Unboxing the HTC Hero, and a mini review Sep 12 2009
This week I took delivery of my new phone, the HTC Hero. After getting bored and frustrated with the iPhone, both from a user perspective, and very much so from a developer perspective, I looked into the Android platform in greater detail. After playing around with the emulator and writing some code, I was sold. The HTC Hero is one of the newer Android devices on the market, and seemed to do everything I wanted and more, so I decided to switch.
Unboxing the device was a joy, as HTC have obviously decided to start paying attention to the Apple school of thought regarding packaging, and it was all very well done. The phone itself was well protected, and the accessories were well packaged too. In the box, besides the phone, you get a mini USB cable, a charger that uses the USB cable to connect from the plug to the phone, a 2GB mini SD memory card (the internal storage on the Hero is tiny, so this is welcome), a set of headphones, ear buds, and a mic clip, and quick start guide for getting up and running with the phone.
Getting the phone setup is a breeze - you simply need to remove the back, remove the battery so as to be able to insert your SIM card, and at the same time you’ll need to remove the protective plastic from around the battery. Insert the mini SD card, replace the battery, and replace the back cover of the phone. Then plug in to the charger and wait for it to charge up. Mine took around 90 minutes to reach full charge - I’m sure you can probably boot it up and play with it after a few minutes, but I like to give it one full uninterrupted charge to begin with.
Once the phone was charged, initially turning it on will run you through a setup wizard. As with all Android phones, it gives you the option of connecting it to your Google account for mail, calendar and contacts, which is brilliant - give it your credentials, and it’ll start syncing all of that stuff for you immediately, really handy. The Hero also gives you the option of syncing with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr for the various social networking apps and plugins that the phone has. The Facebook integration goes to a deep level, integrating with your address book of contacts, and might actually make Facebook more useful. Clicking a contact will let you see at a glance their details, text messages, e-mails, and if linked with a Facebook profile, their recent FB updates. The Twitter client is really good, and also has notifications so that you know when there are new tweets - it would be cool however to customize that to only notify for mentions, DMs, or perhaps specific searches. This device runs HTC’s Sense user interface over the top of the normal Android OS, meaning you get a very swish widget based UI, with seven different home screens to customize, for maximum personalization.
The onscreen keyboard is really intelligent, especially word lookups, giving you suggestions (but not forcing them on you), and allowing you to easily add new things to the dictionary for future reference. On the physical inputs, the trackball is really useful, as are the physical buttons on the phone - call, home, menu and end call buttons are complemented with a back button, and a shortcut button for searching.
As for the Android OS itself, it’s fantastic. So much more customizable and freeing than the iPhone, the possibilities are truly endless. The marketplace has a lot of applications and games on there already, with many more to come I’m sure as the potential audience increases. The very fact that you can have applications that run in the background opens up the possibilities on the device for all sorts of very cool ideas, and so it’s a very exciting development platform. Myself and my buddy Mike are working on a few different ideas, and the SDK is a joy to develop against.
While I’ve only had the phone for less than a week, I can already tell that it’s an incredibly useful and well thought out device. It’s a similar experience in a way to when I got my first iPhone, only this time around the potential seems that much greater, and that’s very exciting.
If anyone has any comments about the phone, or Android in general, feel free to shoot me a mail or leave a comment. You can see all the photos from the unboxing on Flickr.