This is only a quick review of the 1 day I had the HTC Hero with me. There are plenty of other reviews online about the screen, the interface and the inputs etc… I will only quickly address the things I had the time to test and use.
I purchased a HTC Hero for my fiancé. Luckily I was allowed the usage of the phone for one day. So I was able to compare it with my aging HTC x7500 Advantage brick with Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro. I was able to use my very old 1997 SIM card in the HTC Hero.
The combined Android and HTC Sense UI is very powerful, and the reactivity to finger movements on the screen is really impressive. Having the 7 screens available to test. I really liked the way you can design you’re Scenes (Profile) with the different widgets. I didn’t have the time to look on the Android market for interesting new apps. I did like the Peep twitter application, but if you are following a few very active VMware tweeters, it becomes to read.
Delivery & Language
I ordered a HTC Hero White English model from Expansys, and I’m sure they send me the HTC Hero White German version, with German documentation. While you can select the language during setup (I used English, but my fiancé uses French). There are some places in the HTC Hero that don’t change language. For example, I was able to use a English Calendar, but the Personal Calendar was still named “Persönliche Kalender”. So one bad point to Expansys for sending me the wrong HTC Hero box, and one bad point to HTC for making some elements language agnostic.
UMTS Connectivity & Telecom Provider
APN. It’s the term used by HTC in the HTC Hero for configuring the Access Point Name, or the way you communicate with your telecom provider. Why this menu is buried under Wireless Controls, Mobile network settings, Access Point Names escapes me. It should be me clearer and higher up the menu, as it’s so important.
My telecom provider is Swisscom in Switzerland, and the HTC Hero did not pickup any automatic configuration for the UMTS/3G/GPRS connectivity. I had to manually enter all the information in the APN settings, after having spend 15 minutes searching on the Internet. For my fiancé’s telecom provider, Orange, it seems to pick up about 80% of the APN configuration online. I just modified the Server settings. The lesson learned: blaming HTC for poor APN integration is not exactly correct, this seems to be the resort of the Telecom providers.
HTC Hero & Exchange 2007
I use mostly my HTX x7500 Advantage with my corporate connectivity, as my company uses an Exchange 2007 infrastructure with Direct Push Technology. So I’m used to having my phone integrated with Exchange. It really simplifies my life concerning my Contacts, Calendar events and Emails. Setting up the HTC Hero to connect with my companies Exchange server was relatively simple. Yet the HTC Hero is not a Windows Mobile platform and it does not support the Direct Push Technology. The HTC Hero automatically checks my Exchange server every 15 minutes. I personally prefer having the Direct Push Emails. But I can live with it. The Emails where easy to read with both portrait and landscape mode. Managing the emails was rather easy. The point that disturbed me in my usage of the HTC Hero with Exchange integration came at the end of my 1 day review. I acted with the phone, like I had lost it. I connecter to my Outlouk Web Access, went to the options, selected the Mobile Devices and tried to remote wipe the device (Wipe All Data from Device…). it didn’t work immediately. The first attempt was not successful. On the next scheduled Email synchronization (15 minutes later), the HTC Hero noticed something was off, and opened the Exchange configuration panel. It said that the details were not correct and proposed to save the config. I didn’t even have to re-enter my password on the HTC Hero, just select the SAVE button, and off the HTC Hero was again synchronizing with Exchange. That’s no good. A 2nd attempt to wipe all data using OWA, made the HTC Hero query if Yes or No the user should accept the synchronization that would wipe the data. I select Yes in this case and the removal of all the data took 6 minutes, during which I could have cancelled the wiping job on the HTC Hero. The HTC Hero therefore is able to work with Exchange 2007, but a corporation cannot entrust these endpoints for remote data wipe. I guess to have the proper remote data wipe functionality you really need the Direct Push Technology, where the OWA portal or Exchange server forces the mobile devices to reset.
At this point, I had to do a wipe using the factory default settings, so that I could give the HTC Hero back to my fiancé. I helped her setup her own Scenes, import her music, install the HTC Sync on her desktop and synchronize all her outlook contacts to the phone. As the evening progressed she was getting more and more impressed by this small jewel. My fiancé has short nails, making the usage of the phone difficult when you attempt to send SMS or Emails, so she had to recalibrate the keyboard.
I guess I will ask her how she fares with the phone in a few days.
Oops forgot…
One nice feature on the HTC Hero is the clock. Each time you come back to the main screen see how it adjusts the time (scroll the numbers or dial the wheels) ? Well that is getting tedious very very quickly… Why is my phone always on UTC time and needs to correct the graphics to get the right time ?