With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including a GPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a 5 mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.
Review by Thomas Jhou: 
This phone seems to combine a lot of promise with above average frustration. Hardware-wise, it is feature-packed, with a reasonably strong processor, GPS, WiFi, internal compass, ambient light sensor, and autofocus-capable camera. But this phone still runs Android 1.5, which although promising, still has some rough edges. While gearheads and the tech-obsessed will be able to take full advantage of the phone's capabilities, more typical consumers might find the phone rather overwhelming. Using this phone reminds me of my experience many years ago when Windows 95 first came out. Then, as now, that was the product to compete with Apple's offerings, but it had a steeper learning curve, and took a while to iron out the rough edges.
Here are my detailed observations, starting first with the good things:
1. If you use gmail and Google calendar, Android will synchronize your life. If you add contacts on your phone, they show up on your gmail account, and vice versa. If you add calender items online, they show up on the phone, and vice versa. It just works. All phones should be this easy.
2. The GPS is great, much better than my older HTC phone. It finds satellites quickly, even indoors, relatively far from windows. If it doesn't find satellites, the phone will locate itself using cell phone towers.
3. The Android "desktop" is fully customizable. You can place anything you want, anywhere you want. The interface is smooth, responsive, and addictively easy to use.
4. There is an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts screen brightness to match the environment, like the iphone. It works well most of the time, with one quirk that I'll mention below.
5. Although the screen resolution is "only" half VGA (like the iphone), the screen looks great, with lots of detail. I've also used phones with full VGA resolution, and they aren't all that much better.
6. LOTS of apps, many of which are both very good and very free. I didn't like the default clock, so I found a better one that was free. The Weather Channel also has a really good app (also free). Everyone knows about Pandora radio. There are lots of nerdy apps, like the barcode reader and sky viewer. You can read user comments before you install any app, which helps weed out the flakier ones.
OK, now for the frustrating parts.
1. Typing. This phone has one of the increasingly common "capacitive" touchscreens (like the iphone). If you're already used to this, you'll do fine with this phone, and this issue won't bother you. But if you haven't used one before, get ready for several days of frustrating mistyping. Capacitive screens don't respond to mere pressure, and they require the fleshy pad of your finger or other large conductive object. Your fingers will feel like giant marshmallows at first, even if you have small hands. There is software that can help, e.g. a word completion feature that fixes typos, but I turned it off because it mangled proper names and specialized jargon. Fortunately, it is trainable (can learn new words) but this takes time, and if you're still getting used to the touchscreen, the word completion is just one more distraction. Eventually, your typing proficiency will improve, but it will take a little while.
2. Android and the various Google applications still feel like works in progress. For example, Google maps on Android 1.5 doesn't let you save "Favorite" locations. You can save them to your "contacts" instead, but that's not the most elegant solution.
3. Google Chrome automatically syncs bookmarks across your PCs, but this does not extend to the Android browser. Of course, no other phone does this either, but it seems like another strange omission. I have no doubt Google's engineers are working on this, but it's not quite here yet.
4. Settings are often hard to find, and buried deep within menus. For example, to turn off dialpad tones, you have to exit out of the phone application, then go to "Settings", then "sound and display", then scroll to "dialer keypad tone". It took me days to figure this out.
5. When you place apps on the phone's "desktop", you can only choose them by name, not icon, which is a problem because many apps have the same abbreviated text name (e.g. lots of apps are called "clock"). As the number of apps grows, this problem will get even worse.
6. Battery life is middling when using default factory settings. It seems to get better if you turn off "always-on" in the wireless settings. These things aren't obvious - you have to figure them out by reading forums and seeing what other people have tried, then testing them yourself.
In general, using this phone feels like the early days when PCs became popular. There is a lot of potential, but I'm still waiting for the applications to improve, and even the basic applications are quirky. Right now this phone probably has more appeal to gearheads than a mainstream audience. To take advantage of this phone's cool features, you have to be willing to spend considerable time fiddling and tweaking, and reading in forums to find out how other users worked around various quirks. Once you do all that, phone ends up being quite good, but not everyone wants to, or should have to, do all that work.
US $109.99
(out of 3 reviews)
(out of 2 reviews)
(out of 2 reviews)
I hope there will be a way to protect it somehow.
