07 Sep 2009, Posted by mikefoong in the category, 0 Comments

HTC Hero Demo

Speaking to Alan Lee, Regional Technical Support Engineer of HTC Malaysia, he gave us a demo on camera the key features of the HTC Hero.

The HTC Hero Demo:

1. The Hardware and the Design of the HTC Hero. The HERO white has a teflon coating to give it a smooth glossy feel but maintain a non-slippery feel.

The HERO also has a fingerprint resistant glass screen that can withstand some degree of scratching. He demoed the scratching part with his car key.

The tailing is designed to have a better grip on the palm and for easy access to the buttons. What I really didn’t think it was a feature of the infamous “Chin” was that it was used as an easy to to tilt to prevent glaring.

The HERO also comes with a  G-Sensor which is similar to the accelerometer and it can detect the phones orientation to suit.

2. Sense UI

The Sense UI is pretty impressive. In fact its one of the things I envy over the iPhone. It’s pretty snappy on the HERO hardware. It is highly customizable with 7 screens to play around with.

The scenes feature allows you to personalize your mood/space on the HERO where you can define a screen that reflects your needs, mood or your current task. For example Work scenes, Holiday scene, and etc.

3. People (aka Contacts)

The Contacts feature on the Sense UI called People (They really need to have better naming conventions) is very innovative. It is making the contacts closer to today’s Social Media/Network context where it integrates with your social network status profiles and other social components like photo albums. When you pick a contact, it shows not only your standard contacts but it updates your current status on twitter and facebook. It also shows the photo albums that is tied to the profile/contact you just selected. Imagine having the Facebook App and your Contacts integrated into one.

4. Pinch

This I find is pretty similar to the iPhone with 1 difference the pinch works a little differently on the browser. The HTC Hero/Android browser is able to resize the text based on the screen size or viewing size to a more readable format. It nice for reading lots of text. It however reformats the webpages and we know that how it really mess up the layout on the mobile platform when we do that. Nevertheless it does help with enlarging the smaller text for better viewing.

Although I must say that the iPhone does have this nailed down pretty well. With the double tap to refocus the text. When you pinch to enlarge it moves off the screen. HTC however just enlarge to fit the screen and it does not go off screen. I see the advantages of both in different situations.

The HTC Hero retails for RM 2399.00

HTC Hero Fact Sheet:

Check out the video below: (Note: If you use a Netbook or a lower powered computer that does not support HD, you will experience video jerk, try turning off HD

HTC Hero Demo from theITChannel on Vimeo.