| Extended Review: HTC Hero |
| by Charles F. Moreira | |||
| Tuesday, 05 January 2010 11:05 | |||
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The free and open sourced Android operating system for mobile devices is pretty much the buzz these days, especially as several smartphones with it are on the market and more so the opportunity it provides for developers to create a host of applications for it. We take a closer look at the Hero, the first Android phone with the new HTC Sense user interface.Look and feel The Hero’s and the Magic’s chin is supposed to match the contours of one’s face, its microphone is actually found at the bottom of the phone, so the chin is mostly cosmetic and also helps to keep it standing on its side whilst watching videos. Our review unit is in brown, so it does not have the Teflon coating of its white counterpart. It did survive a drop onto a terrazzo floor from a height of about one metre and the battery and cover flew apart. It worked well when we put it together again, moreover there were no noticeable dents or scratches. True to HTC’s claim, it fit comfortably in the hand and was easily operated via its function buttons and trackball. With my large fingers, I found its onscreen virtual QWERTY keyboard prone to mis-typing, though my friend with smaller fingers had no problem. Sense-ible Good looks aside, a phone is as good as its features and the Hero took over 90 seconds to completely boot up from cold. Its HTC Sense user interface consists of seven panes with the centre pane as the main screen at startup and the panes glide past sideways, up or down like a well-oiled mechanical slider when swiped. The display is highly customisable, with five preconfigured scenes – namely HTC, Social, Work, Play and Travel with different sets of icons and functions on each of the panes. The leftmost pane is blank for you to add your choice of shortcuts and you can give your diffferent layouts unique names. There’s the Clean Slate layout which gives you six blank panes to customise as you wish. Apps Since the Android Market isn’t available in Malaysia, this version of Hero comes with something called SlideMe Application Manager. It acts as a client for you to buy and download some of the Android apps. At time of writing, it listed 314 applications under several categories such as Travel, Fun & Games and so on. SAM lets you browse each of these apps and obtain description and pricing before you download and install them. When you’re downloading them, SAM will place a notification on the left of the top task bar. When finished with selecting apps, exit SAM and go to the drop down menu, tap on them one at a time to install. Application prices range from free to USD14 or more. We downloaded a few, including the aLighter which displays a photo of a lit cigarette lighter. Perhaps this is intended as an alternative to holding up an actual lit lighter to cheer live bands at a rock concert. Other freebie apps we installed were Morse Droid, Mobeegal search assisstant, AstroClock Lite, WAEV Tetris and so on. These freeware makes the Hero more interesting to own. The Teletext Lite freeware obtains and displays Teletext pages from the 130 TV channels across 27 countries. TV3 used to have one but it has ceased operations since early last year. aiCurrency is a 30-days free trialware, after which you pay USD0.99. It uses the latest exchange rates downloaded from Yahoo! Finance, the National Bank of the Ukraine or the European Central Bank and converts between 203 different currencies. Whilst the SlideME Android Community and Application Marketplace may not yet have as many apps as are already available for Android Market itself, Symbian, Palm OS, Windows Mobile or Java, it’s growing and promises to offer more exciting offerings in time to come. Free on board As for apps that come out-of-the-box with the Hero, I found Google Maps to be the most useful one. However, you need cellular data connection for Google Maps to work, so best have a data plan before proceeding. Even with both GPS and A-GPS enabled, it saw me as being in front of the Jaya 33 complex on Jalan Semangat, Petaling Jaya when I actually was on the opposite side of the road. In another instance, the directions it gave me to an address in Section 14, Petaling Jaya included instructions to cross the road when I was already on the opposite side. Its calendar, contacts and email synchronises with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync or Google Calendar/Gmail. It displayed the entries in our company Google calendar of events, which let me check up my appointments whilst on the go. Its email client works with other POP3/IMAP mail servers and with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync. Other notable apps include Peep -- a mobile Twitter client, YouTube and full HTML browser. We enabled USB-drive access and installed HTCSync from the setup program on the miniUSB card but the phone could not find HTCSync on our Windows XP PC, even after we downloaded and installed the latest version 2.04 from HTC’s website. Perhaps we had to have Outlook installed on our PC first. However, USB connectivity worked, so we could transfer pictures, videos, songs and documents. Camera Its 5 megapixel camera took clear pictures both indoors and outdoors during the day with sharp detail of leaves and the features of a building in the distance. In some cases, especially where the scene contains brightly lit and darker portions, there was a noticeable bluish bias in some pictures and warmer, more natural-looking colours in others.
Indoor shot Rather surprisingly, it also took sharp street scenes at night, provided its autofocus has properly locked onto a subject and you keep a very steady hand. Its object of focus – such as a particular face or object -- can be changed by tapping on its image on the viewfinder screen.
Night shot
Zoomed out shot It also supports spot, centre area or average metering, geo-tagging of pictures with GPS coordinates, 4:3 (standard TV) and widescreen 3:2 aspect ratios, up to ISO 800, date and time stamping of pictures, special effects and others. It captures 3GP videos in three resolutions up to 352 x 288 pixels max with MPEG4 or H.263 compression. It also plays back MP4 and WMV videos.
YouTube playing on the Hero
The HTC Hero with its Android OS and Sense UI was excellent in almost every way except for its long boot up time and the problems we had with HTCSync. In addition, its battery lasted about a day of intensive use during the review with the occasional top-ups whilst connected to our PC’s USB port for file transfer.
Standard Package
MW Rating: 4/5 
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