I have mixed opinions about the HTC Hero. In theory, it’s amazing. In practice, it can use a little work.

The phone, of course, comes without a physical keyboard. The on-screen keyboard is decent, though a little more cramped than that of the iPhone. Basically, it would be disastrous without the predictive text. With the predictive text, it’s actually pretty good. With one word, I typed every letter wrong and it still knew what I meant. Impressive, right?

Then there’s the messaging. To me, messaging is the most important function of any phone. It’s all I do every day. It’s somewhat of an improvement over my last phone, as the messages are grouped together into conversations where instead of viewing one message at a time, you can see a whole thread of them. It also allows you to send messages that are more than 160 characters. There is also this really cool feature where the phone tries to guess when messages you received were sent, and insert them in the correct place on the timeline. For example, if someone sends a message a minute before you but you don’t receive it until after send yours, the phone will insert it before your message. Unfortunately, sometimes this messes up and it can be confusing because the phone will show someone answering your question before you actually asked it.

The phone includes a 5 Megapixel camera. Although it does not have a flash, it takes beautiful pictures outdoors and indoors, as long as there is enough light. This camera has autofocus, which helps eliminate blur. Sometimes the camera will bring up an error and refuse to open, but usually all you have to do is restart the phone and it will start working again.

The Hero has multitask capabilities. You can have many different programs open at once, though as other reviewers will tell you, it will start to lag if you have too many programs open.

Lag is a major problem with this phone. Even when you only have messaging and mail open, it will sometimes start to lag. Generally turning it off for a few minutes will fix this too. Most problems on this phone can be fixed with a restart.

Battery life is about as to be expected for a smartphone. If you use it heavily (such browsing YouTube for six hours straight), you might have to recharge it when you get home from work or school. Otherwise, you should be fine if you plug it in to the charger nightly.

Overall, it’s a pretty good phone. It’s multitouch and multitasking, with a beautiful camera and a fairly intuitive interface. Unfortunately, it likes to lag to the point where it takes 10 seconds for the text message to catch up to your typing. I’ve yet to decide if the delay is worth all the things it can do.

Tags: android, hero, htc, senseUI, Sprint

Phone, Reviews