HTC Hero (Sprint)

The HTC Hero is definitely the best Google Android phone available, thanks to a sleek design and HTC's own software extensions. But the "best Google Android phone" doesn't mean the best smartphone out there or even the best possible Google Android phone. Android still has a lot of room to grow. The Hero has some great features and a fun interface, but it doesn't muscle out the other strong competitors on Sprint.

The Hero is a lovely piece of hardware. It's not flashy with its gray soft-touch plastic with silver accents, but it feels rock solid. A 4.5 by 2.2 by .5 inch, 4.5 ounce slab, it's topped by a 3.2-inch, 320x480 glass capacitive touch screen. Below the touch screen are some action buttons and a fluid-feeling trackball; there's a real, honest-to-goodness 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, and a microSD memory card slot under the back cover (but fortunately, not under the battery.) The phone comes with a 2GB memory card, but my 16GB SanDisk Mobile Ultra card worked fine.

The Hero has both portrait and landscape mode virtual keyboards but no physical keyboard. The virtual keyboards offer vibrating feedback, pop-up letter images, and good autocorrection, though they're still no substitute for a roomy physical keyboard like the one on the HTC Touch Pro2.

The phone uses the same 528 MHz Qualcomm ARM11 application processor as the existing T-Mobile G1 and myTouch 3G, but it has more RAM available (on my unit, 127MB after syncing and loading personal data.) The device felt slow at times, but that might be because of Android's habit of never quitting programs. Running a task manager helped, but that's a stopgap solution.

Exclusive Apps
HTC is becoming famous for rewriting smartphone OSes to their own taste. Their latest reworking of Windows Mobile 6.1, as seen on Sprint's HTC Touch Pro2, is a tour-de-force which turns Windows Mobile into a people-centric, user-friendly operating system.

HTC Sense on the Hero is less of a radical reinvention. HTC has left the Android user experience more or less intact; you have a bunch of home screens scattered messily with customizable widgets and icons. HTC focused instead on adding features to connect people through messaging and social-networking systems.

The Hero's address book, for instance, lets you cross-reference all the calls and e-mails you've sent to someone, along with checking their Facebook status and Flickr album updates. Microsoft Exchange support is now plumbed into the e-mail, calendar, and address book programs. A built-in IM program lets you hit AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo Messenger, not just the Google Talk built into Android. And a new Twitter app called "Peep" offers quick access to post updates on Twitter.

But that's not all. This smartphone is stacked with custom software, and most of it is useful. Footprints is an interesting GPS-based app that lets you put together geo-tagged photo-notes about places you like. The more conventional Sprint Navigation and Google Maps also use the Hero's GPS, which locked in quickly and seemed accurate.

Sprint's NFL and NASCAR apps let you track those sports through full-screen displays or home-screen widgets. QuickOffice and a PDF viewer let you view, but not edit, Microsoft Office documents. And of course, you can download anything you want from the 7,000-app Android Market.

Phone Performance
The phone connects to Sprint's EVDO Rev A network, and to Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g networks for Internet access. I got pretty slow speeds in the built-in browser, around 200 kilobits/sec. Sprint doesn't currently let you use the phone as a PC modem, so I couldn't see if the phone's browser was the problem.

The Hero gets decent but not great RF reception and delivers mediocre phone-call performance. I got somewhat wobbly voice quality with a lot of background noise coming through the microphone. The speakerphone is of decent volume, but it also transmits great gobs of background sound. The phone works with mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, and supposedly does voice dialing, but the voice dialing app crashed whenever I tried to use it. Visual voicemail, on the other hand, worked perfectly.

The Hero got very good talk time, with nearly six hours on a charge. Standby time was well over a day, as long as you set Microsoft Exchange e-mail to download at 15 minute intervals. (BlackBerry smartphones are the only ones I know of that can handle Microsoft Exchange push email for more than a day on a charge.)

Downsides
As with so many smartphones today, the Hero felt a bit buggy. The voice dialing app crashed every time I tried it. Peep was often well behind real time. Sometimes the phone would take a few seconds to execute a command or pop up the virtual keyboard. And the IM client said outright that it was an "alpha" version.

The Hero's 5-megapixel camera is abysmal. It's shockingly low-resolution for a five-megapixel unit (with only around 1000 lines of resolution), and it takes blurry, washed-out photos with visible JPEG artifacting. Videos came out at 320 by 240 resolution and 15 frames per second. They were sharp enough, but not extraordinary.

Although the Hero's 3.5mm headphone jack means it's a viable media player unlike the two other Android phones on the market, I wasn't satisfied with the phone's video playback capabilities. Audio was OK; the Hero hooks up to PCs in mass storage mode, syncs in a basic way with Windows Media Player, and plays MP3, AAC, and WMA music files, albeit with an almost total lack of bass. But full-screen videos in 3GP and WMV format were sometimes jerky. Sprint's streaming Sprint TV system brings dozens of channels, but they were jerky with occasional lip-sync problems. The custom YouTube app played smoothly, but looked low-res.

Sprint now has four excellent smartphones, tying with AT&T for the strongest smartphone lineup in the U.S. The HTC Hero, Palm Pre, HTC Touch Pro2, and BlackBerry Tour 9630 are all top-notch smartphones with somewhat different strengths. Unfortunately for the Hero, the competing handsets do things a little better. The Touch Pro2 and Tour are better mobile offices thanks to their physical keyboards and document-editing software, the Pre and Touch Pro2 are better for music and video, the Tour is a better phone, and so forth. That doesn't mean the Hero is bad, just that Sprint users now have a range of excellent choices. That's something they should be very happy about.

Benchmark Test Results
Continuous Talk Time: 5 hours 56 minutes

Compare the HTC Hero (Sprint) with several other mobile phones side by side.

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