Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Brilliant Sense UI, good call quality, well designed.

Thumbs down: Poor camera, bad media support.

Inside the trunk:

• Bluetooth: Yes
• Stereo Bluetooth: Yes
• WiFi: Yes
• Processor Speed (MHz): 528
• Playable Formats : AAC Plus, H.263, H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, WAV, WMA, WMV9
• MMS: Yes
• GPS Receiver Details: A-GPS
• GPRS: Yes
• Android OS v1.5 / 320 x 480 pixels capacitive touchscreen

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Well though the wait wasn’t long, the Hero has finally arrived. What is left to be seen is whether this one can live upto what it claims to be. This one doesn’t have the big G branding but it comes with all the android hallmarks.

Razzle-dazzle: Though this one wouldn’t be like the on the numero uno position on the style check list, this one with the bulging lip surely will stand out in the crowd. Like the other android phones from HTC this one also has seven buttons on the lip. The glitch here is that the power key is the same as the application terminate key. It took me some time to get used to this set up so that I don’t switch the phone off whenever I had to end an app.
Going in with the recent fad where in video calling is no longer the ‘IT’ thing, this one has eliminated the front facing camera. To click a picture one has to click the trackball because the camera key is absent in this one. It comes along with an USB cable, a U.K adaptor, and headphones.

Inside dope: The thing that HTC is bragging about with the launch of this one is the Sense UI, and it has enough reason to do so I feel, because its just brilliant. This one is like the fourth android phone from HTC and starting from three home screens, with this one it has moved up to seven home screens including the main home screen which can be accessed from anywhere by just hitting on the home button and with three to the left and the right of the screen respectively. HTC has also taken the TouchFlo3D interface and based its new Sense UI into it. This means that not only does thee user get different home screens there also a slider bar below a few applications to scroll through the pages.

This one comes with a 528mhz processor, which isn’t exactly fit for the kind of multitasking that the HTC hero is expected too provide the user with. I also noticed some lag at different intervals and I guess this has to do with the underpowered processor. I just hope that HTC looks into this soon. Switching the screen from the landscape mode to the portrait mode can be done by simply rotating the phone and then the inbuilt accelerometer does the rest.

For the social networking fans, the Sense UI brings in a lot of relief as it is well integrated with sites like facebook and twitter. You can easily scroll through your contact list and get a record of all the status updates and also when you call the person, his display pic on facebook pops up on the screen. Downloading the pictures through a 3G connection may take some time but then again once the downloading is done browsing through it is almost a breeze.

Though HTC had promised 211 contact imports at a time, it could hardly import 6 names at a time, and this was damn annoying.

Call quality as expected was brilliant. Though nowadays not much attention is paid to the styling of the phone because of high end microphone features like noise cancellation, the jutting lip provided a highly pleasant call experience. There was hardly any static or interference. Also the callers on the other end hardly has any complaints about the voice quality.

Sending messages using the phone is quite an easy task, plus it also provides with something called XT9 dictionary which means that when you have just started hitting the keys, the dictionary will spell the right word for you. Also when adding pictures to the message the pictures get automatically resized.

I was simply blown away by the internet browsing speed that this one had to offer, its second to none in the market. I would also advise watching youtube videos on it rather than actually watching the other flash videos, because whenever I tried playing flash videos it hung up invariably.

Its got a 5 megapixel camera as compared to the 3 megapixel one that the HTC magic had to offer. It goes without saying that more megapixels doesn’t mean a better camera. And this definitely stands true in the case of the hero. The pictures aren’t  sharp with very less brightness and low sharpness. Comparing the video camera and the camera I must say that the video camera fares better and is better than the one offered by the iPhone but is still not all that great.

The music player is not like really well integrated into the phone and just cannot be compared to the iPhone. The sound quality is definitely better using the 3.5mm headphone jack as compared to the speaker. If the disappointing music player was not enough, then let me add that the video player is bad as well. It doesn’t support AVI formats.

Apart from the other inbuilt applications, there are a few applications which can be downloaded for free like the beebPlayer, light racer, file browser, super Mario sounds and ringtones.

It comes loaded with a pretty impressive 1350mAh battery but with al the application running happening on the HERO this one could be expected to last for like 1.5 day.

Nitty-gritty: Its absolutely unfair when every other phone launched gets compared to the iPhone but this one surely was launched to give the iPhone some competition but again the Hero failed to do so. For sure this one tried hard, and still there are many Android phones being launched and I guess there are many from the HTC stable itself. And probably one of them could be the iPhone killer. And on that note I d like to add this one with a some firmware upgrades should solve most of its problems.

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