HTC Hero. Enter the factorium
The HTC Hero is the first phone to be carrying HTC Sense, the new User Interface that all HTC phones in the foreseeable future will be launching with. However, there are a few things we’d like to point out about it before you get too excited. You may have already got excited by looking at sites such as the official product overview, or by coming across HTC Hero review‘s like this, but we want to temper all that excitement with a little fact-based work. Yes, we really are that sad, and this is indeed how we get our kicks. That’s why you love us.
Fact number 1 – The HTC Sense is a User Interface, a skin, if you like, put over the Android OS that supplies a little jazz, a modicum of razzmatazz. It is not, however much HTC might try and insist, some kind of revolutionary new thing called a ‘User Experience.’ Calling it so just proves a little how HTC are trying a little to hard to generate buzz for the HTC Hero.
Fact number 2 – Most of the features in this so-called spiffingly new User Interface have been seen elsewhere, either on other manufacturer’s phone, or even on HTC’s own handsets. The ‘Stay Close’ group of features, for example, are basically the same as the Nokia 5800′s Contacts Bar. The ‘Make it Mine’ set of features is simply the terribly groundbreaking ability to… wait for it… customise your homescreen and other menus. Oooohhhh.
Fact number 3 – According to some marketing buff or other who’s name we can’t even be bothered to copy, “Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use, leaving them saying, it just makes sense.” No, it isn’t. No, it doesn’t. It’s a decent enough User Interface, that leaves us saying, it’s a decent enough User Interface.
So there we have it. Your daily dose of fact. Straight from us to you, for free, with love. Don’t get us wrong, this is a pretty decent phone. Just nothing revolutionary. Out sometime very soon.