Introducing the HTC Hero

Working for one of the key players in the mobile data industry and getting advance samples of devices before they reach the market is definitely one of the big plus points of my job, but it is easy to become 'de-sensitised' to new products and be distinctly under-whelmed by the big announcements that others get excited about.

This is not one of those times.

I have been looking forward to reviewing the Hero ever since it was first announced that HTC were working on it and the advance units we have been provided with have been the subject of a lot of attention - but naturally the readers of the blog take priority and I have the device in my hands and have screen-shotted it to within an inch of its life!

But seriously though, the Hero is HTC's much-publicised and long-awaited Android-based PDA, Android being the Linux-based operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance.
Offering unparalleled levels of personalisation and customisation, and already boasting a wide range of applications available for download from the Android Marketplace, this new platform could prove to be a serious challenger to the more 'entrenched' operating systems offered by Microsoft and RIM, among others, although HTC have made it clear that they will continue to develop handsets on the Windows Mobile platform.
There has been much conjecture in the press as to whether this could finally be the 'iphone-killer', I'll let you decide...

I should point out at this stage that prior to reviewing the Hero I had not used an Android handset before, therefore if anything I say in this or subsequent posts seems a little 'obvious' to users more familiar with the Android platform, then indulge me.

What's in the box

The Hero comes with the following accessories:

• Quick Start Guide
• Screen protector
• Travel charger
• Mini-USB data cable
• Standard battery
• Wired stereo headset with 3.5mm connector
• Accessory leaflet
• 2GB miscroSD card

Specifications

• Processor - Qualcomm MSM7200A, 528MHz
• Operating System - Android
• Memory - ROM: 512MB, RAM: 288MB
• Dimensions (LxWxT) - 112 x 56.2 x 14.35mm (4.41 x 2.21 x 0.57 inches)
• Weight - 135 grams (4.76 ounces) with battery
• Display - 3.2-inch TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen with 320x480 HVGA resolution
• Network
  • HSPA/WCDA: 900/2100MHz, up to 2Mbps uplink and 7.2Mbps downlink speeds
  • Quand-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900MHz (Band frequency and data speed are operator dependent)
• Device Control - Trackball with enter button
• GPSInternal GPS antenna
• Connectivity
  • Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets
  • WiFi IEEE 802.11b/g
  • HTC ExtUSB (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio jack in one)
  • 3.5mm audio jack
• Camera - 5.0 megapixel color camera with auto focus
• Audio supported formats - MP3, AAC (AAC,AAC+,AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI and Windows Media Audio 9
• Video supported formats - MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and Windows Media Video 9
• Battery
  • Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery
  • Capacity: 1350 mAh
  • Talk time:
    • Up to 420 minutes for WCDMA
    • Up to 470 minutes for GSM
  • Standby time:
    • Up to 750 hours for WCDMA
    • Up to 440 hours for GSM

    (The above are subject to network and phone usage)

• Expansion Slot - microSD memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
• AC Adapter - Voltage range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 50/60 Hz DC output: 5V and 1A
• Special Features
  • G-sensor
  • Digital Compass

Getting Started

When powered on for the first time, the Hero startup wizard prompts you to confirm your desired language:

You are then taken through a quick introduction on how to use the on-screen keyboard:

Should the device be able to detect any WiFi networks, at this stage you will be prompted to select whether you wish the device to connect to any of them:

You will then be prompted to configure any email or social networking accounts you wish to:

I will look at how to configure these accounts later. You can then verify the date and time and you're all set:

The default Home Screen will then be displayed:

The device I used automatically configured itself for use on Vodafone UK, provisioning the correct settings for Internet access, SMS and MMS with no user interaction required at all:

The Home Screen / HTC Sense

The home screen on the Hero is not a single screen, it is in fact 32 screens.
By pressing the navigation key to the left or the right when viewing the main page of the home screen, you can move to a second, third or fourth screen - in either direction, giving 7 screens in total:

By pressing the menu button and selecting the Scenes option, you can select from up to a further 5 pre-configured Scenes, or a sixth blank scene which you can configure from scratch should you so desire:

The pre-configured Scenes have been designed to address the different usage styles, or 'moods', that the Hero might be put to and the features available on the screens correspond to that usage type. For example, the social scene has a Twitter and SMS 'widget' available:

Whereas the Work scene provides access to stock information and favourite web browser bookmarks:

And those are just the built-in scenes, naturally you can create your own as well, giving a massive range of customisation options. I currently have the following set up:

Widgets

Widgets are Internet-enabled applications that can run on the Home Screen, providing at-a-glance access to weather reports, stock information, sports results, email, calendar appointments - you name it, you can put it in a widget.
Applications can also provide access to local information such as your Contacts list, Photos albums or just a search box. Android comes with a number of pre-defined Widgets and HTC have bundled a load more meaning that virtually any aspect of the device's functionality can be accessed directly from the Home screen if you wish.
As well as Widgets, you can of course add shortcuts to your favourite applications so they can be launched directly by tapping the icon rather than first accessing the Programs menu and then scrolling to the program's entry location.
Application shortcuts can be added to the Home Screen simply tapping and holding on the icon for the application. As soon as you hold, the program view will fade away and the home screen will be displayed. Release the icon to add a shortcut to the home screen.

Keyboard / Input

As you are taught during the initial introductory wizard, the Hero features an on-screen touchscreen keyboard. No stylus is supplied with the unit: this being a 'capacitive' screen rather than a 'resistive' screen - the screen does not respond to the impact of a stylus, rather your finger completes a very weak electrical circuit to create input.

It did take me a while to get used to I must admit, but once you stop paying too much attention to what you're typing it is surprisingly accurate. The keyboard can be calibrated to your specific requirements by running through the calibration wizard within the settings menu.
Tapping and holding a single key will display all of the characters available on that key and allows you to select the one you want by sliding over to it. The text suggestions that pop up as you are typing are all sensible as well, and when not typing, controlling applications and menus with your finger is simplicity itself.

Applications

As you'd expect from an Android-based handset, the Hero comes with Google's client applications pre-loaded, providing quick access to GMail, Google Maps and Google Talk and contact and calendar information can be synchronised with Google 'cloud-based' PIM services.
The Hero is also integrated with online services including Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. In fact it is clear that "online" is very much how the designers of the Android platform envisage that it will be used, no doubt something that will make the mobile operators very happy.
The full list of standard applications is as follows:

• Albums - browse and sort your photographs and images, upload to Facebook or Flickr
• Browser - access the world wide web in stunning quality!
• Calculator - number crunching
• Calendar - organise appointments and events, configure reminders, etc
• Camera
• Camcorder
• Clock - featuring also a world clock, timer, stopwatch and several alarms
• Dialer - the phone application
• Footprints - time-stamp, geo-tag and categorise photos into collections of 'memories'
• Google Mail - GMail client, distinct from the 'main' email client
• Google Maps - GPS services
• Google Talk - Google Instant Messaging client
• Mail - POP / IMAP and Microsoft Exchange email client
• Market - search for and download both free and chargeable applications for the Android platform
• Messages - SMS/MMS client
• Music - audio file player
• PDF Viewer - Acrobat-compatible PDF application
• Peep - Twitter client
• People - address Book
• Quickoffice - Microsoft Office-compatible document viewer
• Stocks - Internet-enabled Widget
• Teeter - game which makes use of the Hero's G-Sensor
• Voice Recorder - record notes and use the device like a dictaphone
• Weather - Internet-enabled Widget
• You Tube - search for videos and view the most popular

The Albums application allows you to organise and browse your photographs, both taken with the built-in camera or saved to the SD memory card:

Pictures can be set as the wallpaper or assigned to a 'Footprint':

Pictures can be uploaded to Facebook or Flickr directly from the Album view simply by tapping on their entry.

Your account details for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter need to be entered within the 'Social Networks' menu within the Settings:

Once logged in, you can then access any of the services from within any other 'socially-networked' application on the Hero - be it uploading a photo to Flickr directly from within the Albums application, replying to a contact via Twitter directly from the People (Contacts) application, or viewing a contact's Facebook updates directly from your contacts list:

The Peep Twitter client is designed to allow you to manage your tweets and messages:

Teeter is annoyingly addictive!

The Music player allows you to organise your audio files into playlists, shuffle songs, set files as your default ringtone, or as the ringtone for a specific contact:

YouTube is also built in:

The Quickoffice application provides view-only access to Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, but does not provide support for Office 2007-formatted documents.

The PDF Viewer, as its name suggests, can open pdf files.

Google Market

The Market is an online repository of all manner of both free and purchasable tools, applications and games for your Android handset.
When accessing the Market for the first time (and for that matter any of the Google applications on the Hero for the first time), you are prompted to sign in using your Google account details or create a new account and read the terms and conditions of the Market:

Once logged in, you can browse by category, filtering each by date or by popularity:

Installing an application, provided that it is free, is simply a matter of selecting its entry and tapping Install. If the application requires access to any of the phone's features, such as the connection to the Internet, you will be prompted to confirm that the action may be permitted:

Should you have to hard reset your Hero, when you next sign into the Market, any apps that you had downloaded previously will be re-downloaded and installed again automatically. This process will continue until you uninstall the application.

Email

The Hero supports both POP and IMAP email accounts as well as featuring a Server ActiveSync client enabling bi-directional push-based synchronisation of Contacts, Calendar and Email with Microsoft Exchange (2003 SP2 or later).

When adding a POP or IMAP-based email account, provided that your account is with a 'popular' provider such as Hotmail, Tiscali, Virgin or whoever, then the setup procedure is simply a matter of entering your full email address and password and the Hero will do the rest for you - even getting the correct outgoing mail server settings for your mobile operator, something that trips up a lot of users when having to enter the settings manually.
Alternatively you can complete the settings yourself should you want to set up a private server.

Setting up an Exchange account is not much more difficult - if you enter your Exchange email address and password the Hero will attempt to determine the server settings to use automatically, using the Microsoft AutoDiscover service.

Should the client not be able to determine the settings automatically, you will be prompted to enter the address of the server manually, as well as your domain, username and password - as you would have to on any Server ActiveSync client.
There are a number of 'little touches' on the Hero that make using it that much more intuitive and shows that the developers have clearly put some thought into. For example, when running through the Exchange manual setup, by entering in your email address of 'name@domain.com', the server address is automatically completed with 'domain.com' and the cursor placed at the beginning of the line, so that all you need to enter is the server name - little things, but they show that extra attention to detail that impresses me!

Another aspect of Exchange Server ActiveSync synchronisation that is a problem on other devices that the Hero simply dismisses is the matter of self-issued SSL certificates. If you use a non root-trusted certificate on your Exchange server, it is necessary to install the root certificate of the CA that issued the certificate to the Exchange server onto your client devices manually. This is not required on the Hero - when verifying the details of the server, if the certificate is not trusted by the device you will be prompted to 'cancel' or 'continue anyway', much as you are within a web browser when accessing a secure site whose identity cannot be guaranteed. This takes the headache out of setting up Server ActiveSync completely!

Once the connection to the Exchange server has been verified, you can then select what details you want to synchronise:

After a few minutes, depending on how much data you have to sync, your information will be downloaded and available:

As with other ActiveSync clients you can specify a schedule for your mail delivery - having mail pushed as it arrives or every xx minutes:

Synchronisation of email sub-folders is possible:

and you can define a maximum default size limit for downloaded email and define your signature:

It is not possible to edit your out of office status currently. It is also not possible to define different mail delivery schedules for different times of the day - when you leave the office or no longer wish to receive email of an evening, you must adjust the schedule manually - or you can just turn off the email notifications so the client still checks for mail but does not make any audible alert or vibrate.

These points aside, and let's not forget this is version 1.0 of the Android Exchange client, email delivery is very slick and the messaging very nice to use. Email messages can be previewed using a widget on the home screen, allowing you to quickly delete spam or move through the headers of messages to get to important mails that do need actioning.

Alternatively, if you don't have an Exchange email server, you can sign up for and use Google's own online services, synchronising email, contacts and calendar information with your online 'cloud' account:

Multi-touch Web Browsing

The web browser on the Hero is based on the WebKit platform, meaning that it is has the same core as Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari browser and is fully 'Flash-capable'. Web pages can be 'zoomed' into using the screen's multi-touch capability: moving a single finger across the screen moves the view of the web page; keeping a finger pressed on the screen while moving a second finger to the left or right causes the view to zoom in or out.
Displaying the blog is certainly not a problem:

The browser is also integrated with the Hero's messaging and Twitter client, meaning that should you come across anything of interest you can immediately 'share' it with others:

The Settings allow you to set the home page, turn off pop-ups, enable or disable JavaScript, etc:

The History shows recently-viewed pages:

The 'Windows' feature acts in the same way tabs do on desktop browsers and allows you to toggle between multiple active web pages within the same browser session.

Camera / Camcorder / HTC Footprints

The 5.0 megapixel camera on the Hero also features the usual effects and image processing options you get on other HTC models:

New to the Hero is the concept of Footprints. You can think of a Footprint as a digital journal entry that can be a photograph or a video, which can be geo-tagged by location and also have a voice recording associated with it:

GPS

The Google Maps application on the Hero is quite simply, amazing. Even indoors the GPS receiver not only correctly found the building I was in on the company site, but actually precisely pinpointed me to the rear of unit 9 by the window:

The route-planning capabilities are very impressive, providing both written and graphical directions:

Search

The Hero features an integrated search function, initiated by pressing the search button on the handset, depicted by a symbol of a magnifying glass.
When on the home screen, pressing the search button initiates a Google search box:

Pressing the search button within whatever application you are in at that point will search that application, be it your email inbox or your calendar:

Miscellaneous

The Google Talk client provides instant messaging functionality with other Google Talk users:

The Messages application provides a very nice means of managing your text and multimedia messaging:

Summary

The Hero is effectively several devices all in one. The ability to configure the look and feel of the handset for different 'moods' or times of the day based on whether you are at work or at play is a very attractive feature indeed.

For the prosumer, I think the Hero is definitely a contender for the iPhone's crown: unparalleled customisation options; powerful hardware; push email and PIM data delivery (whether with Exchange or with Google's own services); GPS; a very impressive web browser, the list goes on and on...

The iPhone's integration with iTunes and the iTunes Store is something that Android doesn't have an equivalent of yet, but depending on who you speak to this may be precisely the plus point they are looking for rather than be viewed as a limitation.

The Android Market really extends the functionality of the Hero, and any Android-based device for that matter. The wealth of free applications is astounding, ranging from alternate messaging and social networking clients to a barcode reader application that uses the on-board camera to scan barcodes of products and then locate via Google where on the web they can be purchased most cheaply!

For the business user, the ability to synchronise mailbox data with Microsoft Exchange is crucial. There are several device management solution providers working to integrate the Android platform into their products, but currently there are no automatic device provisioning tools I know of that can configure devices 'over the air' and enforce corporate usage policies, but this is surely only a matter of time.
DataViz have already released a version of their "Documents To Go" application for Android, providing viewing and editing capability for Microsoft Office 2007-format documents. This is available for purchase directly from the Android Market.

On the whole, then, the Hero is a joy to use: responsive, intuitive, excellent call quality (oh yes, by the way it's also a phone!) and a good battery performance.

It is perhaps also important to state at this juncture that Android is a very young operating system. Google only announced that they had begun development of a mobile platform approximately two years ago and already a significant number of major handset manufacturers have either already released a model using the operating system or have announced that they have one on the go.
Combine this break-neck development pace with the wealth of applications available in the Market and Android becomes a very attractive prospect. I for one am looking forward to this and future releases.

If by the time you read this you already have your Hero device in your hands and you are eager to learn more about Android and its capabilities, visit the Android section on the blog - http://blog.brightpointuk.co.uk/android

Visit the Hero section of the HTC web site here - http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/overview.html

Visit the official HTC Hero micro-site here - http://www.htc-hero.co.uk

For further information on how to configure Microsoft Exchange synchronisation on the Hero, read this blog article - http://blog.brightpointuk.co.uk/setting-microsoft-exchange-synchronisati...