For the first time in a year and a half, I put aside my iPhone and spent the last week with Telus’ Android touchscreen smartphone, the HTC Hero. Not only was it a chance to try the HTC device, but also a chance to test out Telus’ brand new HSPA+ network (or as they call it “3G+”).
The Hero is an extremely solid piece of kit with a glass screen and a heavy, quality feel. All the materials used are top notch, including a Teflon coating on the white version that successfully kept it smudge and fingerprint free. The look is pure HTC and clearly an evolution of the Dream design including the signature “chin.”
At its heart is a 528MHz processor with 288MB of RAM which, in most cases is sufficient. But frequently not, which I will get into. Thankfully, someone must have given HTC a slap upside the head and they finally had the good sense to put a normal headphone jack on the Hero (3.5mm to be specific). This will be a huge relief to those who had to deal with the mini-USB dongle thingy on the Dream and Magic. It also has microSDHC card slot and removable battery hidden behind the back cover.
The screen has the same resolution as the iPhone but is slightly smaller, (3.2” vs 3.5” on the iPhone) which gives it a higher pixel density and a noticeably crisper display. The trade off, of course, is less room for the on screen keyboard, which can get cramped. The screen has a oleophobic coating, which basically means that it repels finger oils and can be wiped clean with one swipe on pretty much any fabric. This is a fantastic feature and should be required on all touch screen phones.
User Interface
The Hero runs on the Android Operating system (version 1.5 at time of writing) with a custom interface called “HTC Sense.” This look and feel modification is actually quite good and runs deep into the system and brings a great deal of visual consistency that is missing from the stock Android interface. HTC also brings a slew of additional widgets that can be placed on one of the five default home screens. Available widgets include email, twitter, weather, calendar and the signature HTC flip clock, but there are many more.
Although it looks beautiful, the Sense interface on the Hero suffers from slight sluggishness. It’s almost imperceptible, but gives the phone the feeling of just not quite keeping up with your actions. It is not a serious problem but it detracts slightly from the overall experience.
The Hero has no physical keyboard, so it relies on an onscreen keyboard for text input. I found the onscreen keyboard to be adequate. I also found that HTC added too much to the keyboard in an attempt to add functionality, resulting in a very busy and distracting look. The autocorrection system, which tries to correct your inevitable typos as you type, was hard to work with. It often guessed wrong and was hard to dismiss when I did not need it.
Applications and features
As this is, above all, a mobile phone, I’ll start with that. The phone functionality of the Hero is good and voice quality is excellent. I had no problems getting full bars on the new Telus network throughout the downtown core of Toronto but I did not have a chance to test it outside of the city, so results will probably vary depending on your location. Overall, I was very impressed with the quality of the Telus voice network and the sound quality. HTC claims 420 minutes of talk time over 3G nutI did not have the stamina or attention span to test that claim.
For managing your contacts, the Hero can sync with your Google account over the air, as well as connect to an Exchange server over ActiveSync. In addition, HTC added their own Facebook, Twitter and Flickr integration which is set up when you first fire up the phone. You simply enter your login info and the phone syncs your photos, integrates Twitter and syncs your contacts with Facebook, including birthdays, status messages and profile image.
The Browser is built with the same underpinnings as the iPhone and Palm Pre browser and as such is an excellent mobile web experience. I found it to be less intuitive than the iPhone to use, but the overall performance was similar. Something the Hero has that is lacking in the iPhone is the ability to play Flash videos using HTC’s own Flash video player which it developed with Adobe.
Email is one area that I feel the Hero is lacking. I had both my work Exchange email as well my Gmail account set up on the device, and each required a separate email app with an entirely different user interface and controls, which was just plain annoying. Unified inboxes please and thanks. In other regards, I found the email clients (it really is two entirely different apps) were adequate. Unlike the iPhone, you are able to flag messages (or star them in Gmail) which is handy for marking messages that you want to deal with once you get in front of a desktop computer.
Thankfully, HTC did not mess with the standard and excellent Android system-wide notification. This feature is a joy to use and keeps you posted on all new email, calendar notifications, IM messages, SMS, etc, in a noticeable but none-interfering way and allows you to pull down a list of all current notifications from anywhere. This is another area that the Hero has the iPhone beat, hands down.
What is a smartphone these days without an an app store? Nothing, that’s what, and the Android Market is Google’s attempt to replicate the Apple app store experience. The store is still in its infancy and it shows in a fairly limited number of apps, and a generally poorer quality of app based on testing some common apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and RSS reader. That being said, it really is nice being able to run applications in the background, unlike the iPhone. This allows you to quickly switch between apps without having to quit and relaunch each time. The Hero also allows you to install apps from other sources, not just their own store like Apple, which is a huge plus for nerds such as myself, but you can stick with the safety of the store if you so choose.
The calendar is decent and again, it syncs with Google calendar and/or Exchange out of the box. Exchange support was fairly good, but got into trouble when trying to move meetings. I found that other attendees often were not notified of the change. I have similar problems with the iPhone so this may be an ActiveSync configuration issue.
The 5 megapixel auto-focus camera is mediocre and was extremely slow to focus. This resulted in almost every shot being out of focus (see the sample images below). Additionally, you have to click the trackball to take photos, which is the worst possible action as it is on the front of the device, and almost impossible to press without moving and blurring the shot. Low light performance was predictably poor, especially with the lack of any kind of flash.
Multimedia
The Hero comes with an adequate music and video player, nothing special to see here folks. It plays music, creates playlists, shuffles, etc… all of the usual functionality. I did find that watching movie-length videos was fairly poor as a result of slight stuttering during playback.
Syncing your music, movies and photos with your desktop is accomplished with the HTC sync software on PCs. If you are on a Mac, you will need a third party application such as DoubleTwist in order to transfer your media.
Conclusion
The HTC hero is a strong player in the smartphone market with a great deal to like. The quality of the device itself and excellent interface make this a very nice device to use on a daily basis. The only knocks are the general feeling of subtle sluggishness that, for me, grated on me over time and the onscreen keyboard that I just found too distracting and difficult to use. I really wanted to love the Hero, and I believe that HTC came extremely close to nailing it. I hope that the rumoured Android 2 update that is supposed to come by early next year will correct the shortcomings and make this the great smartphone it should be.
If it’s not made by Apple, what’s the point?