Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here with a full review for you on the unlocked HTC hero so before I get started with the review let me preface this with this device does not currently support us 3g bands so won't support 3g for AT&T or t-mobile since it's a gsm unlocked device however it will support 3g in parts of Europe and other places in the world so something to keep in mind as you watch this review so when I start my cell phone reviews always talk about call quality since that's most important and phone it can have the best browser the best you I the most rom the most Ram but the call quality sucks the phone is going to be useless so call quality on the HTC hero is actually quite good I tested it using AT&T edge network and it was fantastic call quality was crisp the radio seemed to be very strong i turned 3g off on my personal iphone so i was running just on edge and this one actually had better edge reception sudden the radio that was put in here is quite strong I can't speak for the 3g radio but ed was it was quite good battery life just running on edge was fantastic i could easily go three or four days and that's even with Wi-Fi turned on however i would expect that number to drop significantly if testing could be done over 3g i think if you want to get a full day of use out of this you won't have any trouble but definitely going to want to charge it every night from a design perspective it's kind of a lover aight type thing with the android chin has kind of been known sort of the Jay Leno of smartphones I talked about during my unboxing I actually liked the chin I'm a big fan of smartphones and you know flip phones as well and one of the first phones that I ever had that I loved was the old razor and I liked it because I could push the microphone right up to my face and it wasn't like a slab phone where it was one piece and wouldn't Bend so I do like that what I'm talking to this the microphone is sort of extent closer to my mouth I think that helps improve call quality and sneaking out color quality like I mentioned sounds quietly good so from design standpoint it really is either love it or hate it I personally really do like it build quality seems solid it feels nice in the hand it's not terribly slippery the 5 megapixel autofocus camera is stupendous although I do wish that it had a self-portrait mirror some sort of flash something that I can definitely overlooked because I megapixel pretty high quality not too bad so let's move on to the screen and this is a capacitive touchscreen similar to what you find on the blackberry storm the iphone the mytouch 3g and the original t-mobile g1 meaning there's no squishy feel to it it's quite nice the screen is very responsive I'd say it's much more responsive than the blackberry storms and on par as far as responsiveness with the iphone and the g1 meaning it's very good there is much of a lag which is quite nice at least when using the screen however there is a bit of lag when i try to open multiple programs or you're trying to flow from screen to screen now I know they've been talked to that big fix with upcoming software and firmware updates but this is the shipping rom so this is if you were to buy this right now today this would be what you would have on your device so it's only fair that I review what it shipped with so programs can launch a little bit slowly it feels like it's struggling to keep up with some of the applications and I think that's due to the pretty resource heavy sense UI that's HTC put on this device you might have seen a previous video that I did going over the sense you i'll put a link to it a sidebar so you can check it out there essentially what it is the skin i'm sitting on top of android i'm sort of take some of the Android features and makes them look a little bit better makes them a little user friendly and really adds a little bit of HTC flair you may have seen something similar done with touchflo 3d found on windows mobile devices I'm a big big big fan of the sense UI and I'm encouraged to see what else HTC is going to be doing and I think that the Android platform as a whole is so much potential and I did that be heroes on the first devices to really tap into that customizing potential so overall I think it's a very very good phone however it does fall a victim I think to its own of don't success and the reason the sense UI is so good as because it's Olga processor heavy and resource intensive and because of that resource in sentence activity you're going to get a little bit of somas with the device nothing bad nothing that's gonna prohibit you from using on a regular basis but it's not going to be as snappy as you might be used to on other Android devices however let's say version 2 point 0 comes out with a faster processor is a little more ram a little more rum I think you're going to have a killer phone here I really liked using and I was impressed with the Android Marketplace gmail integration is fantastic up notifications when you slide your finger down that little bar that pops up is you know really nice the multitasking is quite good i like the tent too i gives you a ton of screens you can flip through the widgets that they put on here or very useful it's a really very user-friendly operating system it's also very powerful as well I kind of almost put it in the middle between let's say the iphone operating system as far as finger friendliness and ease of use and Windows Mobile on the other end which is very customizable but not so user-friendly and I think that Android kind of sits right in the middle of that which is a really good place to be so I'm very impressed with what HTC and I guess a Google building the operating system has done so guys in conclusion oh there are a ton of features that I can talk about but it really kind of want to keep this relatively short sound drag on for a 20 minute video but I am very impressed with the HTC hero if you have 3g in your area 3g that rather supports the HTC hero i can recommend it without hesitation note you're going to have a little to slow down from resources but I think that will be addressed with future firmware updates make it a little less intensive if you're trying to import this into the US where you don't have 3g you may want to think twice trying to use three you try to use edge rather on a regular basis is so painful especially having gotten used to fast 3g speeds that's going to come down to personal preference so on a one-to-five scale i can really give this a solid for four and a half stars i think if it had a little faster processor a little more ram a little more wrong we'd be looking at a solid five here this phone is fantastic and I think HTC really really did a nice job anyway guys this is jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo if you want exclusive content check me out a twitter twitter.com / technobuffalo and to learn more about me personally twitter.com / John for lakers anyway hope you enjoyed and I will see you guys in the next video goodbye