The ‘Most Advanced Android’ That Still Missed the Mark
The HTC Hero was hyped as “perhaps the most advanced Android to date” and the first real answer to the iPhone’s touchscreen era. On paper, it looked like Android’s big coming-of-age moment. In practice, it was a clever skin, a nice chin, and way too many half-baked basics.
HTC and reviewers of the time talked like this thing finally brought Android “up to par” with Apple. The hardware chin, the Teflon-coated shell, the brushed aluminum, the new Sense UI – everything screamed confidence. But once you get past the pretty widgets and clever contact tabs, the Hero shows just how early and unfinished Android really was.
Design and Hardware: Great Feel, Familiar Limits
Credit where it’s due: the Hero looked and felt premium for its era. The 112 x 56.2 x 14.4 mm body with that signature angled chin made it stand out in a sea of plastic slabs. The brushed aluminum frame around the display and the rubbery, matte white finish (with its so-called Teflon coating) gave it solid hand-feel and grip. The 135 g weight, slightly above average, made it feel less toy-like than a lot of rivals.
The 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with HVGA (320 x 480) resolution was basically “standard HTC Android issue” at this point. Colors, brightness and contrast were decent, and sunlight legibility was almost but not quite at iPhone level, with more reflections getting in the way outdoors. In other words: usable, not impressive.
Physical controls were a predictable Android cluster: Home, Menu, Back, Send, End, and a dedicated Search key, plus a trackball that actually worked well for navigation. The problem: HTC leaned too hard on it. There’s no dedicated camera shutter, so the trackball has to double as one – without half-press for autofocus. Once you lock focus and press, you’re stuck taking the shot.
Functional bits were mixed. A standard 3.5mm headphone jack up top was a welcome fix over older HTC phones. The microSD slot supported up to 16GB cards but hid under the battery cover, so “hot-swap” technically worked but was annoying. The 1350 mAh battery got through a heavy day only with a nightly charge. Hero wasn’t thin, wasn’t tiny, but it was comfortable – just not ahead of the pack in anything except style.
Sense UI: Clever Ideas, Uneven Execution
Sense UI is where HTC clearly went all-in – and where the Hero both shines and stumbles hardest. Compared to stock Android, Sense was a serious attempt to make the OS feel modern and personalized.
The homescreen expanded from three to seven panels, with an arched indicator at the bottom and three virtual keys: app drawer, phone, and an “Add to Home” shortcut. Widgets were the headline act. HTC’s own widgets outclassed stock Android’s: toggles for Wi‑Fi, GPS and Bluetooth, multiple clock designs (twelve, if you like overkill), Twitter widgets with different functionality, a People widget for favorite contacts, and album stacks you could flick through.
Scenes were the big concept: pre-defined homescreen setups (Work, Travel, Social, etc.) with different wallpapers and widget layouts. In theory, that’s the ultimate “business vs personal” mode. In reality, HTC half-finished it. You couldn’t edit the default scenes themselves; you had to save a modified version under a new name. And some scenes didn’t even make sense – the Travel scene ships with Footprints but nothing for maps or GPS shortcuts.
Performance was also nowhere near as polished as the glossy UI implied. Sense could be fast, but when the Hero hit heavier tasks – like reading from a microSD full of image folders – the UI would appear to freeze for a couple of seconds with no feedback. Not a loading spinner, nothing. Just taps going unregistered until the phone caught up. For a device pushed as iPhone-level slick, that’s jarring.
Worse, Sense changed behavior in ways that were arguably regressions. On the homescreen, the trackball was demoted to just scrolling between panels; it could no longer select anything. Haptic feedback on the virtual QWERTY keyboard existed, but the rest of the UI ignored it. And many apps simply refused to run without a microSD card inserted – you either embraced external storage or lost functionality.
Communication and Social Features: Smart Ideas, Dumb Edges
Hero’s contact management is where HTC actually got close to something smart. Their take on Palm’s Synergy pulled Facebook and Flickr into the People app. Each contact had tabs for SMS, email, Facebook updates, albums from Facebook/Flickr, and call history. The phonebook itself added tabs for favorites, call log, groups, and an “Updates and events” feed aggregating social activity.
For 2009, this was legitimately forward-thinking. But, again, partial implementation hurt it. The SMS tab for a contact only showed received messages, not the full conversation; for that you still had to jump to the Messages app. The editing UI squeezed all fields into a single continuous list, which meant scrolling down every time you wanted to add new info.
The dialer was better: smart dialing, a combined call log, and accelerometer-based turn-to-mute all worked well. Vibration when a call connects is a smart idea – until you realize it still buzzes in your ear because there’s no proximity-aware logic and no toggle to disable it. Basic voice dialing, which some older HTC phones had, was missing.
Messaging was solid in protocol support but clumsy in UX details. You got SMS/MMS, Google Talk, Gmail, and an HTC mail client with Exchange support. Threads were handled iPhone-style, latest message at the bottom. But composing SMS was cramped – the text box occupied a small portion of the screen even with the keyboard hidden. Drafts moved into a separate Drafts section instead of staying inline in threads, making them harder to pick up and continue. Options like copy text from individual messages were also removed.
Gmail gained batch operations, spam reporting, and threaded views, while HTC Mail added sorting by date, subject, sender and size, plus filters for conversations or just messages with attachments. On paper, the email story was strong. In practice, the real friction lived in the keyboard: portrait and landscape QWERTY were usable, but the screen edges were unreliable and often needed multiple taps to register.
Media and Camera: 5MP, Big Claims, Small Delivery
HTC pitched the Hero as a multimedia step up from the G1 and Magic, and in still photography it largely was. A 5MP autofocus camera at 2560 x 1920 resolution produced decent detail, with no serious purple fringing and respectable dynamic range. The price was cooler-than-real colors and noticeable oversharpening, plus the glaring omission of any kind of flash. Low-light users were on their own.
The camera UI was minimal: a gallery shortcut, a camera/camcorder toggle, and menu access to basic settings like metering, sharpness, saturation, contrast, and gridlines. Quick settings covered resolution, white balance, brightness, and a simple self-timer. No face/smile/blink detection, no panorama modes, no full-res burst shooting. Even for its era, that was barebones.
Then comes video – where the Hero just plain flops. CIF video at 15 fps is what you put in cheap feature phones, not a so-called high-end smartphone. HTC was already competing with devices doing VGA@30fps and above; Samsung and LG were pushing D1 resolution. The Hero arrived with specs that were dated out of the gate.
The Albums app rework was another mixed bag. Automatically building sub-galleries from folder names and supporting both grid and filmstrip views made sense. Tight integration with Facebook and Flickr, plus easy sharing to Gmail, HTC Mail, Messages, Peep and Picasa, looked good. But the app reindexed all content every time you opened it – and even when you opened a single file and went back. On a card with lots of photos and videos, that made the whole experience sluggish.
Multi-touch pinch-to-zoom in photos was one of Hero’s actual bright spots. It was smooth and fluid, comparable to the iPhone, even with 5MP images. But video playback again showed the cracks: the player only handled 3GP and MP4, had a basic interface, and struggled badly with anything above QVGA at 25 fps. Most MP4 files played choppy, not because of the 528 MHz CPU’s fundamental limits but clearly due to poor software optimization.
Audio wasn’t much better. The revamped music player UI looked nicer and added library views by artist, album, playlist, genre, composer and purchased tracks, but no equalizer, no visualizations, no contextual search to jump from a track into YouTube or Google. The included wired headset looked good, had a remote, and delivered mediocre sound.
Objective audio testing backed that up: noise level, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk were solid, but frequency response was uneven and distortion significantly worse than an iPhone 3GS. Put simply: if you cared about sound quality, this wasn’t going to win you over.
Connectivity and Browser: Ahead on Web, Behind on Basics
On radio and ports, the Hero ticked most of the expected boxes: quad-band GSM, tri-band HSDPA with 7.2 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, Wi‑Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP), USB 2.0, and a 3.5mm jack. It could act as a USB modem for tethering on Windows once you enabled “Mobile network sharing” and had HTC Sync installed.
Bluetooth, though, was artificially crippled. Out of the box it was limited to headset use and could not handle file transfers. This was a software lock, not a hardware limitation, which is exactly the kind of anti-consumer move that pushes users toward rooting. If you wanted normal Bluetooth behavior, you had to hack your phone.
Wi‑Fi, by contrast, was painless. Tap network, enter password, you’re done. Google/PC sync was split: cloud sync with Google for most things, and HTC Sync if you needed Outlook/Outlook Express integration.
The browser is where HTC and Android actually delivered something objectively strong. The Hero’s WebKit-based browser was fast, clean, and for many pages genuinely in the same conversation as Mobile Safari. Pages loaded quickly, scrolling was fluid, and multi-touch pinch-to-zoom was responsive.
The headline: Hero was the first Android phone with any Flash support in the browser. It could render animated banners, basic Flash games, and even desktop YouTube. Reality check: desktop YouTube playback was stuttery even on good Wi‑Fi, again hinting at the platform’s general video handling issues. But in terms of standards and feature set, this was a serious attempt to match and exceed Apple – especially with multiple page support, a usable download manager, password management, and form autofill.
Google Maps was familiar territory with one tweak: added walking route planning. But multi-touch didn’t work here at all. Zooming relied on on-screen +/- buttons that only appeared when you touched the display. Street View was oddly hidden behind a long-press rather than in the main mode list. And actual turn-by-turn, voice-guided navigation was missing by default. If you wanted that, you had to go app hunting (CoPilot Live as a paid solution, or AndNav2 plus a Text-to-Speech library for a free but robotic-sounding option).
Apps, Rooting, and the Android Experiment
Preloaded apps painted a clear picture of HTC’s strategy: supplement Google’s basics and lean heavily on Android Market. Out of the box you got Google Maps, YouTube, Quickoffice, a PDF viewer, Google Talk, Peep (Twitter client), Stocks, Footprints, a weather app, a voice recorder, stopwatch, countdown timer and a flexible alarm clock.
Footprints was a nice attempt at geo-tagging locations with photos, notes and categories like favorites, shopping or dining, with address lookup via Google Maps. The weather app combined flashy visuals with useful forecasts, accessible via a widget. The YouTube app, despite browser Flash support, remained valuable because it used the mobile site and delivered smoother playback with less data.
The Android Market followed Apple’s App Store playbook closely – structure, look, and behavior all felt familiar. A permission warning system before downloads at least gave users visibility into what each app could access. Apps ranged from trivial (screen-as-flashlight) to actually important tools like file managers and alternative media players. Gaming existed but hinged on developer enthusiasm and the limitations of early Android APIs.
And then there was rooting. Features like Bluetooth file transfer, alternate ROMs and recovery images all essentially required root. The explanation was simple: the hardware could do more than HTC and Google allowed. With root, you could remove those software locks and get the phone you thought you’d paid for.
XDA-developers became the de facto hub for Hero modding, ROMs and tweaks. That alone says a lot: a supposedly flagship Android needed community firmware to feel complete. Sense UI itself landed first on Hero, but it didn’t take long for people to try porting it to G1/Dream and Magic anyway.
Verdict: Ambitious, Clever, and Ultimately Incomplete
Go back to the Hero’s own conclusion and you see the split personality clearly. On one hand, it’s praised as “the best HTC and Android OS have churned out to date.” On the other, there’s a long list of issues: flawed video playback, painfully weak video recording, slow media reindexing, patchy UI performance, missing features like Bluetooth file transfer and voice dialing, and half-thought-out UX decisions in messaging, scenes, and camera.
The Hero did beat the HTC Magic on several fronts: smoother and more customizable UI, multi-touch baked in, tethering enabled by default, and a better still camera. Against the iPhone 3GS, it offered some practical advantages – removable battery, microSD, 5MP camera – but lost badly on performance, audio quality, and app ecosystem depth.
Even against Samsung’s first Android phone, the i7500 Galaxy, things weren’t clear-cut. Hero had Sense and multi-touch; Galaxy had less RAM and no multitouch support, but the fragmentation between OEMs already hinted that features would be uneven across Android hardware.
Stack it up against HTC’s own Touch Diamond2 and you get a different trade: more mature hardware and UI polish on Windows Mobile, but saddled with an aging OS under TouchFLO 3D. Hero at least represented a break from Windows Mobile’s habits.
For around 500 euro at launch, the Hero tried to justify flagship pricing with UI flair and early social integration rather than raw multimedia or performance. It mostly succeeded in being interesting. It didn’t quite succeed in being reliable or complete.
Looking back, the Hero reads less like a true ‘iPhone killer’ and more like a critical prototype: the phone that showed HTC what Sense UI could be, and showed Google how far Android still had to go.
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