HTC Hero – A Good iPhone Substitute
Sum and Substance:
Thumbs Up:
Great display, 3.5 mm phone jack, 5 MP camera.
Thumbs Down:
The phone is sluggish due to slow processor, flash content is supported but sometimes doesn’t work, no media syncing software.
Inside the Trunk:
Technology: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM
Band: WCDMA (UMTS) / GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: GPS, Wi-FI, Music player, Camera, etc.
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
The display of the phone is 3.2 inch big, gives a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, 18-bit (262000 Colors)
Supported audio formats are – AAC, MP3, WMA, AAC+, AMR, WAV, MIDI. The phone has a 3.5 mm phone jack for so that you can plug in any set of head phones. there is no media syncing software for music player and you will have to drag and drop music files on to the phone using a computer.
The phone has Flash and Java support for web browser. 1500 mAh battery of the Hero gives a rated talk time of 250 min and 360 hours of stand by time. The applications of the phone must be stored on the internal memory. The phone has a five mega pixel camera.
Razzle Dazzle:
The Hero looks a lot like T-Mobile G1 when seen from a distance and we are not fans of the G1 when it comes to looks. But this phone is different, it has metal exteriors and it is not glossy at all so there are no chances of getting finger prints on the body. Overall we will say that the chin and the sleek exteriors make this phone really sexy.
Inside Dope:
HTC is not a new player in the mobile phone market. It has been around for a while and has been churning out great looking phones one after the other. The Android is here and HTC has jumped the bandwagon to make phones driven on those OS. Barring a few like HTC Alltel, we find all of HTCs phones very attractive.
We were a bit overwhelmed to find that the home screen of the phone had seven pages for the menu. You don’t really need this much for the menu. You scroll back and forth by swiping your finger left or right. You can add shortcuts and widgets and you can change the wall paper of the home screen. There are a couple of widgets and you get more on the Android Market but we were really pleased with the widgets that were there in the phone like Twitter widget which give a live stream of tweets.
We have been familiar with ‘scenes’ feature of HTC phones, it just like ‘themes’ in Nokia phones and you can change in according to mood or just to change the look of the phone. You can put in the ‘fun’ theme if you are bored on a Monday morning at work. There are lots of features like this and it might be overwhelming for a newbie but once you get used to it, you will find them really cool.
Social networking is the one reason, if you want any, to buy the Hero. The phone will get all contacts synced from your contact list of Facebook and Gmail. Now, we are not sure about this feature because it will add up everyone you have ever mailed messages as contacts in your phone book. The phone also gets you birthday, e-mails, numbers, etc. of all your people in Facebook and Gmail right on your contact list. The phone will show pictures of friends from Facebook in the contact list. You can also get widgets and applications for sites like Bebo and Myspace but it won’t sync contacts like Facebook and Gmail.
The big screen hogs almost all of the face of the Hero so you get only a virtual keyboard on the screen. Now virtual keyboard though welcome by many has got its own set of drawbacks as some say they aren’t as comfortable as physical buttons which give tactile feedback. We found the full size QWERTY keyboard to be really easy to use, it has predictive text and also a separate number keys which is rare in QWERTY keyboards. There is a spell check feature but it is switched off in default and Hero also supports cut copy, paste.
The Hero is powered by Qualcomm 528MHz processor which we have seen in HTC Magic. The processor is a bit slow and looks like it cannot handle all the features that the phone has to offer. It also lags in accelerometer when you change from portrait to landscape mode. Even swiping on the home screens took a bit of time. The processor is slow but seldom crashes or hangs, the phone will run faster if you turn off the widgets but we were unwilling to let the widgets go, they were one of our favorites on the phone.
Hero has a really long battery life, we have rarely seen a phone battery survive for a whole day when used along with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Hero has a great browser, next to only Safari, it has Flash support which lets you watch videos on sites like YouTube. We ran a few sites with videos and it was not that impressive. The phone could handle video sites which it claims to support well. For watching YouTube video you will have to install a separate application. The browser also had some problems switching widows but we blame the slow processor for this.
The Hero supports multi touch so you can pinch the photos to zoom in and out just like the iPhone. We were disappointed to see the pinch feature didn’t work in Google maps and it is funny that Google maps run better on iPhone than Google’s Android handset.
There is a trackball navigator which helps you in text and web pages but there is also the touch screen which you can use for the two features.
We were delighted to find a five mega pixel camera, the photo quality is good as long as the light conditions are good. The camera will take awful photos in low light conditions because of lack of sensitivity. The phone is good for light usage but still won’t replace your digital camera. Camera phones with 8 MP camera, like N86 or Samsung Omnia were the best in taking pictures.
There is no syncing software for getting music on the Hero. You just connect the handset to the computer and drag files on to the phone icon. It is a matter of personal preference when it comes to syncing software, some people don’t like it since a simple drag and drop interface is easier for them but some people think that syncing software manages files better and can take backups for all the configurations and applications. You can put in your own set of headphones with the 3.5 mm phone jack on the device.
Nitty Gritty:
The Hero is made as a replacement to Apple’s iPhone and we welcome this effort but the phone fails in some areas like the browser has flash support but YouTube videos struggled. But other than that we loved the phone for its sleek looks, muti touch capabilities and messaging features like Facebook and Flickr integration. Buy this if you want a handset just like iPhone.
