HTC Hero Android Phone
27 November 2009
Quite a few things to discuss but I think it appropriate to start with the Android OS. Google’s Android has all of the features you would expect in a phone. I’m not going to spend much time on the standard things as they are really the same from one OS to another. Being someone that uses some of Google’s other offerings (Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar and Google Maps) I was really impressed with the level of integration. Upon setup I simply entered my Google account information and everything from all of their other apps was instantly available. Nice.
Another big Android plus is the Marketplace. A clone of the Iphone’s app store it is simply amazing. Their are apps for almost anything you can think of and most are free. It’s quick and easy to download and install them and there are tons of them. I’ll probably setup a section here to review some of the apps in the marketplace. The marketplace quite simply turns your phone into almost anything you can imagine.
Another thing that sets this phone apart (eve from other Android phones) is the HTC add on’s. Seems like it’s mostly a different shell, HTC Sense, but the overall effect is that it is a much better phone. The home screen is much more useful and it feels more like a sophisticated device rather than a collection of icons.
This being my first touch screen phone I was surprised at how quickly I adapted to the interface. Keyboard excluded (I’ll get to that in a minute), it’s really quite easy and intuitive. It is a multi-input screen so you can pinch to zoom and so on.
Not a big fan of the on screen keyboard. Granted I am coming from a Blackberry where the keyboard was VERY easy to use so I may be a bit jaded. I find that I hit the wrong key often and am always correcting myself. They compensate for this with what is the best auto sense typing enhancement that I have ever used. It often comes up with the correct word even if I hit the wrong keys. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it is a different way of thinking almost.
While 5 mega pixels the camera still leaves a bit to be desired. No flash of course, but they compensate for it by overexposing pictures in low light. This results in pictures that are all very blurry. I’ll tr to post some examples later.
Going to wrap this up for now. There are many more features to this phone, but I feel I should use it a bit more before I comment on them. For now though, I think it’s a great phone and recommend it. I’m very impressed with Google and HTC.
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