I recently got an HTC Hero, the current top of the line Android phone from HTC. This one runs on a rather old Cupcake version (1.5) but comes with a home-brew HTC Sense UI. If you compare this against other Android 1.5-running phones, you will find the interface very different. Do I like the Sense UI? Yes, because it provides more pages for application icons and widgets. No, because it is not consistent with the rest of the Android-based phones.

The Hero comes with a fast F/2.8 auto-focusing 5.0 Megapixel camera that takes both still images and video. Like the iPhone, it does not come with a flash. Frankly, most of the time, the flash on these small camera-phones ruins the resulting photo. It is useful only if you need to take photos in total darkness. Unfortunately, the iPhone's touch to focus (and adjusts exposure) provides more control over any auto-focusing system on any camera-phone available in the market today.

Heck, I'd pay for this touch-to-focus technology to be implemented on pro-sumer digital cameras. Wish that my LX3 comes with this feature. Overall, however, the 3 Megapixel image from the iPhone provides far better images than the Hero's 5Megapixel images. Of course, more megapixels means you can get bigger photos but not necessarily better.

The Hero comes with a touch keyboard, like the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, this one does not support multi-touch. Touch and hold one key and then touch another key and the Hero will not register the second key. Try this on the iPhone and you'd get a better experience. This particular feature makes typing faster on the iPhone than on the Android. The iPhone, of course, lacks the learning feature of the Android's keyboard input -- you can easily add words to the Android dictionary, something that is rather difficult to do on the iPhone. Overall experience, I prefer the iPhone still.

Another area where multi-touch is useful is in viewing web sites and photos. Pinch-to-zoom is a natural gesture to zoom in and out of a page or image. Android, at least with 1.5, does not support this.

Application availability is skewed in favor of the iPhone at the moment - 100K vs 12K. The Android developer community is rapidly churning out applications and the approval process of getting an app on to the Android Market is far faster than Apple's iTunes App Store. I predict that come June 2010, it will cross the 100K mark. The Android Market interface, however, needs a make-over. Searching for available applications is far from ideal - heck, it is even a tad more difficult because it does not find some applications that are already available. Weird, huh? At least Android allows you to install applications from websites (of course, this is risky and opens up a dangerous array of malicious applications), something that Apple does not, I guess to prevent malicious applications from getting installed on the iPhone.

The Android UI, in general, is a bit clunky. Take this as an example -- make a phone call. On the iPhone, the option for speakerphone is right smack on the screen for easy access. Contrast that to the Android interface that requires you to hit the Menu key and hit speakerphone. I got frustrated using this when I was calling several people using several phones!

I have tried four Android phones already and getting all of it to connect to 3G and WiFi is a hit-or-miss sometimes. Setting up is easy. However, if you are like me, who turns 3G off and on depending on usage, then you will find it frustrating getting it to work when you need it. When it works, it is great!

The HTC Hero comes with Flash support. Whilst I personally hate Flash (I'd rather that people use HTML5+CSS+Javascript), a lot of folks want Flash on their phones (please Apple, don't add support for Flash on the iPhones!). I tried to view websites with Flash embedded and the browser failed to render the Flash adverts (which is good, imho). I read that some Flash sites crashed the phone - have not tried this and I don't want to!

Anyway, the HTC Hero, whilst not yet available from the local carriers, is definitely a better Android phone that the HTC Magic and the G1. So far, this one is the best Android phone I have used. Would I recommend it? Yes! If you are a developer, double YES!