• Technology

I have never been one for the cult worship of gadgets. In fact, I have always gravitated away from the mob towards the underdog. In my time, I was never taken in by the Nintendo wave (I had an Atari), nor the Nokia 3310 surge (I used the Motorola Timeport), and I certainly didn’t have a minute for the iPod (it was always Panasonic, for me).

Keeping up with that unflinching tradition, I have always junked the iPhone—it just didn’t cut it for me. The never-ending hype over it was, in fact, nauseating. But where was the underdog? The one with the stomach for a fight? Yes, the past year threw up many claimants to the crown—the Palm Pre, Samsung Omnia, Nokia N97—but none really lived up to the billing.

One has, however, broken through the ceiling. The aptly named Hero is a beautiful, slick phone that retains the open source soul of Google’s Android operating system. With both its hardware and software, HTC has managed to crack the Android puzzle and make the first smartphone that’s able to go head-to-head with the iPhone. And beat it, too.

The phone is pure HTC in terms of its look. Unlike the previous Android phones, this one is solid in build and soft in feel. The shape, though, may take a little getting used to. It has this chin-like base, which may be a visual put-off for some. I, for one, found it pretty ergonomic. The base also has a trackball and four buttons on it, including home, menu, search, send, end/power and return. The last one is a bit awkwardly placed for big thumbs like mine. The volume button, though, is well placed on the right side of the handset and, thankfully, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top.

Spec-wise, the Hero retains the innards of the first Android phone, the HTC Magic. It has a Qualcomm 528MHz CPU, 288MB of RAM, 512MB ROM, WiFi, GPS, and, of course, Bluetooth. Add to that a 3.2-inch, 480×320 capacitive touchscreen, which seems to hold its own against the competition. However, the 5-megapixel camera is leagues ahead of its peers. I dare say that it’s just a few notches below premium point-n-shoot cameras, but way better than the iPhone’s slack 3-megapixel camera. Video recording, however, does not match up to its credentials as a still camera.

Now, we come to the most awesome part: the slick OS. By the looks of it, some serious effort has been put into HTC-fying the Android into this very smooth avatar. Moving away from its TouchFlo past, HTC has hammered, tweaked and developed a completely new UI for the Hero called the Sense—and it is miles ahead of all its Android contemporaries.

Another tip of the hat must go to HTC for the way it has blended social networking with the OS, allowing for Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to merge and be accessible from various spots on the phone.

E-mail-wise, the Hero is a notch above other Android phones as it can access Microsoft Exchange accounts along with POP3/IMAP and Gmail. However, typing your e-mails out could be a chore at first, as the onscreen keyboard does lack in size.

Luckily though, dialing and contact management is a breeze, as you can access numbers and names from the same keypad. Web surfing on the Hero was a joy, too. The rendering of web pages was excellent and the browser opened flash-heavy websites easily—something that the iPhones, the BlackBerrys and the Pre can’t do.

The Hero comes with seven homescreens you can sweep through with your fingers. And each one of them is customizable with the tons of widgets and applications that HTC has to offer. Like Peep, the Twitter client can be used either from a widget on a homescreen or as a full-blown app that easily competes with the likes of Tweetdeck and Tweetie.

Then there are the very cool toggle switches for turning off and on WiFi, mobile networks, Bluetooth and the Airplane Mode without getting into the settings. Add to that the fast-increasing number of applications that the Android Marketplace has to offer.

My take on the phone is this: it is easily the phone of the year. It is a pleasure to play and work with. In fact, it has completely turned a touchscreen-hater like me. Perhaps my only grouse with it is that it could be faster—the older architecture is sometimes unable to keep up with the OS. HTC may want to upgrade the hardware of the next version. Better processing specs would have made the Hero an unbeatable beast rather than the fierce competitor it
is now.

What the Hero has done best of all is set the benchmark for what Android phones can be in the future. We are already hearing of Motorola and its Droid handset taking everybody by surprise, and there are rumors of Google launching its own Android phone—the very mysterious Nexus One. I lie in wait for what the next year will offer.

THEY THINK OF EVERYTHING!
Must-have Android Apps:

Google Goggles Search by image. Awesome!

Facebook for Android No explanation needed here.

ShopSavvy For the budget-conscious shopper.

Shazam Like a song? This can fetch it for you.

Sherpa Your personal concierge.

Gmote Turn your mobile into a remote.

Locale Different phone settings for different locations.

©Entrepreneur January 2010

Tags:
Hero, HTC, phone