Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #680 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: HTC
• Model: A6262WHEU
• Released on: 2009-08-15
• Dimensions: .57" h x 2.21" w x 4.41" l, .30 pounds
• Display size: 3.2

Manufacturer's Description

HTC Hero is our first phone to embody HTC Sense™ - an intuitive, seamless experience built upon three fundamental principles - make it mine, stay close, and discover the unexpected.

With HTC Hero, personalization reaches a level never before possible. Rather than burying important content under layers of menus, the HTC Hero lets you put it at glance view, with a selection of widgets that can be placed right on the home screen. The widgets themselves can be personalized with a variety of designs and sizes that best match your personality.

With Scenes, a new profile feature, HTC Hero becomes multiple phones in one. Create and switch between Scenes that reflect different moments in your life. Your Hero becomes a weekend phone that helps you relax with your choice of tunes, catch up with your favorite friends and capture some memories with HTC Footprints™. And when you go on a trip, your phone becomes your personal guide and gives you instant access to local time, weather and maps.

Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls and emails to Facebook updates. HTC Hero makes staying close as simple as turning to your friend and saying hello. When you view people, you see the different ways to get in touch, you also see all your interactions like emails sent to your personal and work accounts. You can even check for social network updates and event notices as well as see the latest pictures your friends uploaded to popular photo sharing sites.

Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. Even basic functions like the dialer will pleasantly surprise you on the HTC Hero. You can find a person by dialing their phone number or simply by dialing the first few letters of their name.

With HTC Hero, you can look at things through different perspectives. Your inbox is not just a list of emails, but a catalog of conversations, a collection of notes flagged as important, and a document library of all your emails with attachments. Your Album is not just the photos saved on your phone. It is also a gateway to online collections of you and your friends on Facebook or Flickr.

Search just about anything, anywhere on your HTC Hero. The dedicated Search button combs through tweets in Twitter™, locates people in your contact list, finds emails in your inbox, searches through appointments in the calendar and very nearly finds needles in haystacks.

Box Contains

• HTC Hero 3G Android Sim Free mobile phone
• Quick start guide
• Screen protector
• Travel charger
• Mini-USB data cable
• Standard battery
• Wired stereo headset with 3.5 mm connector
• Accessory leaflet
• 2 GB microSD card

Customer Reviews

It is as good as people say!
I have had my Hero for about two weeks now and I can honestly say that it is the best phone I have ever had! I should temper this statement with the fact that I have been a regular Nokia N series user, but this has ended forever now that I have come to terms with the android operating system and fallen in love with the crisp and vibrant screen that comes with the Hero.

If your a little worried about on-screen keyboards, don't be. They are particularly good on this phone. Even the full qwerty in portrait mode is useable as there is a very active predictive text type of thing going on as you type, so half the time you only need type half the word and select the suggestion. There are 2 other keyboards other than the full qwerty, including a t9 phone keypad type thing (that I don't bother with) and a cut down qwerty, that has two letters per key (don't bother with that one either). The full qwerty in landscape mode is a dream and I can type fast with it.

Internet browsing is fast. Sadly I have an Orange branded phone (which essentially means that Orange UK has put their own settings on and as usual made a pigs ear of it). Wifi connection is good and fast too. The standard browser in the phone is all you need (though there was some talk of firefox coming over to android in some form).

I use the HTC Peep twitter client a lot, I have tried other twitter clients from the android market, but HTC have done a nice job with the built in program. Accessing the android market could not be easier. There is no guarantee of quality of programs on the android market, but there are plenty, and I am sure others will give you long lists of their favourites, but I wont bore you with that.

HTC Sense is very very good, there is very little lag, the graphics are smoothe and choices wide and varied. You might think (for example) that 12 different clock types would be enough for anyone, but I would love them to come out with more as I am a little fussy that way! Pity that the music player does not immediately grab cover art, but there are programs on the android market that will!

If you are thinking about getting this phone, but are a little hesitant, don't be! It is worth every penny. I have not found anything I do not like about the phone. Email integration, web browsing, twittering, updating photo's to flickr - its all good and all easy thanks to this phone. Get it, you wont regret it!

HTC Hero - Initial Thoughts
Picked the HTC up at Orange's store last Saturday - 25th July.
I've been eagerly anticipating this handset and couldn't wait to get my hands on it.....
So, first things first, the Orange one is in the Graphite colour, which is my personal preference to white. The Orange logo is not too intrusive, as there is just 1 small (0.5 cm2) logo on the battery cover.
Boot up takes approx 1 - 1 1/2 minutes, this is understandable with such a technically impressive phone.
After that, you are greeted with the best interface I have ever used. Very intuitive and infinitely configurable.
The size and weight are great, the touchscreen is great, it's a beautiful device, the Android Market of Applications is very comprehensive, I downloaded one which had a timer and then produced a flatulence noise yesterday, which was fun (for about a minute).
Another big plus point is that you can crop a section of the MP3 file you wish to use as your ringtone, great idea as most songs have an intro of some sort.
The downsides I have noticed so far are: -
Battery life - I am a minimal user and i'm charging it daily.
Camera - no stabilization whatsoever, so you need to keep a steady hand.
PC Sync - Did not connect to my XP Desktop, but worked first time with my Vista Laptop!!
I think it's a great idea to have the Sync Installation file on the Phone's card, as I have about 10 CD-ROMs at home with install files for various mobiles, installed them once and then never look at them again!
The USB cable is also for charging and this is too short.
Bluetooth is only for Headset Pairing (like the iPhone), not sending and receiving data.

Brilliant Android Phone
I received the HTC Hero on Friday and having used it for a few days now..my initial thoughts are this is a fantastic phone.

Firstly the phone is very well designed and is built to a high standard. The chin on the phone doesn't look out of place and improves the phone. The touch screen is very responsive, with a good layout and easy to use interface.

As reported the HTC Hero is very customisable, with you been able to place widgets on any of the seven screens, for example twitter, weather, bookmarks, contacts, emails. Email is easy to set up, to receive emails from my hotmail account I simply entered my email address and password.

A great feature of the phone has to be its integration with social networking sites, when you first load up your phone it will ask you for your facebook, flickr etc account details. Then when adding a contact to your phonebook this can be linked with your contacts facebook account, which then will display status updates, events, birthdays, albums etc.

There is virtually no lag on this phone, the screen maybe paused for a couple of secs once or twice on the first day but nothing at all since even when running a number of applications at once.

The android market provides a large number of different applications, which provides even more customisation for your phone. The browser on the phone is excellent, I am on tmobile and the loading of web pages is very quick. The browser provides multiple tabs, pinch and zoom and navigating around the pages is very easy to do both using the touchscreen or the trackball.

The camera is of good quality more a less what you would expect from 5 megapixels. Battery life your looking at charging more a less every day if heavy usage. Call quality is crisp and clear.

This phone has so many great features which all work well and integrate together which overall provides an excellent android phone.