HTC Hero + HTC Sense London Launch- 06.24.09
Phone Lust! Crunching to get this post sorted out before i run to LAX to pick friends up… and because of that i wasn’t able to make it out to London today for the HTC Hero and HTC Sense launch! Fortunately Dr. Justine (yes! my little sis is all done!!!) was able to spare a few hours, hop out of oxford, and out of the academic world to go see what all this mobile fuss was about. And get pics to show me what i was missing. As usual, you can get all the technical details on any site, but she got us those key moments and details i love seeing… like the expressions the C-level presenters have, and the presentation graphics they used… and quotes about things like Drunken Thumb and Teflon fingerprintlessness and how ‘fun people make fun phones, nerdy people make nerdy phones’ (yes, this is a “fun” phone). So on the next page you’ll see a bunch of hands on pics of the new phone, as well as my favorite snippets of her press event experience.
As for the phone lusting ~ the new HTC Hero is like a super thin keyboardless version of the G1 (in shape!) ~ and it is running Android, with their new HTC Sense experience that takes it to a whole new level (keep in mind HTC are the guys who even skinned windows mobile to a point where i loved looking at it, and the UX, until you realize its still win mobile under there, too bad they couldn’t hide everything?) ~ Its most appealing feature is that it is truly PEOPLE centered, in that instead of looking for your friends on twitter, facebook, flickr, address book, email (of various accounts)… it sorts the content by PEOPLE! So you can see all of a person’s feeds/interactions with you in one place. And it sounds like it does it pretty easily too ~ get your account info in and the phone does the rest and updates it regularly and syncs people up. Now if that meant all those people i’m bad at officially putting in my address book can have their info sucked in from facebook/linkedin etc ~ that’d be awesome. (p.s. while it does apparently magically sync matching names on its own, you can decide which get paired or manually sync for people who like pseudonyms on various accounts.)
OK ~ go see the pics!
Ok here are pics from the actual presentation ~ keep in mind i wasn’t there, so i picked the shots that were most visually interesting to me from afar. And honestly looking at them now, i feel like some of these could be great for caption contests! The imagery was very people focused… young emo hipster people perhaps? finding their sense of self? through a phone?
See? This one is calling for captions!
Floating heads, which i assume were giving their feedback on the street of how awesome the phone is? With a creative telling us about it?
This one made me laugh.
Yes! Teflon! And fingerprintless due to magical bonding to the glass. Sure it can still have some fingerprints, but they wipe off as you put it in and out of your pocket… And its almost ceramic like in its matte-white nature.
I like to imagine he’s a tiny man pushing buttons on a giant phone.
Hehe ~ so apparently there is the “Drunken Thumb that developed the keypad” ~ and i’m hoping that’s what this thumbs up is (Justine had to run off to a meeting, so she got me pics and info and a quick im chat before taking off…) As for drunken thumb, from what i understand, that guy likes to type while driving, and does it one handed with the hand he shifts with. (CLEARLY not an LA driver) And then the big test for the on screen keyboard was whether people can text coherently while drunk… hence the “Drunken Thumb”
WIDGETS! He looks SO excited there it’s adorable?
As for a hands on with the phone:
Starting with the two colors… more may come…
Super thin!
And for your token press photos to compare to reality:
See? Facebook and Flickr photos together as “photos”!
is there a version of iphone’s BRUSH for painting for HERO? what’s that app’s name, how to get one etc, etc. thanks
AT
----- Asnee 03.12.09 05:32