Sprint today announced plans to release the HTC Hero, confirming months of rumors and speculation that the popular Android device, already available in Europe, would finally come to the U.S. carrier. The HTC Hero is similar to the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, in that it's a tablet phone running the Google Android OS, but the Hero also gets a boost from manufacturer HTC in the HTC Sense user interface concept. The design is similar to the base Android platform, but with some nicely polished interface improvements, as you can see in our extensive hands-on look at the HTC Hero.
The HTC Hero is an impressive piece of hardware, and it appears that Sprint isn't hobbling the phone compared to its European brethren. Quite the contrary. The Sprint Hero will get a 5-megapixel camera, and it will be the first phone to ship with HTC's new HTC Footprints app. HTC Footprints is a location-based journaling app. When you take a picture with the Sprint Hero, you can add notes and audio clips to the photo, and the Hero will automatically add specific GPS tracking information as well as more general location and area info.
The Sprint Hero uses the same 3.2-inch touchscreen we saw on the original HTC Hero, and the interface will support multitouch gestures, so users will be able to pinch and zoom their way in and out of photographs and Web pages. Like the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, the Sprint Hero will also see a range of e-mail possibilities, including Exchange ActiveSync e-mail access, so corporate users will be able to check their mail. The Sprint Hero will stand out from the rest of the Android pack as the first Android phone to synchronize natively with an Exchange account, so business users will also be able to check their calendar and look up corporate contacts on the device.
The HTC Hero on Sprint will run on the Now Network's EV-DO Rev. A data connection, which, in our testing experience, is the fastest network in the U.S. Sprint's Hero will also come with plenty of Sprint's online services, including Sprint TV for streaming video clips, NFL Mobile and NASCAR Sprint Cup Mobile apps as well. The Sprint Hero will also be one of Sprint's only phones with visual voicemail (the Samsung Instinct S30 being the other). The phone won't come with any onboard internal memory, but Sprint will bundle a 2GB microSD card in the retail package.
The Sprint Hero will be available on October 11. The phone will retail for $280, with a mail-in rebate dropping the price $100 to only $180, a competitive starting point, but we're still not fans of this whole mail-in rebate thing. The Sprint Hero will require an unlimited data plan, but as we saw in an earlier analysis, Sprint also offers some of the most competitive rates for smartphone data.
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