HTC Hero CDMA Review

Introduction:

Sprint continues its onslaught of devices with their version of the HTC Hero.  This is the company’s first Android device, though it will be joined by the Samsung Moment just a few weeks later.  The Hero distinguishes itself from other Android devices thanks to HTC’s Sense UI.  Actually, Sense personalizes Android in a similar fashion to how TouchFLO 3D does it with Windows Mobile. It allows the user total customization of homescreen apps, widgets and even allows for different interface setups.  Other features of this fully-stocked phone include a 3.2” capacitive display, 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, EVDO Rev. A, 3.5mm headphone jack and microSDHC expansion up to 32GB.  Included in the box you’ll find:

•    1500mAh Li-ion battery
•    AC adapter with female USB end
•    USB data/charging cable
•    2GB microSD card

Design:

We first saw the Hero as a Teflon-coated, chinned device in Europe.  Underneath the Sprint version is identical (save for the CDMA radio,) but externally the two devices are vastly different.  For starters, the chin is gone.   This was a distinctive feature of HTC Android devices, but one that we never cared much for, although it does contribute a little bit to a better voice clarity during talks. 



This CDMA Hero had ditched the original angular design, trading in the hard lines for soft curves.  The device feels fantastic in your hand; while we still feel that the Diamond was the best device to hold, this new Hero is hot on its heels.  It is narrower than other full touchscreen devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry Storm, which makes it more comfortable to hold.


You can compare the HTC Hero CDMA with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

While the GSM counterpart is available in white and brown (with others likely forthcoming,) Sprint’s version comes in a drab gray.  HTC is in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation here.  They tried to infuse some color and personality into the Diamond with its red back but got flack for it, and now they are getting flack for the more conservatively styled Hero.  We wouldn’t have minded some color, but the silver-on-gray color scheme isn’t ugly by any stretch of the imagination.

The buttons remain the same as the original, but have been moved around and are thankfully now symmetrical.  The user has Send and End keys on the far edges, and Menu, Home, Back and Search buttons situated inside them, with a trackball at the middle of this cluster.  The trackball of the G1 was revealed to be the same as found on the Curve, but this trackball is larger than the one we’ve encountered into the past.  The bigger ball is easy to navigate with and we appreciate the larger size.  The only other buttons on the device is the volume rocker on the left side.




The 3.2” glass screen is capacitive, incorporates multi-touch technology and has a resolution of 320x480.  It is similar if not identical to the screen we’ve seen on the G1 and Magic, which means that it is 65k colors.  It is a good display, but does not have the pop that the Instinct HD or Palm Pre has - each with 16m colors.  The screen fingerprints worse than most, and is nearly impossible to keep clean.  We’re not sure if it has the same oleophobic coating that the GSM version did, but we were constantly cleaning ours.  The auto-adjusting backlight kept the display too dim for our tastes, so we disabled it.  For whatever reason this sensor is not used to turn off the screen during a phone call when the Hero is against your face, as it is on many of HTC’s Windows phones.

The bottom of the phone  has HTC’s funky miniUSB port, though any miniUSB charger or cable works with it.  At a time when all other manufacturers not named Apple are going to a microUSB standard it is rather frustrating to see this older port used.  Thankfully HTC has included a 3.5mm headset jack, which can be found at the top of the Hero.  The back is very plain, with the 5 megapixel camera housing surrounded by the speaker cutout.



While the color scheme could be better, we really like this new design for the HTC Hero overall.  It is extraordinarily comfortable to hold and we do not miss the chin one bit.  The phone is built very solidly, the screen is very responsive and the buttons all offer good travel.  HTC adheres to a high manufacturing standard and the Hero is undoubtedly no exception.

User Interface:

The HTC Hero features the same Sense UI we saw the first time around.  This marks the first time a manufacturer has really customized Android, though since then Motorola has introduced their MOTOBLUR interface on the upcoming CLIQ.  Sense takes the best of the TouchFLO 3D interface and integrates the personalization afforded by Android.  The “homescreen” is actually 7 screens, and each one is fully customizable.  There are plenty of stock Android widgets, hundreds of more available through the market, and a number of new HTC widgets.  The HTC widgets are very impressive, anything from contacts, messaging, calendar, music, Twitter, a whole slew of clocks and many others.



In case seven pages of customizations aren’t enough, there are multiple “scenes” that the user can switch between.  The theory behind this is that the user can have a scene for work, a scene for the weekend, a scene for social networking, etc.  There are pre-named scenes- of course all customizable- and the user can save and name other scenes.  The possibilities are virtually endless.



There were lag issues with the original, but for the most part they seem to have been fixed in Sprint’s version.  It is still present at times however; for instance when typing something and rotating the device there is 1-2 seconds before it responds.  Nothing major, but just bad enough that it may get annoying after time.  The biggest annoyance is opening apps, which can take 5-10s.  We’re not sure how much of this is Android and how much of this is Sense.  Hopefully it will be corrected in a future update, but the lag is no worse than what the iPhone or the Pre exhibit at times.

The dedicated search key will bring up a Google search bar, and much like the search bar in Firefox it will give suggestions for popular searches as you type.  Opening the search key in certain apps, for instance contacts, will search that app rather than the web.  Unlike Palm’s webOS you cannot search for a contact or other local information from the main screen.



Phonebook and Organizer:

Again, there isn’t anything new here, but HTC’s contact management is awesome.  For starters, you can link contacts to their Facebook profile and Flickr pages.  In this manner status updates will be delivered to your device, and within the contact you can view albums from both services.  Linked Facebook contacts use their Facebook profile picture, but unlike this feature for HTC’s Windows Mobile devices, this picture does not stay with the contact when synced, whereas manually set pictures do.

Each contact has six tabs.  The first contains their information, the second your text history with them, the third your email history and the sixth your call history.  The fourth tab is Updates and Events, which shows their Facebook status and any upcoming events, such as a birthday, and the fifth tab is their albums, again from Facebook, Flickr or both.  TouchFLO 3D 2.0 users should be used to this type of contact view, and it is very nice to have everything about a contact self contained.



Being a smartphone, the Hero has a space for any manner of information on a given contact.  You can store birthdays, anniversaries, addresses, IM, email and a few other items.  For those people you just don’t want to talk to there is an option to send their calls directly to voicemail, a handy feature to be sure.  HTC does offer a desktop sync client for this, but being an Android phone the device syncs contact and calendar info with your Gmail account.  This sync is not instantaneous, like it is on the Pre, but it does run quietly in the background.

The calendar has everything you’d want and expect.  When adding an event you can choose what calendar you want it to be stored to, your options are Gmail, Outlook or Exchange.  One minor quirk that annoyed us is that all day events show up a day early on the calendar widget.  For instance, if someone in your contact list has a birthday two days from now the widget will say that it is an all day event tomorrow, and then tomorrow it will say that it is occurring that day but when you open the calendar it is indeed listed as an all day event on the proper day.



There are no tasks or notes apps, but the Android Market has several to choose from.  The clock app gives you an alarm clock, world clock, stopwatch and countdown timer.  The basic calculator has an advanced panel, but disappointingly does not switch to scientific mode when the Hero is turned on its side.



There is a handy voice search application which allows you to perform a Google search with your voice.  In our testing it was very accurate and served its purpose.  There is also a voice command app which is accurate as well, however you have to confirm your selection by pressing a button, which means the device must be with you.  We used a few different Bluetooth headsets, and unfortunately you cannot activate the voice command feature via the headset, it must be initiated from the phone itself.  This doesn’t make much sense to us and defeats one of the main purposes of both Bluetooth and a voice command program.

Messaging:

The HTC Hero has many messaging options.  SMS and MMS are encompassed within the messaging app, and conversations are threaded.  The IM client bundles AIM, Windows Live and Yahoo Messenger, and Google Talk has its own stand alone app.

Gmail is of course the preferred email solution, but it will support nearly any IMAP and POP client, as well as Exchange email.  Like Google Talk, Gmail has its own stand alone client and all other emails - including other Gmail accounts - are checked via the Mail app.  The Gmail app is very nice, and replicates the web experience well.  The Mail app had some issues with other Gmail accounts, for instance it would sync some of our labels, which it recognized as folders, but not others.  Other email accounts synced just fine, which leads us to wish the Gmail app could handle multiple accounts.

We found the same three keyboards as on the original Hero, which originated from the Diamond.  The QWERTY keyboard is, as you would expect, a full QWERTY.  The compact QWERTY is similar to BlackBerry’s SureType keyboard, and the Phone Keypad is a T9 keypad.  No matter which keyboard you choose, rotating the Hero to landscape mode brings up a full QWERTY.  As we mentioned earlier there is a bit of lag for this transition however.

Data and Connectivity:

The CDMA Hero runs on Sprint’s EVDO Rev. A network.  On the local side it supports Wi-Fi for when 3G cellular data isn’t available and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.

The browser is Webkit based and similar in scope to Mobile Safari and the webOS browser.  It is not quite as good as either of those though; there was no one thing that stood out but it just wasn’t as smooth.  It does have Flash support, but not all versions of Flash are supported.  Adobe.com gives a Flash error, whereas htc.com/us plays fine.  Videos that do play aren’t exactly choppy, but they’re not smooth; at the end of the day the hardware is probably limiting the device.



Content syncing can be achieved in one of three ways.  The easiest solution is to simply use Gmail, which will back up your contacts and calendar.  Users can also opt for Outlook sync via the HTC Sync software (similar to ActiveSync) or by connecting to an Exchange server.  With the Pre contact and calendar changes are nearly instantaneously synced, but with Android it takes a bit.  Nothing major, but for those looking for instant gratification webOS is quicker on the uptake.  Gmail would also be delivered to the Pre quicker, though we’re only talking a few seconds on that.

Camera:

The camera interface is similar to what we’ve seen from HTC in the past, and identical to the GSM Hero, but has a few differences from Windows devices.  It has 5 megapixels with auto-focus, and a neat feature is that you can tap anywhere on the screen to set the focal point.  Image controls are fairly standard - contrast, saturation, sharpness, ISO adjustment (100-800 plus auto), metering and flicker adjustments - but nothing out of the ordinary. There is no flash, but the Hero supports geotagging of photos and integrates them with their Footprints feature.



Megapixels keep increasing on cell phones, but for the most part the pictures are just getting bigger. In bright sunlight the Hero’s 5MP shooter managed only so-so shots, and under artificial lights results could be downright bad. Colors were washed out, details were muddy and in general pictures were just bad. At least the performance has improved a bit over the original Hero as images are no longer underexposed.



Videos can be captured in large (352x299,) medium (QVGA) and small (CIF) resolutions and were equally poor in quality. The user can adjust the white balance, brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness.

Multimedia:

The HTC Hero has decent codec support.  The music player can handle MP3, AAC (AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB, WAV, MIDI and WMA 9 files, and the video player can handle MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and WMV 9 files.  It handled all the mp3 files we threw at it like a champ; all the album art and ID3 tag information was properly read.  It had issues with higher quality videos, however.  It was ok with H.264 MP4 files as long as the resolution wasn’t too high, but once we got to 640x360 it would no longer play (640x272 played fine.)  We’re still waiting on an Android version of CorePlayer for better codec support.



We enjoyed the music interface, something we haven’t typically said about HTC devices.  The music player is well laid out and easy to navigate, and there are two HTC widgets that place controls on the homescreen.  The video player is very straightforward, tapping the screen brings up playback controls and you can scrub through the video.  Playback was very smooth, but the 65k colors limited video quality at times, though not always.

Music can be sideloaded or downloaded OTA via the Amazon MP3 store.  This is the second major device from Sprint to offer Amazon as its music store instead of Sprint’s own.

Software:

There are several preinstalled apps for the Hero, but Android Market is now over 8,000 apps strong to expand your catalog.  Of course all of the Google services are installed, and Google Maps is as excellent as ever.  Sprint Navigation has been bundled with the Hero and offers turn by turn GPS directions.  Sprint has included its NASCAR Mobile, NFL Mobile Live and SprintTV apps, the latter two have a widget as well.
Other notable programs include HTC Footprints, Peep (HTC’s Twitter client,) Stocks (ironically, data comes from Yahoo,) Weather, YouTube, PDF Viewer and Quickoffice.  Most importantly, Teeter is included!  We could do an entire review on Android apps and not begin to scratch the surface, so whatever you want to do we’ll just say that there’s likely an app for it.

Performance:

We were impressed with the call performance of the Hero and the phone feels great against your face. On our end things sounded perfectly good, though we wouldn’t call it a standout. Callers generally had the same impression. They had nothing bad to say about the device and they said we sounded very good. The speakerphone isn’t quite as good as the one of the Touch Pro2, but was still pretty impressive. HTC is doing a lot with that tiny speaker on the back!

Initially our battery life was horrible. It is rated for four hours of talk time, but the device would typically drain 40% or so every night with no use. Sprint issued a last minute software update that we managed to get our hands on and it drastically improved the performance. We can now go two days in between charges with moderate to heavy use.

Conclusion:

We’ve been using the Hero for several weeks now to get a good impression of what the device really had to offer. As each day goes buy we are more impressed with the device and its performance. The battery life was our biggest concern, but that issue has been addressed. We’d prefer to see the remaining lag worked out, but it by no means takes away from the user experience. The feel is great, the apps are abundant, the phone performance is good and the device can be customized until the cows can come home.

The inevitable question for Sprint users, new and old, will be the Pre or the Hero. We gave the Pre our highest rating ever, and still feel that it was a really groundbreaking device. WebOS is way further along than Android was at this point in its life, but Android does have a year head start. In the end it will come down to things like physical versus virtual keyboard, expandable memory versus internal and ease of use (webOS) versus customization (Android.) We don’t feel there is a wrong or right answer to this question; each device has its own merits and it’s up to the user to pick what is important to them. One thing is clear however: Sprint customer have a pretty impressive toy box to choose from right now.