Crave UK got its hands on the HTC Hero, the company's latest device to run Google's Android operating system. Click through the gallery put together by Crave UK's Flora Graham to see the Hero's oddly curved body and find out more about the features of this powerful touch-screen smartphone.
Hey, that doesn't look like the Android we've come to know and love! It's the HTC Sense user interface, which gives Android heaps of customizability and usability features. For example, you can have several "scenes," or custom configurations, set up so that your phone looks different for work and on the weekend.
That means different wallpaper, widgets, and shortcuts on any of the seven homescreens in each scene. The lock screen is also customizable.
John Wang of HTC showed off the heaps of widgets available for the HTC Hero. That's 12 different clocks, people...although a few of them look pretty similar to us. The Hero has location awareness so that when you land in a different time zone, your clock and weather widgets automatically update to show the local deets.
If that's not enough, you can download more Android widgets from the Android Market.
You can choose full-screen or smaller widgets to fill up your screen, and switch between them with the swipe of a finger. We liked the full-screen widgets showing live updates from services like Twitter and Facebook, which gave the Hero a Palm Pre-like feel and took advantage of all that home screen real estate.
Social networking is integrated all over the UI. For example, your address book not only shows each contact's e-mail, text, and call history, but also shows their Facebook updates, profile photo, photo albums, and Flickr albums.
In the photo gallery, your phone photos are side-by-side with your Facebook and Flickr photos, too.The Hero has Flash support, and on our demo model, it looked great. You can see Flash in Web pages, so you'll never have to miss another snazzy ad again.
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