HTC Hero Early Impressions

Sunday

Feb282010

Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 7:03PM

I've been using the HTC Hero since this past Tuesday and while our relationship is still in its earliest stages I have to say I've been rather impressed overall with the Android platform with the HTC Sense overlay. That's not to say there are not some things that I think could be better implemented, there are, but rather I can see where Google is going with Android.

Here's a break down of the early pros and cons that I have so far with the device...

Pros:

Fairly fast start up time! From the time I power the device up to usable interface is less than two minutes which is by far the fastest of any smartphone I've yet to use.
HTC Sense offers a vastly superior user interface over standard Android. Seven "home" screens versus the three of standard Android means that you can load up with various widgets that bring the information you need/use on a regular basis to the forefront. In fact, I still have two screens that are blank at the moment.
Some applications "feel" superior to what I've used on the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or WebOS. Some, there are others that feel "half baked" but they were free so no niggles here.
The glass capacitive touch screen is nice! I prefer glass over plastic screens as they are easier to clean and feel better to the touch. That and they don't scratch as easy as a plastic screen.
If you do a restart of the device daily then it doesn't lag down that much (this may be a con for some but not for me due to the fast start up time).
The media player that HTC includes is awesome, at least for audio. I've not done any video watching on the phone yet.

Cons:

The web browser on Android is based on Web Kit just like the ones on the iPhone and WebOS but this has to be the worst implementation of this program I've ever seen. Sure, it has multi-touch support and sure, it supports Flash Lite but that doesn't mean a whit if the thing is as slow as a pig going to slaughter. Turning Flash off helps. A lot.
Battery life on the HTC Hero is not really all that great but I'm still in the process of conditioning the battery so I hope that will improve over time. I can barely make it through the day without having to do a recharge but I keep that portable battery pack for charging cell phones topped up and in my back pack every day, just in case.
The layout of the hardware buttons and trackball could have been done better.
You use the trackball to snap pictures with the camera. This wouldn't be all bad if the trackball wasn't also used to zoom the camera but more often than not I have to retake photos due to the zoom kicking in.
No way to quit applications by default unless you download and install a third party task manager program. Instead programs are "paused" in the background but are still running.

While there are cons with the pros I have to say that so far I do like the Android operating system. The HTC Hero is running version 1.5 but is slated to be updated to 2.1 sometime in the next month or so and with that update should come several improvements that may take some of the cons off the list. After I've had more than just a few days of using the device I'll do a more detailed review.

Mike P. |

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