GizmoScoop

The HTC phone is out in the market, and it is deemed to be the champion to fight off against evil doers, well sort of.  The new HTC Hero set out to compete against the iPhone 3GS and others alike.  The HTC Hero is the third Android phone that has come out to the market so far.  The HTC Hero comes with an updated camera and a newly fashionable design compare to the HTC Touch Pro for Sprint last year.  Not only that, the HTC Hero comes with HTC Sense technology, which supposed to be intuitive and seamless user interface.  With the HTC Sense technology, content such as applications can be reach at a glance view where a selection of widgets that can be placed right on the home screen.  This feature is very useful, and comparable to creating shortcuts and place it on your desktop computer screen.  You have seen a lot lately that smartphones are trying to mimic the desktop computer environment; such as with the Palm Pre, you can run multiple applications at the same time through its deck card like feature.  The HTC Hero also has A-GPS, a digital compass and accelerometer for  instant access to local time, weather and maps when you go on a trip.

The HTC Hero comes with a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen at 320 x 480 HVGA resolution and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera. It is a thin handset, measuring 112 x 56.2 x 14.35 mm, compare to HTC’s other models; for those of you who think in inches, it is about 4.41 x 2.21 x 0.57 inches; the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS’ thickness are 0.67 inch and .048 inch, respectively.   The HTC Hero has a microSD slot with a SIM slot and 1,350mAh Li-Ion battery, all which can be accessed by removing the back cover. The total weight is about 135 grams (4.76 ounces). The HTC Hero will be available in the 850/900/1800/1900MHz GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 900/2100MHz HSPA/WCDMA.  The 900/2100MHz HSPA/WCDMA supports up to 7.2Mbps download and 2Mbps upload speeds.   It has multiple external connection types which include WiFi b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR with A2DP support, and USB 2.0.

Lets us take a look at the engine that runs the HTC Hero.   It is run on Qualcomm’s MSM7200A processor at 528 MHz, which is an old processor.   It is about 72 MHz less when compare to the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, which run on the new ARM A8 Cortex processor at about 600 MHz.  Not only that the processors from the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre have double the L1 cache but also added a second cache L2 at 256kB (32kB L1 on Qualcomm’s and 64kB L1 on both iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre).  The greater the L1 and L2 caches, the smoother and faster the processor able to execute instructions command by you.  From the Qualcomm MSM7200A’s spec sheet, it seems the processor from the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre would out run the Qualcomm MSM7200A any day as we have seen from the previous model of the G1, which has the 528MHz ARM11 processor.  Hopefully, the Qualcomm MSM7200A is a better tuned processor and that HTC’s user interface software is efficient. As we have seen so far from users experience in the past couple of months, even with a faster processor, the Palm Pre and iPhone ran into problems of a complete shut down and screen freezing problems.

So far, we haven’t heard any availability to the U.S. market.  But a quick check at the HTC’s website, the HTC Hero is available through major U.S carriers like Sprint, ATT, T-Mobile, and Verizon.  We’re pretty sure that it will be available through those major carriers.  Sprint and T-mobile is definitely for sure, because they are currently carried HTC products.

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