User interface

Before getting the Hero, the only touch-screen phones I had tried were the iPhone and the Nokia N97. I really hoped that the Hero could live up to the iPhone that I couldn’t get. Just turning on the phone and seeing the screen, and going through the setup wizard showed that HTC had done a really good job with this phone. They have built a coherent look and feel to the entire experience, called Sense UI. In my opinion, Sense UI is very intuitive. Most functions can be found where you’d think they are. The user interface is really polished and professional looking, unlike the N0kia N97 I had tried earlier.

The initial firmware supplied with the phone was a bit laggy, especially when running many applications. One of my biggest surprises when I moved to Android was that there wasn’t any kind of task manager to kill apps with. Fortunately, there are several applications in the Android Market to help out with this problem. The one I liked the best was Advanced Task Killer Free. It allows you to check applications that you want to kill and then kill them with one tap. The Task Killer remembers which applications you have previously selected, so once you have selected the apps you always want to keep running, you can quickly just tap “Kill all selected apps” and have all the unnecessary apps shut down.

A firmware update came out later and made the phone significantly faster. It eliminated animations from some widgets, like the default clock/weather applet, but made the Hero much more pleasant to use.

What impressed me the most during the setup was that by entering my Google account details, the phone had set up all my contacts and calendar events. Even the correct internet APN was provided,  so I could get to surfing immediately. By entering your Facebook login information, you can have the phone match your contacts to Facebook friends and pull their photos to your contact list.

HTC has extended the number of home screens to seven. All home screens are completely customizable with widgets and icons. Comparing this to the iPhone makes the iPhone’s static grid of icons seem very outdated. For example, my home screen shows me at a glance the time, weather, next calendar appointment and shortcuts to my most used applications.

Browser

The browser on the Hero is WebKit based like the iPhone’s Mobile Safari. This, along with the same screen size, makes most iPhone web apps, like Facebook, work flawlessly on the Hero. Unlike most other Android devices, the HTC Hero has multi touch support with the familiar pinch-to-zoom gestures. The browser is fast and really makes it possible to view full web pages on the phone. Even though the Hero has Flash-support in the browser, it makes browsing a lot slower. This is because most of the Flash content on web pages is ads that don’t add any value to the content. By turning off the Flash plugin from the settings menu, the browser becomes even faster.

Google Maps

Another essential application in a smart phone is the map/navigation app. Google maps works very well on the Hero, even though it still seems to miss a couple of features. One of the missing features is the multi touch support that is used by most other applications on the phone. By not supporting pinch-zooming, the application feels out of place on the phone. Google maps does not either take advantage of the compass in the Hero to orient the map.

What I really miss from Google Maps, though, is navigation support. I hope that the rumored Android 2.1 update will bring navigation support also to the Hero (and to Finland).

One of the uses of Google Maps: finding food.

Email

The Hero comes with two mail clients, which is kind of confusing. One mail client is the default Android Gmail client. In addition to that, HTC have supplied an own email client that supports multiple mailboxes. I needed my phone to check all of my email accounts, so I chose the HTC email client.

In order for the client to display HTML emails, I had to change the maximum message size limit to more than 5kb (text only), which was the default option. I also had to disable Android’s Gmail syncing as I would get two notifications for every Gmail I received.

The mail client itself is quite nice. It displays HTML emails in the same way the browser would, and supports multitouch gestures. It allows you to choose how much mail you want to automatically download and you always have to manually download attachments, so there is no risk that the phone will start downloading huge attachments by itself.

Calendar

The calendar on the HTC Hero uses Google Calendar and automatically syncs events to and from Google Cal. By default, however, it uses a local calendar for some reason. I found it easiest to just hide the local calendar and use my Google calendars instead.

The Calendar application shows each different calendar with the same color coding as on the web. This makes it very convenient to have shared calendars and set up meetings from your phone that will automatically be synced to all those you share your Google calendar with.

Syncing

Syncing the Hero is dead simple. All you have to do is add a contact or calendar appointment, either from the phone or from the web and they will automatically sync over the air. This was a huge improvement form my previous Nokia and Windows Mobile phones that required manual syncing. In my experience, manual syncing = no syncing.

Other applications

There are also a whole lot of other smaller applications included in the phone. The phone will always stay logged on to Google Talk, which is a handy and cheap alternative to SMS for those who have your gtalk username.

The SMS/MMS application collects all messages to one person into a chat-like thread. It makes it simple to keep track of the discussion even if it has been a while since the last message.

Another nice touch on the Hero is that all communication with a contact can be seen from their contact page in the contacts app. It lists all messages and email correspondence you’ve had with that contact in one easy to find location.

In addition to all these apps, you can choose and install from tens of thousands of applications from the Android Market. You can see some of my favorite apps in my earlier post.

Build quality and battery life

The biggest weakness of the Hero is the same weakness that plagues all large-screened smart phones – battery life. During normal use, the battery lasts about a day and a half, but in real life you will want to charge it daily. On a positive note, I’ve never had the battery die on me during a day of usage.

The build quality of the device is fairly solid. I have still not got any scratches on the screen, and the screen stays easily clean as it is oil-repellant. A minor complaint about the build is that the back cover gets a bit loose after being taken off a few times. It squeaks a little if pressed near the volume button.

It was also nice to notice that iPhone headsets worked on the Hero, allowing me to both talk and control music.

Conclusions

I can honestly say that this is the best phone I’ve owned. Even though I got it because I couldn’t buy an iPhone, I’m more than happy with my choice. I wouldn’t trade it for an iPhone anymore, it offers me much more functionality and I like the openness of the Android plattform. Even though the phone is starting to get old in gadget-years, I can easily recommend that you get one if you find one cheap.