Notice the language. Not next month, not even first quarter 2010, but first half. Meaning it could take as long as June. Really guys? [Twitter]

If you want them all on one page, click here.

If we've missed anything or you've got a superior alternative, let us know in the comments, since you vastly outnumber us. By 'us' I mean me.

You'll notice that one of the shots is in landscape mode. Be Geek, who scored the images, suggests that Sense with Android 2.1 will either support accelerometer-controlled landscape rotation, or HTC might have another landscape-slider planned. Time will tell. [Be Geek via SlashGear]

The Droid Eris is very closely related to the Hero, which currently costs $180 at Sprint, sharing mostly the same internals and a slightly redesigned shell. So it's got the same decent 5MP camera, the same 528MHz Qualcomm processor, and the same 3.2-inch capacitive multitouch screen. However, the Hero's 1500 mAh battery has been replaced with a 1300 mAh battery, presumably for thinness's sake—we don't know if it'll reduce battery life noticeably, since HTC says they've made helpful optimizations, but it might.

It'll be Verizon's first phone with HTC's Sense UI, but underneath that pretty interface it's still running Android 1.5, which means you won't be getting any of Android 2.0's sweet new features like turn-by-turn Google Maps. Yet. HTC told me they'll upgrade to 2.0 once they've worked out all the bugs between 2.0 and Sense.

On the plus side, it's thinner and lighter than the Hero, and the four key buttons have been rearranged into a straight line of touch buttons rather than the Hero's square layout. The Hero's blobby design has been changed to a, well, different-looking blobby design. It's even more understated than the Hero, with textured plastic replacing the Hero's brushed aluminum front, and while it isn't an ugly phone, it's also not very eye-catching. However: It feels good in the hand, it's still quite snappy and Sense UI is as slick as ever. At $99 (with 2-year contract, after $100 rebate that comes back as a debit card, like the Droid), with an 8GB microSDHC card included, it's an enticing deal. Press release below. [Verizon]

DROID ERIS by HTC Debuts with Verizon Wireless with HTC Sense Experience and an Ultra-Attractive $99.99 Price

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and BELLEVUE, Wash. – Beginning Nov. 6, DROID ERIS™ by HTC will invade Verizon Wireless Communications Stores across the United States, bringing the power of the Android™ platform and the Verizon Wireless network together. DROID ERIS by HTC combines the popular Android platform with HTC Sense™, a user experience from HTC that makes it easy for customers to stay close to one another and create an individualized mobile experience tailored specifically to their needs.

DROID ERIS by HTC offers customers the opportunity to customize a seven-panel wide home screen with a wide variety of widgets designed to bring the most important information to the surface. DROID ERIS by HTC also includes the innovative "Scenes" feature, which allows customers to create multiple home screens, each with different widgets and shortcuts, to transform DROID ERIS by HTC from a "work" phone to a "play" phone with just a touch of a finger.

DROID ERIS by HTC also organizes interactions by person, which makes it possible to access text messages, e-mails, phone calls and even Flickr streams and Facebook updates from a single contact card.

The unique HTC Sense experience found on DROID ERIS by HTC is supported by an array of the latest mobile features, including:

o 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen and trackball interface

o 5.0 megapixel auto focus camera

o Expandable memory with pre-installed 8 GB microSD™ card (up to 16 GB supported)

o Supports USB mass storage

o Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi and 3.5 mm headset connectivity

o Integrated GPS and a digital compass with a sensor that enables the phone to know what direction it is facing

o Smart dialer for simplified dialing by name, number or initials

o Full HTML browser with Flash Lite capabilities

o Seamless compatibility with Google services like Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search and more

DROID ERIS by HTC will be available in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores and online at www.verizonwireless.com on Friday, Nov. 6, for $99.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement on a voice plan with an e-mail feature or e-mail plan. Customers will receive the mail-in rebate in the form of a debit card; upon receipt, customers may use the card as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted.

For more information about Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

Kinda Like the Old One

The GoPro Hero HD is squarely based off the old model. It has the same mounting system, case, physical shape and user interface. It is so similar, I suggest you read the original short review I did and then come back here for the low down on what makes this one better. Here's the link. Or you could just take these basic points as a foundation.
• Awesome mounts for everything.
• Meant to be semi cheap so you don't sweat it, yet capable.
• It has a 170 degree field of vision and the case makes it waterproof to 100 feet. Very rugged.
• Two buttons for controlling the basic UI. Shoot, toggle modes. The UI is so rudimentary you'll often forget how to use it, but all you need to do is turn it on and shoot.
• There's no native LCD for viewing replays.
• It's not tiny.

The Video is Now HD

Instead of the paltry 512x384, the $270 camera with surf mount has several modes, most HD. On the silky smooth 60 frame per second mode there are standard definition resolutions of 848x480 or HD at 720p/1280x720. Both are 16:9 ratio, which is recommended only for motorsports or other activites where you're not trying to catch yourself in frame standing up. The 60 frames per second modes are noticeably smoother in normal playback but they're meant to also look better if you slow down the frame rate playback for slow motion in your favorite video editor. The grain was noticeably worse when using 60FPS indoors, but not a deal breaker.

In 30 frame per seconds, there are modes for 720p again, but also a 1280x960 which is 4:3 high def. That's the default and I used that for surfing which is (usually, if you do it right) something you do while standing. The 1080p mode is 16:9, and 30 frames per second but limits the field of vision from 170 to 127 degrees. Again, the 16:9 modes are used less than you'd expect in sports shots. There's also a center weighted mode for exposing the road when shooting from inside a car, and leaving the dashboard underexposed properly.

The bottom line is that this new camera is in HD. That's the big improvement

Quality

This is a still of the movie at full res, not the actual 5MP stills.
First, watch the movies the guys at the company produced here. Then watch my shitty one filled with shitty surfing. Colors were a little washy/green but the ocean and the sky together, with the lens collecting droplets, well, that isn't an idea situation. Watch it for yourself and form your own conclusions, but note the reflections off the water which will inform you of pretty decent autoexposure and sharpness. It's a vast improvement over other sports cams and the standard def version. Oh a little thing held over from the last generation that isn't a ding or a plus: the 170-degree angle is great for reducing apparent vibration and for making sure what you want in shot is in the frame, but has the unfortunate side effect of making things like waves and jumps and other otherwise impressive looking things seem smaller.

Storage Capacity

Average recording times:
1080p: 12 min/GB
960p: 14 min/GB
720p: 16min/GB @30fps; 11 min/GB @ 60fps

GoPro recommended you use fast SDHC cards to save battery life. And that on a 32GB card you can get almost 6 hours of recordings, although you'd be constrained by battery life. Oh one annoyance — every time you clear the card, the files are named from 001, 002, again. So if you copy them over to the same location, they'll ask you if you want to overwrite. I wish the camera kept its file name numbers in series.

Battery Life

The other big change is that instead of being powered by a pair of AAAs, GoPro jammed a 1100Mah 3.7 volt battery in the case. I did not do a full run down test, but shooting 51 minutes of video didn't reduce the charge one notch; GoPro estimates you can get 2.5 hours of battery life from the camera in normal climates, regardless of the definition of video you're shooting. The old model died quickly in the cold if you weren't using rechargeables but this camera's housing retains a bit more heat making it better for the winter. You charge it by USB. Unfortunately you can't charge it while doing a USB transfer, yet. They hope to fix this by firmware later.

Sound

Stills

I didn't test this mode, but GoPro claims the 5MP shots are better due to better processing. There are several still modes, as before: Single shot, triple shot that takes three shots over 2 seconds and a time lapse mode that can be set to record a shot every 2, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds. And a 10 second delay timer. For me, this is not why you get a sports camera.

The Surf Mount, in Particular

Oh it's 3M double sticky and it seems to hold up just fine. You clean your board of wax and then use a bit of rubbing alcohol to apply it. Let it settle overnight. To get it off (permanently) you use a hair dryer, which sounds a bit scary when it comes to something nice and fiberglass, but what do I know? (That's why I put this one on a pop out longboard.

The Future

Another big but so far not useful thing on the new camera is the expansion port. they plan on offering a bigger back door for the case, so you can fit in an external LCD screen for replays or an extra battery pack. I like the idea. I'm thinking they could probably go ahead and work on making the camera smaller even if it costs a bit more, in the next generation, though. I like GoPro enough to use it, even though gadgets on the mountain or in the surf piss me off by way of distraction. Now that they've got mounts, higher resolutions and battery endurance covered, I think making it even smaller is the next step to making it more enjoyable.

High def modes

Best mounting options in the business

Rugged, yet affordable case good for bumps and waterproof to 100 feet

Wide angle lens captures 170 degrees of motion so you fit in the shot and vibration is dampened.

Smooth 60 frames per second great for action shots

Relatively cheap for what you get

Case kind of biggish
[GoPro]

I said the original version of the Hero was "daring" and "ambitious, but tragically flawed." (Read that review first.) If it was Batman, the Sprint Hero is Superman: Nearly perfect, but goddamn boring. HTC has taken the striking, aggressive angles of Hero v1 and flattened them out into a rounded, far more generic looking phone. It's not hideous, but it's lost its power to captivate as a geek fetish object.

Everything else about this version of the phone is better: The software, which is exactly the same content-wise on the HTC front as the first Hero, has been seriously optimized, so it doesn't suffer show-stopping slowdowns anymore, even with a full set of HTC's widgets running. Speedwise overall, it's about the same as a G1 running the stock Android OS—bearable, but not exactly a blitzkrieg. (The iPhone 3GS is way faster, to compare.)

Interestingly, while HTC says the hardware is exactly the same—except for the CDMA chips to get it on Sprint's network, obviously—there are some differences we noticed. The screen, while the same size, actually seems to look a little bit better on the Sprint model. Not worlds better, but if you look close, the difference is there. The colors are a bit more saturated, the viewing angle a little wider. Also, it's got a bigger battery: 1500 mAh, compared to 1350 before. The bigger trackball is a plus, since it takes less thumb movement to get around, meaning less carpal tunnel problems in the future.

And, while it's very possibly firmware at play, the 5MP camera shoots, on average, about twice as fast as the first Hero, and the metering in low light seems to be way better, too. Both of the shots above were taken using the same settings on each phone, with the old Hero running the original firmware it shipped with. (Still not great, but better.)

The only real new bits, software-wise, are a handful of pretty standard Sprint apps: Sprint Navigation, NFL Mobile Live, Nascar, SprintTV and Device Self-Service. Everything else, from the keyboard to the multitouch browser looks the same, just faster (and in the case of Flash in the browser, more reliable too, since we could actually watch videos this time around). Which is dandy, since HTC's Sense UI, with its multiple desktops, social networking integration, widgets for weather, Twitter, settings and other enhancements, made Android great.

The real power of this Hero is that the best Android phone you can buy—it's everything good we said about the first Hero, but with our biggest complaint, speed, fixed—is on Sprint and its solid 3G network—making it the first U.S. Android phone outside of T-Mobile—and it's $180. Plus, the required Sprint Everything now has free calling to any mobile number, not a bad perk.

The princess might not kiss this Hero because it's kinda ugly, but at least it'll actually get the job done now. If you've been waiting for an Android phone not on T-Mobile, or one that's finally just about ready for primetime, this is it.

HTC's Sense UI makes Android way more usable and adds useful features like social networking integration

Almost all of original Hero's problems are fixed

Android kinks, like no easy way to update all apps, meh store interface aren't polished over

Jumbo trackball and more logical front placement marred by cheap front plate

Hardware blobbified into something boring and dull, not daring and awesome

Still not as polished as iPhone or Palm Pre
[Sprint]

Sure that is more than Guitar Hero for Wii (including guitar and drums) will cost you but for those that love to have the best for rocking, the Logitech stuff is made from the best stuff on earth (just like Snapple). The wireless guitar has a maple neck, rosewood fingerboard and metal frets. Even the wireless controller has a white finish with a glossy-black pick guard.

Like those for the PS3, the Logitech Wireless Drum Controller for Wii has got three drum pads and two cymbals. You can adjust them to your liking and there is a recessed-rim around the pads that help avoid accidental rim shots. And haven't you always wanted a kick pedal made of stainless steel. The Wii remote fits into the panel on the drum set (and into a slot on the back of the guitar).

Logitech also released a wireless drum set for the Xbox360 which is pretty much the same as the one for the Wii without the opening for the remote. Same pricing and all.

For those watching the cash, you can always find the closest pub with a Rock Band jam session and totally mooch on their instruments. [Logitech]

They've also confirmed that they're the only non-Sprint-store retailer that'll have the Hero. Aaaaand Sprint stores will be handing you a rebate form to take home, so, well, you've got a pretty obvious choice to make here.

Sprint's Hero is a bit blobbier than HTC's original, but it also looks less chinny—an HTC design quirk that's starting to get on some people's nerves—and at any rate, there isn't a whole lot of the Hero that isn't the screen, so aside from the shuffled hard buttons, this redesign shouldn't change too much in terms of usability.

Wisely, Sprint left the Hero's guts—hardware and software—intact. That's the same 3.2-inch multitouch capacitive screen, the same 5-megapixel camera, the same microSD slot (Sprint throws in a 2GB card for free), the same 3.5mm headphone jack, the same multitouch browser (no mention of Flash support though) and the same Sense UI, which converts Android into something unexpectedly beautiful, but tragically sluggish. And since this thing obviously supports EV-DO, we'll finally get to play with it on proper 3G.

Whether or not they'll be able to load HTC's latest Sense update—the one that fixes basically every complaint we had with the original Hero, including slowdown—before the handsets ship is still up in the air, but in any case, it's coming eventually.

The $180 price assumes a 2-year agreement at a minimum of $70 a month, and that you've got the initiative to mail in a rebate form, though just like with the Pre, there's a good chance retailers like Best Buy'll just take care of this for you. Like the Pre, the Hero is eligible for the $100 Everything plan, which is just about the best deal going for obnoxiously talky/texty types.

So, uh, Sprint's kind of killing it these days, no? They've got their iron grip on the only two smartphone underdogs anyone really cares about: the first of which made all the other carriers' Palm phones look pathetically lame; and the second of which looks like it'll sucker-punch a complacent T-Mobile right off its Android throne—especially considering the fact that Sprint's priced this thing a few bucks below T-Mo's categorically less good MyTouch 3G. It may have taken a year, but this whole Android thing is finally getting interesting.

The best bits of press release below. [Sprint]

The Innovation and Openness of a True Mobile Internet Experience Coming Soon to America's Most Dependable 3G Network from Sprint on HTC Hero with Google

Sprint's first device with the Android™ platform available Oct. 11;
Pre-register for HTC Hero today at www.sprint.com/hero

OVERLAND PARK, Kan., and BELLEVUE, Wash. – Sept. 3, 2009 – Sprint (NYSE: S) and HTC Corporation today announced the upcoming arrival of the first wireless device offering the combination of the open and innovative Android platform with the high-speed connectivity of America's most dependable 3G network1 (EVDO Rev. A), HTC Hero™ with Google™. Offering a rich mobile Internet experience, the much-anticipated HTC Hero offers synchronization for built-in Google mobile services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, and YouTube™ as well as access to thousands of applications built on the Android platform.

Beginning on Oct. 11, customers will be able to purchase HTC Hero through all Sprint retail channels including Web (www.sprint.com), Telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) and our national retail partner Best Buy for $179.99 (excluding taxes) after a $50 instant savings and a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Pre-registration begins today at www.sprint.com/hero.

Access to countless applications
As a charter member of the Open Handset Alliance™, Sprint is actively engaged with the Android community. Through Android Market™, HTC Hero users have access to more than 8,000 useful applications, widgets and fun games to download and install on their phone, with many more to come. Thousands of developers are working to introduce new Android applications every day.

Intuitive, user-focused and fun
HTC Hero is the first U.S. device to feature HTC Sense, an intuitive experience that was built with a guiding philosophy to put people at the center and allows the device to be completely customized to the wants and needs of the user. The device's seven-panel wide home screen can be populated with customizable widgets that bring information to the surface.

HTC Hero users can easily create and switch between Scenes to reflect different moments or roles in their lives, such as work, social, travel and play. For example, a work Scene can be easily set up to include stock updates, work email and calendar, a play Scene could have music, weather, and a Twitter feed or a travel Scene could offer instant access to the local time, weather and maps.

Industry-leading features
HTC Hero features an integrated 5.0 MP camera and camcorder. It also offers easy access to personal and business e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging through POP, IMAP, and Exchange Active Sync accounts.

HTC Hero is a full-featured smartphone with Wi-Fi capability, a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with pinch-to-zoom capability and a fingerprint resistant coating, integrated GPS navigation, and trackball navigation. Additional features include:
Stereo Bluetooth® 2.0 Wireless technology
accelerometer, light sensor and home screen widgets for improved usability
multimedia capable with microSD slot (32GB capable, 2GB included)
Sprint TV® with live and on-demand programming
NFL Mobile Live and NASCAR Sprint Cup MobileSM
easy access to social networking sites, including Facebook®, Flickr® and Twitter
visual voice mail for quick and easy access to specific voice mail messages

HTC Hero requires activation on a pricing plan offering unlimited data. Sprint's Simply EverythingSM plan provides unlimited nationwide calling, texting, e-mail, social networking, Web browsing, GPS navigation, Sprint TV, streaming music, NFL Mobile Live, NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile and much more for only $99.99 per month. That's a savings of $1,200 over two years vs. a comparable AT&T iPhone® plan2. Sprint Everything Data plans with unlimited messaging and data start at just $69.99 for 450 minutes with unlimited night and weekend calling starting at 7 p.m. (All price plans exclude Sprint surcharges and taxes.)

From the review in July:

The Hero is flawed, though, in ways that are truly depressing in light of its potential and how much it does get truly right: It's often sluggish, which absolutely destroys the user experience. It's a particularly unfortunate affliction as the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre emphasize speed, making the Hero feel that much slower.

This was all but a dealbreaker, this frustrating slowness. But! Paul at MoDaCo has a preview of HTC's forthcoming update, which was vaguely announced yesterday, without much mention of what it would actually do. Now we know: It's about speed. And as someone who's been using a Hero for a few weeks now, this video makes by fingers tingle, ever so slightly.

Best of all, this update, due in a few weeks, looks like it could be ready before the Hero even shows up on whatever US carrier it's destined for, by which I mean, Sprint. Now, excuse me while I go remove the asterisk from that "Best Android Phone Ever" title. [MoDaCo via Slashgear]

Also intriguing is CDMA support—as in the kind of network that Sprint runs—adding on to Sprint's Dan Hesse remark that Android is coming to Sprint this year and rumors that it'll be Hero. You can see a lot of the new Donut features in action here, like universal search, in this video from the Google I/O conference.

Folks at XDA are working on a build that'll run on the Dream (G1), though it works in the emulator right now. [XDA Developers, Images via XDA's cyanogen, Thanks Will!]

Which is not a great sign for Windows Mobile, since it used to be tied up exceptionally tightly with HTC as a brand. Windows Mobile 6.5 just can't come fast enough. [Digitimes]

The HTC Hero is as much a champion for HTC as it is for Android: It's the first genuinely gorgeous piece of hardware running Android, and the Sense UI is the most ambitious, polished software HTC has developed yet. It doesn't have a carrier in the US yet, but as Android's headline phone, it makes the just-launched myTouch 3G on T-Mobile a lame duck. It's the most important Android phone to date, since it's the first one to really give us at peek at just what Android is capable of.

The Hero is flawed, though, in ways that are truly depressing in light of its potential and how much it does get truly right: It's often sluggish, which absolutely destroys the user experience. It's a particularly unfortunate affliction as the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre emphasize speed, making the Hero feel that much slower.

Design and Build
It's daring. While phone design lately has been all about shedding hard lines and angles to form slick, nearly shapeless blobs, the Hero is strikingly angular, like a retrofuturistic sci-fi communicator. You almost expect to see Kirk's mug when you turn it on. Its chin juts out with more force than the Dream (aka G1) and Magic (aka Ion, myTouch 3G) combined. Which is appropriate, since the entire phone feels rugged, durable and manly, like an action star that breaks concrete and bad guys and Hot Pockets with his jaw.

The angles don't just give it a sense of Star Trek machismo—they're what make it so comfortable to hold. While the basic silhouette of the phone resembles the Dream and Magic, the left and right edges taper from the display's bezel at about a 45-degree angle, giving your hand a serendipitously positioned surface to grasp.

Compared to the Hero, the Dream feels bulky and clumsy, while the Magic feels like a cheap plastic toy (this is partly because the Hero weighs more, about as much as the iPhone). The back on the darker phones is rubberized, more so than the Dream, so rubbing it a lot makes your hand feel weird, sweaty and dried out at the same time. (The magical Teflon coating is reserved for the white phones.)

On the face, there are six buttons—the same set as the Magic, though back and search are now part of the same rocker button, set to the right of the more-pronounced trackball. I would've preferred the back and search buttons split apart, both for functional (it's easy to press search when you mean back) and aesthetic (read: symmetry) reasons.

Despite its more aggressive shape, Hero is noticeably thinner than the Dream, and ever-so-slightly thicker than the iPhone, though it's a bit shorter and narrower. The Hero feels more secure and natural in your hand than both, though less comfortable in your pocket, because its fat jaw makes people think you're happy to see them, or that you've shrunk Jay Leno and shoved him in your pocket just to give Conan a break.

HARDWARE
Display
If you've used the Dream or Magic, the 480x320 screen will seem like an old friend. It's still really good. Next to the Dream, while the brightness is the same, it's very obviously warmer, however—like on the same order of magnitude as the jump from the original iPhone to the iPhone 3G. The color temperature seems fairly close to the iPhone 3G, actually, maybe even warmer, though it's hard to tell precisely since the iPhone 3G's screen is a tiny bit brighter.

It is a multitouch display, as the other Android phones, but this time it's actually enabled. The first time you pinch to zoom out in the browser, the feeling is both shock and matter-of-factness: "Holy crap, multitouch, this is so much better than those stupid plus and minus buttons," followed by "of course this is better, where the hell was it before?" While the touch accuracy is very good, I would rate it slightly behind the iPhone and Pre, and equal to or slightly better than the Dream. However, I suspect this is at least partially a software issue. It is good enough to type confidently, at any rate.

Camera and Photos
Is there a way to disable autofocus? It's the Achilles' Heel of the Hero's biggest spec upgrade over the Dream and Magic: the 5-megapixel camera. It's maddeningly slow, even with brightly lit subjects. I mean like, up to four seconds after I push the trackball to take the shot kind of slow. Which, by the way, when you're holding the sideways like a point-and-shoot is about as a dumb an input method for snapping a photo as the iPhone's touch button, since the natural inclination to use your thumb is met by the scary reality of the phone slipping from your hand if you're trying to naturally shoot one-handed, unless you've got it in a awkward death grip between your thumb fat and index finger. Just add a dedicated camera button to the side that's natural easy to click and that instantly activates the camera app, like if I were shooting with a real camera, 'kay? Thanks.

Back to the actual photos. They're a mixed bag. While some of the low light shots are somewhat impressive for how much you can actually see, and certainly better than what the Dream takes—at night in the rain, and of the delicious pizza at Keste—the daylight shots range from thoroughly mediocre to shockingly bad. Check out the blacks in that street sign. Mosey on over to some samples from the N97's 5MP shooter and the iPhone 3GS's camera to see why these are so disappointing. Also, um, where the hell is some flash? Not even asking for crazy Xenon strobe lights, some LED action would be just fine.

Video isn't a much happier story—the max resolution is 352x288, though the default is 340x280, which we shot sample video below in. Motion looks pixels running through time warp blender.

All in all, the camera, which should've been one of the biggest points over the previous Android phones, falls flat, like if someone had a tummy tuck, and instead of coming out all skinny, they had a bunch of loose skin hanging around. But the software is fair enough—you can adjust settings like white balance and exposure, and it takes just two clicks to upload a photo to Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, or send via email or MMS. The photo album app is slick enough, and features another guest appearance by multitouch, whose zoom gestures suspiciously match the iPhone's.

Guts and Miscellany
Powering Hero is 528MHz processor virtually identical to one inside the Dream and Magic, and it has the same 288MB of RAM as the latter. Frankly, it's not enough. At least not with HTC's custom user interface, more than a couple of widgets and an application running. Killing all of the widgets—especially the Twitter one—does help. But moments where the phone does nothing for a second or three after you've tapped, flicked or swiped happens far too often. Which is to say, a lot, especially after it's been on for more than an hour. Fast, totally smooth transition animations are infrequent enough I'm pleasantly surprised when a desktop screen immediately and gracefully slides to the left or right without a hiccup. It's frustrating.

But holy mother of god, there's a 3.5mm jack. And it's not even a cruel joke where you need a special dongle to make your headphones fit, even—they just work. You have to pop off the back cover to get to the microSDHC card slot, but you don't pull out the 1350mAh battery to get to it, at least. There's no futile plastic cover hiding the mini USB port, which retains HTC's typical funky shape. Speaking of the battery, HTC claims it will net you 420 minutes of talk time over 3G, though we never got the chance to test its 3G capabilities (or deficiencies)—this phone is a final product for the UK, but it doesn't run on the 3G bands used by AT&T or T-Mobile.

To roll all of that up into a pair of bullet points: It's fantastically designed and sculpted, amending many of HTC's past sins, but it needs more processing powah and a better camera.

SOFTWARE
This is not a Google phone. Android is the hidden golem running stuff behind the scenes, but the Hero is HTC's show. The scope of Sense UI is remarkable—it goes way, way beyond a skin, and shows just how radically Android can be transformed.

The stock Android user interface isn't ugly, but it is wildly inconsistent—text messaging looks completely different from mail, which is nothing like Google Talk, and settings and the Android Marketplace have another look entirely. HTC's user interface has a (mostly) consistent look across the phone. Most of the oh-so-glossy interface looks like it was molded out of plastic, with lots of black and the occasional shock of neon green, plenty of gradients, and no corner that isn't rounded. Universally, text is white on black in menus, and black on white within apps. It looks polished, if philosophically somewhat less sophisticated than the webOS's user interface.

As long the phone's not bogged down by more than a couple widgets, it surprisingly does move slightly but perceptibly faster than the standard Android interface on the Dream. The main apps list pops up quicker, apps launch a smidge sooner, desktop spaces slide from one to the other with just as much snap. Unfortunately, the limit's pretty thin—if you run one of the widget-heavy scenes (more below) and have an app in the background, the performance benefit dies with a whimper. But otherwise, what HTC's done here borders on incredible, especially when you consider the garbage they were crapping out just over a year ago.

Desktop and Widgets
The way you unlock the phone is weirdly emblematic of the Hero's UI, and how it at times makes expected behaviors an unpleasant surprise: If simply you stare at the screen, it's not immediately obvious how'd you go about unlocking it. Fumbling around the screen for a few seconds with your fingers, you'd probably wind up tapping the curved steel bar that cuts across the screen 2/3 of the way down. It'll tell you to drag the screen down. But if you slide your finger down from the top of the screen, nothing will happen. Not until you reach the bar, at which point the lock screen will slide away like a window shade in reverse.

Or you could've just pressed the menu button, which the standard Android would helpfully tell you. Oops.

Like Android, HTC's interface has multiple desktop spaces—but like, seven of them. On the bottom is a persistent HUD with one-touch access to the phone app and main app list, which works pretty damn well as an interface convention. There are widgets, oh what widgets. Besides the stock Android ones, HTC supplies 15 categories of their own. They're pretty, and useful, for the most part. There's the familiar HTC flip clock with local weather, naturally.

But the interesting widgets are ones like the Twitter widget, so you can read recent tweets or update your status without opening up the Peep Twitter app (more on that in a bit); messaging preview, with a rotating carousel of recent text messages; a favorite contacts list; and a handful of settings widgets that give you instant access to Wi-Fi and other settings toggles. Some of them are unexpectedly limited, as an example of the bad surprises mentioned above: You can't actually send a text message from the preview widget, though you can tweet from the Twitter one.

More than that, the Hero has multiple desktop themes, with different backgrounds, widgets and shortcuts, called Scenes. It comes with nine six, like this "work" scene packed with a pair of clocks and a calendar, and over to the side, email and stock widgets (since everybody who works looks at stocks right?). You can save custom configurations as well. It takes a couple seconds to switch from one scene to another, but being able to completely rearrange your entire desktop almost instantly around whatever you're doing at the time is incredibly awesome, especially if you're trying to maintain some kind of work/life balance. The problem is that if you load up a scene with a ton of widgets, it kicks the phone's performance in the nuts, so you're better off running lean.

Smartly, HTC left Android's brilliant dropdown window shade alone for background notifications, so it still does its thing, same as always. But with all of the other work HTC did, it actually makes us want the universal search coming in Donut that much more.

Contacts and Social Networking
The Hero pulls one hell of a Palm Pre Synergy turn with the way it handles your contacts and social networking. When you turn on the phone for the first time, it asks for your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr logins—after your Google one, natch. But rather than dump all 900 of your Facebook friends into your contacts like the Pre, it keeps the friends list in the background for when you need it. Instead, you have to link up Facebook and Flickr profiles to your contacts manually. This is a pain, for sure, but the Facebook connection here is deeper and more useful than what the Palm Pre makes of it.

As you scroll down your contacts list—which has the familiar iPhone whiplash when you hit the bottom—if you've linked someone to a Facebook profile, under their name it'll show their most recent status update from Facebook. A contact's page is divided into six tabs: The main contact tab, with their numbers, email address, photo and birthday (the latter two are pulled down via Facebook); text messages, with all of your SMS conversations; email history (from HTC's app only); their recent Facebook updates and events; albums, with their Facebook and Flickr photo albums, and at the end, call history (which shows you what's really important here). It's not the single flowing stream of conversation across multiple networks that the Pre offers—it's more like an organized collection that manages to be in some ways, both more functional and oddly less fulfilling than the Pre's Synergy. What's utterly bizarre is that it doesn't just fail to integrate any kind of IM—even Google Talk—or Twitter status into the profiles, it's completely blind to anything going on with actual Google apps, even Gmail. Maybe HTC's software isn't allowed to access that data on the phone, but it's a pretty stunning gap in what's otherwise the best attempt since the Pre to pool the vast amount of social data and connections you likely have into a single place.

Also somewhat strange is that while you can access your Facebook friends list to assign them to contacts and update your status from your own contact page, there's not an actual Facebook app to do any real Facebooking. Same deal with Flickr, though it's easy enough to upload photos and see your friends albums. It's made more mystifying by the fact that HTC includes its own Twitter app, called Peep, which is built on top of Twidroid. HTC's app is more stripped down, but it's also prettier and easier to use, even if it still isn't quite as nice as some of the better iPhone apps. The Twitter widget for the desktop is slick, if a bit slow, both to refresh and react. But hey, at least you don't have to fire up Peep every time you wanna kill 30 seconds checking out Twitter.

Browser
The other major upgrade HTC made to Android is the browser: They've tacked on not just Flash support, but multitouch. Now that Palm's whipped its balls out, I guess nobody's afraid of Apple anymore, since the gestures are identical to the iPhone's: Pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in. The implementation is jankier—zooming sometimes happens really really fast, so you're nowhere near the zoom level you wanted, and sometimes it drags. But it still beats clicking stupid little plus and minus buttons. Flash support is more miss than hit—don't expect to play Hulu videos (crash), or YouTube videos (they just won't play, no matter how many times you mash the giant play button). Looks like we'll have to wait for that more official implementation this fall, for a real solution. But, uh, at least something is there? Regardless, the core WebKit browser is still one of the best mobile browsers around.

Keyboard and Text Input
While HTC only puffed up the keys a tiny bit, the keyboard is noticeably more comfortable and accurate than the standard Android soft keyboard on the Dream and Magic, and while it's closer than ever, it's still not quite as good the iPhone's. (But it's still pretty damn good.) They managed to carve out some extra room by shrinking the number/symbol key, which was made feasible by giving you an alternate way to type numbers and symbols. Long pressing a key acts like shift—the floating pop-up from the key will turn into its alternate symbol or number. I've gotten fast enough with the iPhone's method of alternate key input that I felt slowed down every time I stopped to punch in a number, but this actually seems more logical for beginning touchscreen typists.

My biggest gripe about text input is the autocomplete bar that hovers above what you're typing, constantly offering suggestions, ready to leap into action at a tap of the space bar. As far as word prediction and correction goes, it's pretty decent—neither as sentient or aggressive as the iPhone—but the bar is totally obnoxious. I can't help but think "get the hell out of my way" most of the time I'm typing, even as it's helping me type better, faster. Isn't there a way to make it more subtle?

For the uninitiated, copy and paste works like this—put your finger down on the text until a context menu pops up. Tap "select text" and then using the trackball to highlight whatever text you wanna copy. Push the trackball, and it'll let you copy it. Long-press the screen or hold down the trackball, and you can paste. Not quite as fast as the iPhone's implementation, but more elegant than the Pre's finger gymnastics.

Music and Video
Sweet christ, Android needs a media syncing application. Dragging and dropping just doesn't cut it now that the Hero has a real live 3.5mm headphone jack, especially given the awkward way you have to mount and unmount the SD card when you plug into your computer. Fix that crap, seriously. Otherwise, the music player listicle interface cribs a bit more liberally from the iPhone's than the stock Android UI, but otherwise it's pretty standard, and all of our MP3s and album art imported and played just dandy.

Video is another issue. HTC boasts that Hero natively supports MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and Windows Media Video 9. We couldn't get WMV files to play it all, and the playback quality of the MPEG-4 and H.264 videos we dropped onto it were asstastic—choppy and full of artifacts. Maybe we just done did it wrong, but that just shows why it needs a media syncing application. Also, it's not immediately apparent that to play videos, you have to go into the albums app, where it stores your photos. A dedicated video app would be nice (yes, we know there are ones available in the Android Market, but if HTC's gonna go all out, they should go all out).

Messaging and Mail
Speaking of typing on the toilet (or just typing), HTC replaces the default email client—not Gmail, that's still there and the same as always—with their own, which supports IMAP4, POP3 and, oh yeah, Exchange out of the box. It's a pretty decent email app—full HTML support and the like—but it also has a threaded conversation view and lets you separate attachments. Messaging is also skinned, though the changes are more subtle—it uses HTC's universal scheme with rounded corners and black text on white, but the threaded conversation view also uses contacts' photos as icons, so it looks more like an IM conversation.

Phone
I find the standard Android dialer interface to be less confusing, honestly, since it's immediately obvious how to get to your call log, favorites, and contacts, though the Hero does have sleeker dial buttons. (With the Hero's you have to type menu.) When you start dialing a number manually, it starts pulling up contacts that match the number, which is a neat touch. Call quality is better than average—not knock-you-on-your-ass loud and clear, but it's good.

Google Apps and Android Marketplace
The Google apps, as far as we can tell are the exact same as they are on the other Android phones: Maps is Maps, Gmail's Gmail, Google Talk is the same, you get the idea. They're all still great. The Marketplace has gotten way more mature over the last 8 months—enough what we run a monthly roundup of Android apps that's increasingly packed with bigger names in software. In short, 9 months after launch, the Marketplace is very nearly ready for the masses.

Conclusion
The Hero is a really good phone. It might even be a great phone. HTC's done a fairly remarkable job transforming Android's rough surface into something slick and glossy and palatable while integrating social networking features that go beyond any phone but the Pre. And the Android Marketplace has come into its own, so that as a platform, Android easily stands up there with the other major smartphone OSes.

The biggest drag on the phone is that it, well, drags way too often, smooshing the other solid user experience into a goopy ooze of the awesome sauce that you hoped the Hero would be. It's like finding out that Arnold is actually a 110-pound French guy in an inflatable suit. The performance issues are persistent enough to tarnish what HTC has done, especially considering that Android already feels slower than the iPhone 3GS. Which adds to the feeling that in the end, as much spitshine as HTC has rubbed all over Android, it's still not quite as polished or elegant as the iPhone or Palm Pre. With two companies compromising on the interface, perhaps it never can be.

That said, the Hero is still the best Android phone yet. The phone's design, revamped interface and features like totally integrated profiles carry it over the rest of the (admittedly small) Android pack, and make it a real alternative to the iPhone and Pre, even if it doesn't quite rise to meet the occasion. It sets a new standard for the overall Android package by showing the potential for future phones with beautiful, powerful hardware and awesome custom interfaces, even if it falls somewhat short of brilliance itself.

He also says that there are three "classes" of Android phone. Obviously HTC isn't happy with Android as is, and will skin it like they do with Windows mobile.

There are three classes of Android phone: the first was the Google-branded phones, the G1 and Magic; the Hero is the first in the second category, in which we added our own customised UI, but we didn't change everything because they did some great things, like push email, integrating Google Maps etc; and the third is the quick and dirty Chinese knockoffs that won't work with Marketplace. They're Linux phones, really.

[T3]