Unveiled yesterday, the HTC Hero is the newest phone from the HTC stable, and it’s easily the best specced Android phone they’ve yet made. However, another hands-on has popped up onto Engadget Mobile today, and it seems like the phone may actually be even more awesome than even I thought it was yesterday (and I really liked it, as well).
Let’s start with something I did mention yesterday: Flash. Yup, the HTC Hero has got full Flash support, meaning you can finally do things like watching a Youtube video properly on your mobile, instead of using their mobile site. It ain’t just Youtube, though, because I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t let you play Flash games on there, and I know for a fact I’ve seen a pic online (and in true Murphy’s Law fashion, I now can’t find it), of the HTC Hero with someone playing the infamous Yetisports on it.
So, Flash rocks, but what about the new user interface? Well, by all accounts it’s doing something that I’ve decided to christen ‘pulling a Palm Pre‘. In other words, as well as it being all flashy and finger-friendly, it lets you pull in a person’s contact details from all over the shop, from places like Facebook and the like. That’s really rather good.
It’s with the exterior of the phone, though, that two new, really impressive details have emerged. First, the HTC Hero’s got an oleophobic coating on the screen, just like the iPhone 3GS. Or, in other words, the screen’s designed to resist smudges and fingerprints. Ok, sure, fingerprints will still end up on there, but they wipe off really easily. Think of it as kind of the non-stick frying pan of screens.
Actually, that’s not a bad analogy, considering the other new detail that’s emerged is that the whole of the HTC Hero’s body is in fact Teflon-coated. Yes, it really is the non-stick frying pan of phones, and that’s something unique and really rather cool. Fingerprints? Pah! Wipe and gone!
I like that, I really do. In an age where phone OSes are getting more and more refined, it’s taken a phone with the same coating as a non-stick pan to get me really jazzed up!
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