HTC Hero Interface
The HTC Hero has received some impressive reviews since its release. Both industry professionals and users have been bowled over by the simplicity of the HTC Hero interface and the power that it puts at your fingertips. There have been many touch screen phones released in recent times and yet few have been able to compete with the iPhone in terms of user friendliness. The HTC Hero interface aims to change all of that.
The first thing that you notice about the interface is just how customisable the whole experience can be. This is thanks to HTC’s own Sense programming, which has taken the Google Android operating platform and turned it into something that most users will love. Using the large touch screen you can choose and manipulate every aspect of the HTC Hero interface to suit your needs. This is helped tremendously by the multi-touch sensitive capacitive screen, which is very similar to the one found on the iPhone.
The Sense interface gives you access to a total of seven different home screens, each of which can be edited to suit your own preferences. The idea is that you can add all of your favourite widgets and applications to multiple different home screens and eventually end up with a different home screen for different day to day situations. For example, you might set up your work home screen to include your email application and a widget to let you know about the weather. For the commute you might set up a home screen that gives you access to all your favourite games or a live news feed to keep you entertained and informed. When you are at home relaxing, you might dedicate a home screen to the Twitter application that keeps you updated with live tweets as they happen and allows you to reply without having to open up the application in a separate window.
Each one of these home screens is designed to reflect your mood or situation. HTC call these customisable home screens and themes ’scenes’. There is no doubt that this is the strongest function that the HTC Hero has to offer and it works far better than the home screen system and interface used by previous HTC Android phones as well as solutions offered by the competition.
Although the HTC Hero interface allows you to compartmentalise the many different areas of your life, it is also great at merging certain useful functions. For example it is able to blend your Gmail contact list with your Facebook friends’ information. This means that contact information for each person you know will be easily accessible, provided you have a fairly organised Gmail address book before you begin the syncing process. A further benefit is that pictures of your friends are pulled from their Facebook or Flikr accounts and used as their contact pictures: you do not have to lift a finger as the whole process happens automatically.
One of the best aspects of the HTC Hero interface is the on-screen keyboard. Whether in landscape or portrait mode you can use a full QWERTY layout or revert to a numeric substitute if you wish. The Hero has a seemingly psychic predicative text function and the touch screen is responsive and natural to use for typing even long messages and emails.
The HTC Hero interface and the sheer degree of customisation on offer may cause some to worry that they will never be able to form enough coherent ’scenes’ to get the most out of the handset. Luckily HTC supplies the Hero ready-to-go straight from the box so if you do not feel up to the task, you need never change a thing and yet still enjoy a hugely rewarding mobile experience.
