My Hero

I promised myself many years ago that when I finished my thesis I would buy myself a PDA. I had my eye on a Palm LifeDrive at one point. But that was a long time ago, and PDAs seem to have gone out of style now – what you have are smartphones instead.

For some reason, I have an irrational aversion to the iPhone. The way they control everything obviously results in good user experiences, but the way they lock up the ability to develop applications for it just annoys me. Even if I liked the phone itself, I wouldn’t be happy knowing it was an Apple product.

I’ve also never been an Nokia person. I’ve been quite happy with my Samsung, but not so keen that I’m even bothering to keep up with their new releases.

Nope, me, I’m a Google fan. So ever since they announced Android, their mobile phone OS, I’ve wanted one. I’ve also been quietly jealous of Stephen’s (Windows Mobile) HTC Touch, so when HTC announced the HTC Magic would be an Android phone, I began scheming to get my hands on one. Since it was a reward though, I made myself wait until after submission, and boy am I glad it took me so long.

During the interval, HTC came out with the Hero, and I fell in love. It has multi-touch goodness like the iPhone and Flash available in the browser. It sports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPRS and all the goodies you’d expect for a price tag of $1k. It also has a completely customisable set of home screens on which you can embed not only shortcuts but running applications that you can easily switch to. To say I was looking forward to it is a gross understatement!

It finally arrived yesterday and I love it even more than I thought I would. The tactile feedback (subtle vibrations) you get when you use it is incredible. The screen is just gorgeous, and every part of the phone has beautiful icons and visual details that just make it delightful to interact with. It’s also very responsive, which I was a bit worried about, having seen people with WM phones that take a long time to react to user input.

Being a Google OS, it naturally hooks up perfectly with my Gmail, GChat and Google calendars, but I didn’t expect it to play so seamlessly with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, the three social networking applications that I actually use! It automatically matched up all my Google & phone contacts with their Facebook and Flickr profiles, so I can see updates from any channel. It also plays nicely with Exchange so I can access my work mail. And, oh yeah, you can send text messages and call people.

I’ve only had it less than a day, so I haven’t even scratched the surface of what I can do. I haven’t even tried out the 5 MP camera, or turned on the GPS, or downloaded any music or video onto it. I’m off now to play with it some more.