HTC reveals Hero smartphone and Sense UI (See all news)

Today, during a press event in London, HTC Corporation announced its third Android phone, the HTC Hero. At the same time the company introduced a new user interface, the HTC Sense, an intuitive and seamless experience that will be introduced across all smart phones beginning with the new HTC Hero.

"The HTC Hero introduces a more natural way for reaching out to the people and accessing your important information," said Peter Chou, HTC's Chief Executive. "Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use."

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 its predecessors, the HTC Magic and Dream, the new handset sports a 3.2-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen display of HVGA resolution. The white variant of the phone includes an industry-first, Teflon coating, resulting in an improved and durable white surface.

Other features include 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with geo-tagging support, GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP support, Wi-Fi, accelerometer sensor, 3.5mm headphone jack, memory card slot, and a built-in digital compass to work with Google Maps. In terms of connectivity the HTC Hero is quite well covered as it will feature quad-band GSM and dual band UMTS with HSPA support.

As for the new user interface, the HTC Sense was created with three main principles: Make it Mine, Stay Close, and Discover. As detailed in the press release HTC uses widgets, scenes, integrated communication applications, and hardware design features to create HTC Sense. Other new features include integration with Facebook and Flickr, updated phone dialer, T9 contact searching, the web browser now includes multi-touch zooming control, and new bookmark manager, and very important Adobe Flash based full-screen video support.

The HTC Hero should be available to consumers across Europe in July and in Asia later in the summer. The company promised that a distinct North American version will be available later in 2009.