Leakdroid Phone Review Series – Sprint HTC Hero (w/ Videos)

The HTC Hero is an upcoming Android Smartphone launching on Sprint on October 11th.  Delivering to the World the first ever Android Smartphone, HTC has the jump on all other manufacturers readying their Android wares.  The Hero is HTC’s third Android device, and the manufacturer seems to have learned quite a few things from creating the G1, and myTouch 3G (both available on T-Mobile).  The Hero also marks a big step forward for Android, now being offered on second carrier that just happens to have more subscribers and a larger network footprint than the first.  Sprint has always earned rave reviews for their 3G data network’s reliability and speed, and the Hero seems to be the perfect device for those wanting to be connected to everything all the time.

Sprint’s version of the HTC Hero is almost ready to drop on U.S. shores, and people everywhere are wondering what all the hype is about.  In the first (of many) edition of the official Leakdroid Phone Review Series, we put Sprint’s new Hero through the wringer to see if it lives up to that hype.  Scroll down for videos!

HTC’s aforementioned extra time with Android has been very well spent, developing a custom User Interface (UI) on top of Google’s Android operating system called HTC Sense.  HTC Sense is HTC’s new design philosophy consisting of three parts:

Make it Mine

With HTC Hero, personalization reaches a level never before possible. Rather than burying important content under layers of menus, the HTC Hero lets you put it at glance view, with a selection of widgets that can be placed right on the home screen. The widgets themselves can be personalized with a variety of designs and sizes that best match your personality.

With Scenes, a new profile feature, HTC Hero becomes multiple phones in one. Create and switch between Scenes that reflect different moments in your life. Your Hero becomes a weekend phone that helps you relax with your choice of tunes, catch up with your favorite friends and capture some memories with HTC Footprints™. And when you go on a trip, your phone becomes your personal guide and gives you instant access to local time, weather and maps.

Stay Close

Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls and emails to Facebook updates. HTC Hero makes staying close as simple as turning to your friend and saying hello. When you view people, you see the different ways to get in touch, you also see all your interactions like emails sent to your personal and work accounts. You can even check for social network updates and event notices as well as see the latest pictures your friends uploaded to popular photo sharing sites.

Discover the Unexpected

Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. Even basic functions like the dialer will pleasantly surprise you on the HTC Hero. You can find a person by dialing their phone number or simply by dialing the first few letters of their name.

With HTC Hero, you can look at things through different perspectives. Your inbox is not just a list of emails, but a catalog of conversations, a collection of notes flagged as important, and a document library of all your emails with attachments. Your Album is not just the photos saved on your phone. It is also a gateway to online collections of you and your friends on Facebook or Flickr.

Search just about anything, anywhere on your HTC Hero. The dedicated Search button combs through tweets in Twitter™, locates people in your contact list, finds emails in your inbox, searches through appointments in the calendar and very nearly finds needles in haystacks.

Android has always offered a level of personalization and customization not found on other smartphone platforms, but HTC Sense really takes this feature to the next level.  On stock Android handsets, you get 3 Home Screens with which to customize to your heart’s content with shortcuts, widgets, and apps.  HTC Sense gives you 7 Home Screens to really put your customization abilities to the test and “Make it Mine”.

HTC Sense also offers a feature called “Scenes“, allowing you to create different profiles of your phone categorized and created by you.  With this feature, you can save and easily switch between profiles for Home, Work, Play, and anything else you might want.  7 different home screens, and you can customize them completely differently for each Scene.  Smartphones are becoming much more common these days, and many people use or want to use them as both their personal and work phone.  This feature is not found on any other smartphone platform, and HTC clearly listened to the people out there who only want to carry around one device to do everything they want.  Ever wish you could make your phone different at Work than it is at Home?  Want a custom wallpaper, social widgets, and your personal-related items after “quittin’ time”, but Work E-mail, stocks, news, and office-related tasks during the day?  Scenes makes it easy to switch between your profiles in just a few taps.  The Hero comes pre-loaded with 6 different Scenes:  HTC, Social, Work, Play, Travel, and Clean Slate, with the latter being just that – a blank slate of 7 home screens to customize from scratch as you see fit.

HTC has also developed it’s own set of custom Android widgets to display on any  of your home screens, including:

• Bookmarks (quickly scroll through your bookmarks from a home screen and tap to open in the Web Browser)
• Calendar
• 12 different Clocks to choose from (12!)
• Footprints (an awesome app to create custom Geo-tagged postcards from your travels)
• Mail
• Messages
• Music (manage your tunes from the Music widget and then move on to other tasks while your music continues to play in the background)
• People (create speed-dial or speed-text contact shortcuts right on a home screen)
• Photo Album
• Photo Frame (for quick pics of loved ones)
• Search
• Settings shortcuts (icons to enable/disable Airplane Mode, Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi in a single tap)
• Stocks
• Twitter (read tweets and tweet directly from the Twitter widget)
• Weather (location-based weather auto-updates for you, no need to change cities/time-zones)

Once you see HTC Sense in action, you will quickly wonder why no one has thought of all of these features yet.

The “Stay Close” concept of HTC Sense is an amazing implementation of centralizing all of your contact-related info into one place.  Users can enter their Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr account info, and Sense will link the people in your phonebook to their respective accounts.  It pulls in their current Facebook profile picture and updates, Twitter updates,and Flickr photos into their contact card, so you can see what people are up to at any given minute just by going to their contact info.  This is a really nice touch, and I loved seeing current Facebook photos and updates when people are calling.

This may sound like a lot of improvements already but HTC didn’t stop there, they also gave the Hero some nice hardware upgrades.  The Hero uses the same processor in the G1 and myTouch, but features 288MB of memory (as opposed to the 192MB of RAM in the G1 and myTouch 3G), giving you more performance and more room to run more apps at the same time.  Multi-tasking is a great feature of Android – the ability to run more than one app at once is a treasure and one you have it you’ll never go back.  Sprint’s version of the Hero is FAST.  This can be attributed to not only the extra memory, but also the recent software update HTC issued for the Hero (Sprint’s version ships with this updated version of the software).  The complaints of lag and slowness by European owners of the original Hero should be a thing of the past, and in my testing, I didn’t experience anything but silky-smoothness, even with lots of apps running.  This marks a HUGE improvement over the G1 and myTouch 3G, which still occasionally slow down under heavy load.  The HTC also jammed a 5 Mega-pixel camera into the Hero, up from 3.2MP in their first two devices.  The camera (and video camera) quality is very good, and a big improvement in my opinion.  The Hero also features the largest battery available in any Android phone yet, and will have G1 users everywhere drooling.  This is a big step in the right direction because as current Android users know, running apps in the background all day can take it’s toll on battery life.  While you can customize the update interval settings for every app you have, the Hero’s battery will give you some extra room in finding that sweet spot for you, and I was able to get a few days battery life out of the Hero easily.

Being that the Hero is an all touch-screen phone, HTC developed a new virtual on-screen keyboard that is worlds better than the stock Android on-screen keyboard.

The Hero’s keyboard features both haptic (vibration) and audible (sound) feedback and predictive text technology which takes your grammar and the context of your sentence into question to help you type easily and error-free.  I highly recommend calibrating the keyboard as soon as you fire up the Hero, it will go a long way in training the keyboard to your typing style.  I have pretty large hands, and in my testing, I basically now just have to get close to the button, and the Hero’s keyboard figures out what I am trying to type.

This allows you to type away quickly and be confident that you’re sentences will come out right.  The keyboard has both Full-QWERTY and Compact-QWERTY (T9 and ABC) modes, and is sure to appease any heavy texter/e-mail-warrior out there.

Turning the Hero on it’s side activates the accelerometer and gives you a much bigger landscape keyboard to work with.  I find this mode best when typing long e-mails.

With all of the customization work HTC has done, Sprint couldn’t be left out in the cold.  Usually carrier-branded apps are terrible, but Sprint’s commitment to Android really shows on the Hero.  Sprint bundles the Hero with: SprintTV, NFL Mobile Live, Nascar Sprint Cup Mobile, and Sprint Navigation.  The apps work flawlessly on Android, and really harness the power of Sprint’s fast 3G network.  Watching SprintTV on the Hero proved to be a very smooth video-watching experience, and will be a great time-passer for those with long public-transportation commutes – Don’t watch SprintTV and Drive people!

The HTC Hero is a flagship-class smartphone, and I’m sure Sprint is very excited about offering it to their current and potential customers.  This phone will handle everything you throw at it, and come back for more.  HTC’s customizations on the Hero go a long way to show the power of Google’s Android operating system, and HTC Sense puts a beautiful and functional polish on the look and feel of Android.  I think the Hero will be one of the top (if not THE top) two or three  Smartphones on the market when it is released on October 11th, and it appears that Sprint is about to have a HUGE seller on the “Now Network”.  After putting it through the grinder, I can honestly say that the Hero is easily the best Android phone created so far, and at the price point it is being offered at, I can assure you that you will be very happy with your purchase.  If the Hero is the product of HTC’s head-start on Android, it makes you wonder what the company has up their sleeves for their future Android devices.

The HTC Hero will be $179 w/ a 2-year contract from Sprint (Data plan also required), and will be widely available for purchase on October 11th, 2009. Best Buy is taking pre-orders for the Hero at certain locations, so if you’re lucky enough to have one in your area call or stop by to get your name on the list.  For $50, you can be one of the first in the country to have a Hero!

More pictures, specs, and our 3-part video review after the jump!

HTC Hero Review Videos:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Sprint HTC Hero Specs:

Visit the Official Sprint Hero Site for more details.

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Filed Under: Android Phones • HTC • Reviews • Sprint

Tags: Android, Hero, HTC, LeakDroid, Reviews, Sense, Sprint