I have had the HTC Hero for about a month now. I wanted the black but had to get the white, but it has grown on me as has the chin. Most of the reviews on the web complained about it being laggy. So far I have only encountered lag once or twice, in general the applications load promptly and input is responsive - however when scrolling between home screens the widgets (e.g. clock, messages, etc) do not refresh instantly. The HTC 'Sense' user interface and widgets look very nice, although some of the widgets aren't well designed for the small screen e.g. the People widget has two small buttons right next to each other and 90% of the time I hit the Information button instead of the Call button.
The Android operating system (version 1.5) is stable and has a bucket load of options, tweaks and functionality. I found this to be both surprising (for such a young system) and daunting (not helped by some convoluted menus). While it is stable there seems to be some bugs/strange behaviour e.g. when changing the wallpaper of the home screen you can choose from the Wallpaper gallery but when changing the lock screen wallpaper (the option is found on the same wallpaper menu) you can only choose from Camera shots or All photos. Sometimes when receiving a call or message the screen and trackball will light up to indicate this but there will be no ringer. I find the virtual keyboard (and it's word suggestions/corrections) to be very good ... when in landscape mode, my man sized (read fat) fingers make the portrait orientation near useless and frustrating for typing more than one or two characters.
As for the hardware, it is nice and solid and as mentioned the chin isn't as ugly in real life. The camera is well ... a cellphone camera so don't go relying on it during your next trip to Paraguay. I like to turn my phone off when I go to sleep to prevent annoying late night calls and to save precious battery life, unfortunately unlike on my previous Nokia the Hero does not turn itself back on if you have a scheduled alarm - you can however turn on airplane mode which I guess is almost as good. My main gripe is that in order to access the Micro SD card slot you must remove the back cover (again unlike my previous Nokia), this is not helped by the fact that the cover is not the easiest to remove. The battery life is decent and I seem to be getting 2+ days out of it (some calls, some messages and some internet).
Overall despite the negative tone of this post I find the Hero to be a great phone and hoping version 2.0 of Android will fix a few things. It is still behind the iPhone in terms of hardware and software (OS and applications), but since it is an "open" system I think it has a lot more possibilities and is more exciting - exciting enough for me to download the SDK and start writing something, Java >> Objective-c.
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