HTC Hero Smartphone

Its been about a month since I dumped the Palm Pre and got with the Hero from HTC (how cliche, right?).  While I haven't had a chance to put it through its paces in what will be a huge part of its life (storm chasing), I feel pretty confident in my experience at this point to give a preliminary review of this phone and the features.
 
I go through cell phones like a woman goes through clothes.  In fact, its been quite a while since I've held on to a single phone for at least a year.  I'm a phone junkie, I love the technology that comes with them and I typically bite on something newer.  The Palm Pre was the first time I had purchased a phone being brand new, and within 6 months, I grew tired of its issues and mechanical failures and thanks to Sprint's "lemon policy", I was able to trade out for anything in the store.  That's when my era with the Hero started.

This isn't the first time I've been with HTC as I owned a Touch back in the day.  I believe that phone served the longest in terms of a smartphone for me, but its age had me eventually trade it in.  But alas, I came back as HTC has teamed up with Android and Google to make this beauty, a phone I think I can say with confidence, that will be around next year!

Its my first touchscreen-only phone, and it was a jump for me.  I enjoyed having a keyboard independent of the screen and it definitely has taken a while to grow use to it.  At first, the up-and-down keyboard was way too small, often hitting different keys than I intended.  Fortunately the smart type tool really works well in terms of auto-correcting your words or offering the correct suggestion based on what you're typing.  This phone seems to sense commonly made mistakes as it often suggest words that are similar to those you type with keys surrounding the one you are aiming for.  Its not perfect, and occasionally a text will get through that's auto-correction will leave the recipient goofy with confusion.  But in any case, its a good offset for hitting the wrong keys.  I do like the fact I can type with one hand.  The keys being squeezed into an up-down configuration makes it easy to hold in your hand and type with only your thumb.  I have found with practice, typing on the smaller keyboard isn't very bad at all.  Its worth mentioning that you can turn the phone sideways to bring the keyboard into landscape mode which increased the overall key size and will allow for more normal two-handed typing.  There is the occasional lag in typing and every now and then, the button will hold long enough for the letter you want to be a symbol instead, but its not terribly annoying.

The initial learning curve of the phone's features is a bit steep.  I have to admit that I wasn't expecting the overwhelming amount of features this phone has, so it took a while to customize the phone exactly to my tastes.  But just as the commercial says, its made to for YOUR life.  I can't disagree, you can do a lot with it.  The seven home screens allow a lot of quick access to many things I would use on a normal basis.  A simple slide will transfer you from screen-to-screen that you can customize with various widgets and shortcuts.  At first, seven may seem hard to fill, but as you install apps and understand the widgets, you'll quickly fill them.

One thing I am still learning is the "scenes" option.  When you hit the menu key from any of your home windows, you'll see this option at the bottom.  What this does is allow you to save various configurations of your seven home screens.  How is this handy?  Well for me, I can have a normal "scene" that has my main front page set to a clock, email, contacts, etc.  But when I go chasing, I can switch over to my chasing "scene" and the seven screens will change to the configuration I have for that scene.  So instead of the before-mentioned items, I may have shortcuts to my radar and weather apps, RSS feeds from various weather sources, and my Wordpress blog app for quick updating of my site from the field.  You can add several scenes (I'm not sure how many in total) for various different reasons that will make it very easy to switch around based on what you're doing.

One of the main reasons I picked this phone was the ability to sort, well everything, by the person its from.  Basically, I can go into my contacts ('people'), and find text messages, emails, photos, Facebook, whatever specifically from THAT person.  That's very handy and I enjoy the hell out of that feature.  The direct link to Facebook is also very nice as I am a big Facebooker and having updates from people show up in their contact sheet is quite nice.

Another big reason for the switch was the wider range of apps compared to the Palm Pre.  I immediately found a large handful of apps, both included and free downloads, that were more useful to me than anything I found on the Pre.  Barcode scanners for Amazon and Ebay (amazingly helpful and fun), DirecTV DVR access, RadarNow (a weather radar program), aCar, Discovery Channel, PayPal, Wordpress, and more!  The collection of Apps isn't as good as the iPhone, but at least this phone works outside of metro areas (don't get me started).  But the apps are growing, and seeing big names like Discovery Channel indicates that you'll see a lot of iPhone apps migrating in this direction.  At least, that's my hope.  Oh yeah, and the Google integration is great, too!  The only drawback is the contacts merging, so be careful there.  Makes sure, if you have Gmail, that your contacts are well organized, otherwise you'll have some issues at first getting them sorted out on the phone.

Battery life is about as good as any other smartphone.  I say I use the phone about as much as the average person in terms of texting, music, and internet useage.  I'm rarely on the phone, but I do use it a lot.  With that usage level, I typically can go through an entire day on about 60% of the battery.  I haven't had it run out on me yet except when I was working in a building where there was no service and the battery drained quicker cause it was looking for roaming all day.

Ringtones, there are a few good ones.  But I learned recently that I can actually use my music as ringtones and edit/trim it down straight from the phone.  Its not as exact as going on to a computer, but I can go in and trim second-by-second and assign it as a ringtone.  Its helpful as I haven't seen this before where you can edit your songs into ringtones straight from the phone.  Its one of about a million things I'm sure to discovery by playing or actually sitting down to read the manual.

Video and photography are pretty good, I think.  I obviously won't shoot amazing photos or video with it, but to have it in a pinch is quite handy.  I haven't done a lot with the video yet, but have shot a couple things with okay quality to the point where I'm sure a news station would be thrilled should I capture some amazing moment on my phone.  As for the camera, it's a 5.0MP lens and it does all right, too.  I miss the flash my Pre had, but this does better on its own in low light than the Pre, so it'll suffice in those circumstances.  Of course, you can upload it straight to Facebook, Gmail, messages, Picasa, YouTube, and Wordpress (with downloaded app).  The upload process is pretty painless and typically your image/video is available within seconds of its completed upload.

Last feature to hit is the phone itself.  Again, I don't go through a lot of minutes in the average month, but when I do, it sounds good and clear.  I don't have issues with hanging up on people because of the touchscreen.  The headset volume is good, speaker is good, and I haven't tested the bluetooth yet (although I hear its just as good).  Dialing is easy and with the search features, you sometimes only need to type in a few keys to bring up the name of the person you are calling.  Voicemail is very nice on this as you have the menu ON the phone itself.  This is new to me, but now, with the Hero at least, you can fast forward, delete, save, re-listen, whatever by using the touchscreen to control the message.  Rewinding or fast forwarding is as simple as sliding the bar to move forward or ahead in the message.  Very handy.

Overall, I am very impressed and happy with this phone and definitely think Android will give iPhone a run for its money.  Of course, if the iPhone rids itself of its AT&T commitments, then you may see some issues, but if you're in the market for a great phone with the intention and hope to use it outside of metro areas, I would strongly recommend checking into the Android phones, particuarly the Hero as I can vouch for it at this stage in the game.