The third android smartphone of HTC is the HTC Hero, the chin happy design has been out for some months in Europe, and finally the HTC Hero has come out on Sprint. The HTC Hero has gone over some cosmetic surgery for Sprint and lost it’s chin, making it a bit more classic smartphone design. As is the nature of opinions in this case they are divided as well, some prefer the chin and some prefer the smooth design. All in all the phone – chin or no chin looks great, and the build quality is sturdy and feels good in the hand. The Hero is packed with great features and because of the Sense UI allows for a lot of customization in the widget rich interface.

Compared to earlier HTC Android device releases the HTC Hero feels a lot better, the quality of the device itself and the software running it are much more polished then for instance the G1 and the T-Mobile myTouch 3G. The device measures 4.5 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches. Size itself is comparable to the myTouch 3G and quite abit smaller then the G1. Without the HTC chin the device fits great in a normal sized pocket or phone holder. The coating of the device feels great, it’s a little bit soft but not too soft, making the grip on the phone feel good.

Ofcourse a smartphone does a million things, but let’s not forget about the HTC Hero call quality, like most of the HTC devices this is great and seems crisp, though the speaker phone could be better, there is some cracking in the voice and when I called a co-worker with the Hero lying on my desk while typing on my keyboard the found these background noises really loud and distracting. All in all not a really big problem area of this smartphone.

The screen of the HTC Hero seems as vibrant and bright like the iPhone and the iPhone 3G which have the same HVGA (480×320) screen resolution. Browsing the web, updating twitter or facebook all looks great. The browser works great, but is a lot slower then for instance safari on the iPhone and slower then Opera Mobile (both 9.5 and 9.7 score a lot faster). However it’s not annoyingly slow. HTC has made the software so you can use multi touch on the device so pinching to zoom works in the browser. One of the selling points of the HTC Hero is the fact that it supports flash in the browser, but while trying to get this to work on youtube seemed like a big chore, some movies played, some did not. One thing was always the case, it is really slow and takes the fun away from the browsing experience. It seems flash is just not ready yet for usage on smartphones. Perhaps apple isn’t that foolish to not include it in the iPhone.

The phone has some standard themes which basically puts some widget on your screen, from there you can further customize the device, this feature saves quite some time and works well. One thing that also saves a lot of time is that the HTC Hero fetches all your contacts from all your e-mail and social network accounts like facebook and google mail. You will probably still get some duplicate contacts and some that need your time to manually edit, but at least the feature works, and we haven’t seen it on that many phones as of yet.

One of the other big plus points while comparing this device to other android smartphones is the exchange supports, it actually syncs e-mail, contacts and calendar items, something we have not seen before. The camera on the phone is what you would expect from HTC, sadly no flash, no optical zooming and not so great shutter time. If there is enough light the Hero makes great photo’s but as soon as there is a shortage of light like at night or in a not so well lit garage you will get grainy dark pictures that take ages to shoot.

All we would rate the phone a decent 8 out of 10, some things need more work, especially the web browsing and the camera. But the phone offers a great experience and is a joy to use. I’d say apple has to watch it’s back, when android device like this hopefully get some better hardware and faster cpu’s to backup the rich features and flash web browsing.