HTC Hero

I've been using the Hero for the past week and a bit and while initially I was hugely impressed, the novelty soon wore off. There are just too many compromises at this stage of the game; something which I thought HTC would have addressed through seeing the Iphone through its first three generations.

Performance is acceptable and the user interface is streets ahead of any other HTC running Windows Mobile, and while it is nice to have a device to rival the IPhone experience - which I assume is the target market? - the connected environment is still very data hungry.

SMS which gets categorised in threads under a contact's name cannot be individually deleted. Deleting one SMS deletes all correspondence from that person.

Battery life is also poor. I could not get the Hero to last longer than about 15 hours.

Overall, its nice to offer a decent rival in terms of style and interface, but it has a long way to go before it can hold a candle to the Iphone. Me: I have switched back to my E71.  

What we've heard is that an Android 2.1 update with HTC Sense is set for European release mid-March, which is a week or so away. It's not clear when a release for our region will follow though. If you can’t wait that long you could always root and flash your Hero and upgrade it using the Android 2.1 ROM available from alldroid.org. I've got no idea how it would work out for you however and we don't have a Hero to test out ourselves at the moment - so back up all your data.