I purchased my HTC Hero from Telus in December and unlocked it for use with Fido. 3 months later, I have to say that this is still the best phone I've owned to date. Is it perfect? No. Having said that, for the functionality I need, this phone has been rock solid. I use very little voice traffic but where I've used it, the phone has been great. Excellect clarity, and easy pairing with the bluetooth unit in the car. Most of the time that I'm using the phone is taken up with text messaging (Handcent), web browsing (Opera Mini), and News Reading (Nubi News). These apps have all been rock solid for me too. Just enough customizability without getting messy. I've had good luck with the marketplace and I seem to have found apps to do everything I want. One of the main criticisms with the Hero has been lagginess and while I've noticed a little of this, most of the time its just not present the way I use the phone. Even tethering with my notebook using PDAnet worked out of the box. Battery life has been excellent as well. Even leaving 3G on all the time, I easily get 4 full days of use out of the phone before I have to plug the charger in. Charging off of USB from a PC is impossible though, it takes probably 4-5 hours to charge up this way so I just use the wall charger.
Things that still irk me:
Things that still irk me:
- Factory camera application sucks and takes crappy pictures except in low light. (Taking snaps of whiteboard work at the office is great though).
- SMS timestamps don't work out of the box, annoying. (Handcent fixes this for me).
- Internal compass gets it wrong sometimes. If you can't believe it ALL of the time, what's the point?
- PC interface is lacking compared to Nokia PC Suite. On the Nokia, I could plug the phone in using USB and send out text messages, work on the calendar app, etc. This is not out of the box functionality with the Hero.
- Infrequency of updates from HTC. Where is Android 2.1 already?!?!