Introducing the Hero Smartphone. The phone you have been waiting for. Powered by Google’s Android operating system the Hero is one phone to fall in love with. The design of the phone is quite daring to say the least. Most recent phones have shed their hard lines and angles and have become slick shapeless blobs. The Hero is very angular, similar to those you might see in futuristic TV shows. The phone looks and feels more rugged and durable than most phones on sale today. The angles make it feel more comfortable and natural to hold and grasp in your hand.

Display & Browser - As with other Google Android phones the display is multitouch with a really good 480-320 screen. The brightness is similar to other phones of this type but feels warmer than most. If you are a little worried about on-screen keyboards, don’t be. The keyboard is particularly good on this phone. There are three keyboard layouts in both portrait and landscape modes. The standard full QWERTY keyboard, a phone keypad and a cut down version of QWERTY - which has two letters per key. The full QWERTY keyboard in landscape mode is a dream to type fast with. The browser makes full use of the multitouch feature with pinch to zoom out and spread to zoom in. Flash support is also incorporated into the core WebKit browser.

Widgets - The Hero Smartphone is crammed full of new applications and widgets. You won’t be seeing most of these on any other phone as they are unique to HTC. The usual widgets such as the clock and weather are present but there are interesting ones like the Twitter widget. This enables you to read tweets and update your current status without having to open the Twitter application. The Hero Smartphone comes with multiple desktop themes, all pre loaded and filled with different backgrounds, widgets and shortcuts. You can customise these any way you like and save the resulting configuration. Switching between these themes, or scenes as they are called, takes only a couple of seconds and lets you completely rearrange your entire desktop almost instantly. Use one scene for home and one for work, this lets you organise better.

Social Networking - When you turn on the HTC Smartphone for the first time it asks for your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr logins. Unlike a lot of other phone this one does not dump all 500 of your Facebook friends into your contacts list; it keeps the list in the background for when you need it. The Facebook connection here is deeper and more useful than the likes of the Palm Pre. While scrolling down your phone contacts if you have linked someone to a Facebook profile you can view their most recent status. In the contact tab you can view all the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses, photos and birthday and all recent txt messages and conversions. Also displayed are email history, recent Facebook updates and Flickr photo albums.

The HTC Smartphone, Hero, is the best Android driven yet. The phone’s design, interface and features such as totally integrated profiles make it the best smartphone to date. This is a real alternative to the iPhone and Palm Pre.

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