HTC Announces Third Android Powered Smartphone, The HTC Hero

Unveiling its third powered smartphone branded The Hero, HTC promises that this sense user interface device will be available on some other existing devices. This will give added capabilities such as an expanded Home screen with unique HTC widgets and tighter integration with social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook.
The HTC Hero represents the most usable and feature-rich Android phone and the real genius behind the HTC Hero is the new customized Android OS user-interface that HTC is calling the HTC “Sense UI.” Think of it like this – the Sense UI is to Android OS as the TouchFLO 3D UI is to Windows Mobile Pro OS. And, seeing as how the HTC TouchFLO 3D UI – especially the latest v2 iteration – is almost unarguably the baddest UI overlay available for Windows Mobile, it makes sense that the Sense UI rocks equally hard.
The device sports a 3.2-inch 320 x 480 (Half-VGA) capacitive touchscreen display and a special anti-fingerprint coating. There is a new 5 megapixel camera that comes with geo-tagging and an actual 3.5mm headphone port which replaced the need for headphone adapters.
Also, it includes a GPS and HTC Footprints, a built-in digital compass for helping with Google Maps, and a new search button.
As mentioned earlier, the Hero new features include a possible integration with Facebook and Flickr, including linking your contacts with their own Facebook and Flickr feeds, and this eanbles you not only to see their contact info in the contacts app, but also quickly view their Facebook updates and recent Flickr photos. Other tweaks have been made to the phone dialer, including T9 contact searching, and to the web browser. The web browser tweaks include multi-touch zooming control, a new bookmark manager, and Adobe Flash based video support.
The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript® 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content.
With the promise to make available a dedicated version of the Hero later in the year for North American users, the Hero will be on sale across Europe in July and there would be a subsequent release for Asia by summer. There are no details about pricing yet.