HTC HERO

HTC HERO

 The HTC Hero is the second Android powered handset to be launched in the country and in quite a short span. The initial model, the HTC Magic was launched exclusively with Airtel and so is the Hero. But it’s also available as an open GSM model for use with any other operator.

Form Factor

There’s nothing to dislike about the handset’s design. The slight rubbery surface makes it easy to grip and gives a good feel. The chin portion tends to give you a sense of closeness to the microphone; you’ll never have to raise your voice. Trackball navigation is not new but it does beat the nav-pad option. The keys are well placed and easy to use when necessary. The volume keys are almost invisible as they blend perfectly with the rear portion of the handset. The display size and resolution hasn’t been upped from the Magic’s. It’s still a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with a 320 x 480 pixel resolution and support for 65K colors.

A proprietary styled mini USB port is located at the bottom and it’s compatible with the standard mini USB cables though. A 3.5 mm handsfree jack is located on the top. The saddest part is, unlike some handsets if you’re using your own set of earphones and not the bundled handsfree, you’ll have to unplug them to take a call as the mic doesn’t seem to work with third party headphones. The hot-swap slot for the microSD card is located under the rear panel.

Interface

The Sense UI is a simplistically designed interface. Essentially it’s a total of six desktop pages with widgets that can be assigned to each page. Widgets can also be downloaded from the Android Market. This time the app is available with the handset so you’re free to browse the variety of add-ons that are available for download. This is the only handset with the multiple desktop option, and the full page widgets are extremely well designed and easy to use. The HTC QWERTY keypad is easy to use in landscape mode but we recommend the regular phone keypad in portrait. QWERTY is a little cramped in this case.

While the UI does seem relatively smooth it is also a little bit sluggish in certain instances. When it comes to opening the album folders to view images or videos it tends to take a few seconds. The transition from portrait to landscape is also a bit slow and not very seamless. Perhaps the 528 MHz processor is just a little bit underpowered than what one would need.

Media

We were impressed with the superb sound quality that the Android music player delivers. Even without EQ settings, it delivers crisp sound with all frequencies blending perfectly and a brilliant thump in the bass line. The player itself is simple with the option of creating playlists on the go. The lack of an FM radio is still a big problem.

The supported video formats are MPEG4 and 3GP, and videos don’t really look all that bad. They play without a hitch and you can also opt to change the resolution from widescreen to full screen, cutting out the black bars from the edges.

The gaming experience is still not even close to being anything as good as that on the iPhone. The ones designed for this platform, although entertaining, are still simplistic in creation and look or feel.

Connectivity

The HTC Hero is connectivity-ready but that isn’t the whole truth. Yes it is a 3G ready handset with HSDPA capabilities and thus easily supports basic EDGE and GPRS. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 as well and supports PC connectivity. But here’s the glitch—like the high and mighty iPhone, HTC’s Android handset also offer limited Bluetooth capabilities. We were unable to send or receive any data to or from the handset via Bluetooth. A2DP worked just fine with a stereo Bluetooth headset but we found the range to be a bit of an issue.

As usual it was externally easy setting up Gmail as well as other POP3 and IMAP accounts. The handset is also set to handle Microsoft Exchange accounts if that’s what you use. A widget can be placed on one of the many desktops to give you on the fly updates of your accounts. The browser is still the best part about the handset. It’s fast and navigation is simple. Its full web capabilities with Flash support give mobile web surfing a great feel.

This Android handset comes plenty of skill to handle most of the popular social networking sites. First up is the ever popular Facebook that has a widget all to itself, a sync option for your contacts that also stores their profile images. Twitter is next with another helpful widget called Peep for receiving and sending updates. You can set these various functions up with your accounts so transactions between the two will be seamless. Pictures can also be quickly uploaded to all of these networks with a click of a button. You can also upload images to a Picasa album or send them via Gmail.

Google has its own little arrangement of goodies from a Gtalk application that also syncs with your contacts. That’s all in addition to Gmail app as well as Google Maps which is certainly a few steps up from what the Magic had to offer. Footprints is a great geotagging application that shows you the location on Google maps. The funniest thing is that although the camera supports geotagging, we weren’t able to simply click on a captured image and find the position on Google Maps unless we used the Footprints app.

Other features

When it comes to the simpler applications such as Calendar, Alarm, Notes, Stopwatch and such, if you can’t find it on the handset already just get it from the Android Market, it’s all there. The Hero comes preloaded with QuickOffice (read only) that reads .TXT and .XLS files quite easily. PowerPoint files take quite a while to open and .DOC files that had any images in them refused to read while normal word files were no problem. The PDF reader also took time opening files.

Camera

The Hero’s 5 megapixel camera was not very good. It’s slow and unsteady, so almost all captured images seemed a bit blurred. The settings include white balance, self-timer, effects and even ISO settings up to 800. It allows you to select an area of focus by touching the screen. But that didn’t make things any better. Macro shots are a problem as we could never get the camera to focus on the subject of choice.

Battery

Depending on how often or how much you like staying connected you can maximize your battery life. With quite a few of the Widgets and email being active simultaneously with a few calls and messages, the battery lasted for a little over a day and a half. You can switch off the Internet connectivity and get quite a lot more. Talk time by itself averaged in at about four hours which is not bad. So on the whole the Hero’s battery life is better than just average.

Specifications

Rs 31,990