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After a thorough software walkthrough by Chris Leckness, it’s time to see how the HTC Hero fairs on the daily basis. Expect a solid run-through of this handset as I happily set aside my AT&T Tilt for a week, sorry WinMo, in favor of seeing how the Android half  lives. I tried the Android Google Voice app on for size, read feeds, streamed media for hours, and put one of  HTC’s solid Android offerings through its paces.

Hardware

At first glance the handset is thin for a phone toting a 5-megapixel camera and spots a grippy, rubberized casing that has prevented it from slipping through my butterfingers out of the box. I rejoiced at the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and the universal charging port. I can easily use the wall and car charger from my HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt) from 2007 to charge the HTC Hero without a problem. Then, I started fishing for the Hero’s charger and USB cable. What I wasn’t expecting to see was both the charger and cable consolidated into one handy accessory; an AC charger with a detachable USB cable that can then be used as the phone-to-PC connecter. Why carry around two completely separate peripherals when they serve nearly the same function? Exactly.

The Hero needed a full charge before I could start touching-and-swiping, but after a few short hours I was already going through the start-up tutorial, which was helpful since my daily handset up to this point had a physical QWERTY keyboard. Keep in mind that the only visible button on the side of the Hero is the volume rocker, which toggles the volume of notifications or ringtones depending on which screen is displayed. There’s the usual buttons to start and end calls, plus Home, Back, Search, and Menu keys. The Menu key has become invaluable on this handset, but I’ll get to that later.

The trackball on this handset immediately reminded me of a Blackberry. Believe me when I say that it took me a while to figure out why a trackball would be better than a dedicated camera button; I accidentally rolled it a few times while trying to press the trackball to take photos. From a daily use standpoint, a trackball just isn’t practical for taking photos. That aside, the 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera works well but lacks any photo quality settings and flash. If I only took photos during the day, the lack of these features wouldn’t be so glaring.

Interface

Another nifty use for the trackball was being able to switch between panels, which makes for quick panel-editing if you decide all your widgets would look better on the other end of the panel spectrum. Just press down on a widget, wait for the phone to go into edit mode, and then scroll the trackball to switch panels while the widget’s still up in the air. Beats dragging each individual widget to the edge of any given panel and waiting for the panels to change themselves. After a few goes, I finally got all my panels organized the way I wanted without using the “Themes” feature at all, although I can see how simplified panel setup can be by just selecting a social-network or business theme each with its own predetermined widgets and all completely editable. And finally, the trackball can be used to scroll between letters in any text I input be it Tweet, Facebook update, or email to selectively copy, cut, or paste anything, which is handy because apparently I can’t type worth a darn on this all-touch keyboard.

The on-screen keyboard on the HTC Hero can only be used in portrait mode on any home screen or widget, but once I switched into a full program like Peep, HTC’s Twitter app, I could turn the phone and use the keyboard in landscape mode. Thank goodness the auto-correction features on this handset are intuitive enough to interpret my flubby typing, but the fact that I have to rely on the auto-correction feature instead of a well-spaced, well-formatted keyboard leaves me lukewarm.

Despite my lack of typing skills, I’m in love with the HTC’s Sense UI. The smooth scrolling from panel-to-panel is almost seamless and gives the customizable background a three-dimensional quality that makes the handset’s large screen really pop!  The lock screen is also fully customizable. I selected photos through the Backgrounds app from the Android Market and set my wallpaper. I could also set my lock screen with any downloaded/imported photo. Any image files were automatically saved to my photo album, which eliminated any headaches of delving into folder directories.

Applications

Downloaded apps are also easily handled by the Hero. Once I hit the install key from the Android Market listing for an application, the program would download and install in the background. There later be a simple notice in the taskbar that the job was done. All I had to do was go into the programs menu or tap a panel and add a shortcut to the program. The Market already has a treasure trove of essentials for Google products, social networks, and even recipe-making like Healthy Recipes and Digital Recipe Sidekick. The latter is an interesting idea that takes advantage of the HTC Hero’s text-to-speech capabilities, which allows for any would-be chef to rely on the phone to read what to do next with a verbal command. I only wish that every time I got virtual Henri’s attention the app wouldn’t force-quit on me.

Since the aLast.fm Player app also decided to force-quit on me at every turn, I settled on Last.fm’s official app for my streaming music needs.  The Filter feature in the Market came in handy, since I could search the free apps first before searching the pay-to-play apps.  There’s a multitude of free soundboards, ringtones, and photo packages, one of my favorites being the Backgrounds app that seems to search Flickr for a quick wallpaper change to suit my mood.

No matter what app I was using, the Menu key was an easy way to access any kind of settings available without having to dig deep just to change something like a notification change. All the menus on the Hero are large, easily accessible, and finger-friendly. There were no times where I wondered how much easier could I access an app or setting, but the different ways to delete emails in Gmail versus Hotmail was a little funny. The difference was only a re-ordering of keys, although why both email interfaces weren’t standardized I don’t know.

The Hero also comes with an Adobe PDF Reader and Quickoffice, which makes viewing PDFs and PowerPoint presentations a breeze. Yes, even those slightly annoying email slideshow attachments download and play without a problem. I’m glad the Office capabilities stop there because I couldn’t fathom typing anything longer than a quick email or text message on the awkward keyboard let alone create a Word Document.

Reading eBooks in the public domain worked well, and although downloading and navigating through an eBook on the Hero is simple, the battery life probably wouldn’t allow for reading over a long period of time. Neat feature is that the Hero remembers exactly where I was in any given program, which would come in handy is I needed to look something up in the browser while in the middle of an eBook.

Syncing

Once I setup my Gmail account on the Hero, all of my Google contacts automatically imported without a hitch. My calendar, which I also kept synced with Google from my WinMo phone, also downloaded in seconds. The Hero also simplifies connecting contacts with their prospective Facebook profiles, which in turn downloads contact photos, events, status changes, et cetera. A small downside is that I couldn’t find an easy way to connect multiple contact profiles with Facebook. After all authorizations and user login information was saved, I was able to log in to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, et cetera, using the handset’s standard browser.

Browsing, Flash, and Video

Flash was less than reliable when any kind of embedded video was concerned, although it worked fine when I surfed to Flash-heavy sites with embedded music. If I was trying to watch YouTube videos, even if I was on the YouTube main site, I would get an error message and no video often. While browsing through my Google Reader feeds via Greed, I would surf to a full site with an embedded video and the video would play fine. I’m convinced Flash on the Hero just didn’t like me.

Streaming video from the Sprint TV app, on the other hand, worked without a hitch. The video quality was pixilated at best while watching one of the few mobile channels, but there was virtually no buffering time spent twiddling my thumbs. Can’t say I’d actually use the service for any huge length of time because sadly the Hero’s battery wouldn’t be able to handle it. Streaming music for four hours with the screen off or on the lowest possible brightness setting would almost completely deplete the battery on this handset.

Loading music on the handset was cake. I could just connect the phone via USB to my PC, select that I wanted to copy/move files to/from my PC from the notifications menu, and click “Mount.” A file directory appeared on my computer and I was ready to reorganize files, so I moved a few ringtones over into my music directory. I liked that I could create a shortcut to any given music playlist on any panel. What I didn’t like was that this was the only way I could figure how to load my own custom-made ringtones onto the device. True, I could make any full-sized song my ringtone and even edit any song down to a smaller clip on the phone, but I wish that ringtones could just appear on the ringtone selection menu if I put them in the right directory.

Phone Calls

The Android phone call interface isn’t anything groundbreaking, but how other open applications handle an incoming call is neat. If Last.fm is streaming music, the connection pauses and I could take a call. If I had Google Voice set to receive calls on the Hero, then the service would automatically kick in when I answered the call so I could seamlessly use my Google Voice account. When a voicemail was received, the Google Voice app itself can cache it much like a visual voicemail function so I could read, play, or fast-forward through each message. I could definitely see screening calls become a world easier by just being able to label unwanted callers as spam or block them entirely.

Verdict

The HTC Hero is light-weight, has a large screen, and beautiful Sense UI interface. Internet browsing, skimming documents, scheduling events, reading emails, listening to and watching media, and keeping up with social networking on-the-go was less cumbersome and time-consuming. The keyboard was satisfactory but is awkward for typing anything longer than a quick email, and HTC could have done better with battery life. All that said with its hassle-free setup and intuitive interface, the HTC Hero can make a new smartphone user feel confident while still being a powerful enough handset for seasoned users. If the HTC Hero ever made it to AT&T , I would be an early adopter.

Edited October 11, 2009:

After a few attempts with my Canon, here are several screencaps of the HTC Hero.