HTC Hero joins the Android bandwagon with a custom UI

Quite as expected today HTC officially announced their third Android-running handset - HTC Hero. Sporting the most complete feature set of the three it is destined to battle it out with Samsung I7500 for the full-touch Android throne.

The new HTC Hero runs on the familiar Qualcomm's MSM7200A chipset, with a 528MHz CPU, 288MB of RAM and 512 MB of ROM. Just like the HTC Magic and the HTC Dream, the Hero sports a 3.2" TFT LCD touchscreen display of HVGA resolution (320 x 480 pixels). However this time it will use the capacitive technology and will support multi-touch as visible from the demo video published by HTC (embedded further down this article).

HTC Hero

Connectivity is perfectly covered with the HTC Hero as it will feature quad-band GSM and dual band UMTS (with HSPA) support as well as built-in GPS receiver and a Wi-Fi antenna. The mandatory USB and Bluetooth are present too.

The final attention-grabbing features of the HTC Hero are a 3.5mm standard audio jack, a microSD card slot and a built-in accelerometer.

HTC Sense

HTC Hero pioneers the new custom UI that HTC have prepared for the Android OS. HTC Sense is based on three basic principles dubbed as Make it Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected. Here are the three principles as HTC explain them.

Make It Mine
Make It Mine, is about feeling your HTC phone was created for and by you. To do this, HTC encourages you to dictate and organize how you want to access the people and content in your life in a way that fits best for you. For some, this means adding glance view widgets that push content like twitter feeds, weather and other content to the surface while others may want quick access to business-focused information like email, calendar and world-times. HTC is also introducing a new profile feature called Scenes that enables you to create different customized content profiles around specific functions or times in your life.

Stay Close
Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls, emails, texts, photos, status updates and more. HTC Sense takes a different approach by integrating these communication channels and applications into one single view enabling you to stay closer to your important people. With HTC Sense, friends Facebook status updates and photos along with their Flickr photos are included along side their text messages, emails and call history in a single view.

Discover the Unexpected
Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. HTC Sense is focused on providing a variety of these simple yet innovative experiences on your HTC phone that will sometimes bring you moments of joy and delight. It can be something as basic as turning the phone over to silence a ring or as simple as improving the smart dialler for making calls quicker. HTC Sense also includes perspectives, a new way for viewing your content such as email, photos, Twitter, music and more in different ways.

Here's the official demo video of the new HTC Sense UI that comes to enhance the already quite user-friendly Android OS:

As Orange seem to have some sort of deal going on, they also announced today that they will be launching the HTC Hero in the UK in the early July. They have even prepared a live preview of the Her and its new HTC Sense UI. Here, have a peek:

HTC Hero will be available in three color versions - White, Brown and Graphite (Orange exclusive), with the white one coming with fingerprint-resistant Teflon coating. It will hit the European shelves in July with Asia and North America following later this year.

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