. The Hero's 5-megapixel camera beats the more costly myTouch's by about 2 megapixels, adding digital zoom and a tap-to-focus feature like the one found on the iPhone. Another iPhone-like feature is Hero's touch screen, which allows you to zoom in and out of photos, Web pages, and other on-screen elements with a pinch, poke or swipe. It has Wi-Fi and a fairly competent Web browser.
Intriguing interface. Hero’s custom interface, called Sense, sits atop the Android operating system, making it fairly easy to access its briar patch of programs. It's similar to Motoblur, the interface Motorola added to its Android powered Cliq, but slightly inferior to it, I found. The Cliq, for example, puts all of your social-networking applications like Twitter and Facebook on one screen, making them easier to monitor. Ditto for contacts, calendar appointments, and e-mail and text messages. The Hero, by contrast, doesn’t integrate apps quite as well, nor does it dig as deeply into apps residing in the Android OS. Also, some of the widgets, like the music player, take up almost an entire screen, defeating the space-saving purpose of a widget.
Slick, but sluggish, navigation. The Hero's fairly responsive touch screen makes it a snap to view Web pages and photos. Launching applications, however, seemed to take longer than on other phones I've tried recently. Occasionally the display would snag on a photo or Web page. But the Hero's trackball—something the iPhone lacks—did make it much easier to zero in on tiny or closely packed hotlinks. Pushing the magnifying-glass button, a standard feature on Google phones, launches Google. But searches don’t factor in your location in this mode. You have to go into Google Maps for that. Other phones, such as the Samsung Instinct, make local searches much easier.
Competent keyboard. We've yet to meet a virtual keyboard that will outperform a real one, but my chubby fingers had little trouble typing accurately on the Hero's virtual keyboard, which has vibration feedback. Tilting the phone on its side should automatically widen the keyboard, but it sometimes got stuck, especially if I had already typed something in the search field of the Web browser.
Cool camera. Taking pictures with the Hero's camera is a snap. Its tap-to-focus feature lets you focus on any subject in your viewfinder by tapping it on the screen. Swiping your finger vertically along the viewfinder activates virtual slide control for the camera's digital zoom. Another cool feature: After you snap a picture, an icon at the bottom of the display will let you quickly e-mail or MMS your photo to a contact, or upload it to Facebook, Flickr, and other popular sites.
A few quibbles: Launching the camera seems to take an eternity, and I found a significant delay between the time I pushed the button to take the photo and when the camera actually snapped it. Also, the Hero could us a dedicated physical button for launching the camera, as even the most basic phones do. You shouldn’t have to fish for it on the phone’s crowded home page. Our imaging specialists are currently evaluating camera performance, and we’ll share the results here in the coming weeks.
We'll have more details on this talented phone soon. In the meantime, check out our Ratings (available to subscribers) for details and advice on other hot smart phones. —Mike Gikas
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