Built around Google’s Android operating system, the HTC Hero has been billed as the iPhone killer, but can anything really live up to that hype? HTC has experience in the smartphone field, though, and with the Hero it’s done an excellent job, perhaps because it doesn’t rely solely on Android, but puts another interface on top of it.
Plenty of thought has gone into every aspect of the HTC Hero, including its physical design, which has been widely praised in mobile phone reviews, especially for the 3.5mm jack, which means a user can plug in headphones or ear buds to listen to music the way it should be heard. Unlike many of its competitors it’s set up for social networking, with a built-in Twitter application, and both Gmail and Facebook contacts as part of the address book – a very forward-thinking move for HTC.
All these are very positive things, but the Hero does fall down in several ways. With little memory built in, the user is reliant on microSD cards. That’s not the end of the world, but could have been improved. So, too, could the on screen keyboard, which has the typical sluggishness of Android’s slow processor. At five megapixels, the camera sounds impressive, but several mobile phone reviews commented that it simply wasn’t especially effective.
Those negatives aside, the HTC Hero certainly represents strong competition to the iPhone, even if it’s not likely to topple it from its perch just yet. However, the next generation might just manage that.
