On Thursday, Sprint and HTC announced the upcoming launch of the HTC Hero, Sprint's first Google Android-based smartphone. The Hero is the first Android phone with a redesigned user interface called HTC Sense, which offers a multi-panel, customizable home screen with Internet-based widgets.
The HTC Hero will cost $179.99 with a two-year contract and after $150 in rebates when it goes on sale Oct. 11. That's a slightly lower price than Sprint's other flagship smart phones, the Palm Pre and BlackBerry Tour 9630, which both cost $199 after rebates.
MoreAs we discovered in our earlier hands-on with the Hero, Sense means a lot of personalization (you can choose between ten clock designs for your phone), a heavy focus on contact integration (flipping easily between contact cards and all the e-mails you've received from a person, for instance) and the occasional cute, unexpected touch. When you open up the Weather app and it's raining, raindrops appear on your screen and are then wiped away by a virtual windshield wiper.
A related innovation, HTC Scenes, lets you set up different home screens for different situations (such as work and home, for instance.) The Hero also features HTC Footprints, a GPS-based diary app which lets you associate photos, audio and notes about places you've been with a GPS location to form "digital postcards," according to HTC.
The slab-style Hero is better than the other two Android phones on the market, the T-Mobile G1 and the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, in various ways. The Hero has a real 3.5-mm headphone jack, so it's a viable music player. It also has a 5-megapixel camera, versus the 3.2-Mpixel versions found on the other two phones. Finally, the Hero's other advantage is a fingerprint-resistant coating on its screen similar to the one found on the iPhone 3GS.
Most of the Hero's other specs are similar to those other two phones: a 528-MHz Qualcomm processor, stereo Bluetooth, a MicroSD memory card slot, a 3.2-inch, 320x480 capacitive multitouch screen, Wi-Fi, GPS, and all the standard Android applications, including support for Microsoft Exchange push email. The phone connects to Sprint's EVDO Rev A 3G network, which typically produces download speeds around a megabit per second.
The GSM version of the Hero, available from some European carriers, includes Adobe Flash in the Web browser, but we couldn't find anything about Flash on Sprint's press release or fact sheet.
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