I received this phone as a result of a swap with my husband. He tried to use the phone for a matter of hours before deciding that the touch-screen keyboard was just too much of an inconvenience for him.

I began being very impressed with the phone when I got it back in January of this year but my opinions of the phone have gone down considerably since then.

First of all, the phone is a tough piece of kit and can withstand a few knocks, my brother has this phone also and although his is slightly battered and has chipped edges, it still works well.
The battery life is reasonable for the OS it runs, although a Task-killer application is a real must to extend the usage time. I find my Hero tends to last a good 15 hours or so with regular use of applications, games, texting, calling and emails. It does require a charge each night, which is fine for me as that is my routine, this may be a problem for some.

The Android OS is a dream. It is beautiful and full of useful and fun applications. I will have a hard time changing from Android in the future, the phone however, I will be glad to be rid of!

Setting up email addresses is fairly easy, with step-by-step instructions. As long as you have all of the right log-in information, you shouldn't run into many problems. The phone does offer an optional interval for checking of emails and that is very convenient for people who do not have time to keep refreshing their accounts.

I adore the contacts set-up and being able to link each contact with a Facebook and/Flickr account was a major draw for me. It also comes with Peep pre-installed for those who are connected using Twitter, this can be placed on one of the home screens as a widget for constant updates.

I came across a few minor problems with this phone a couple of months ago, the lights completely stopped working, with the exception of the back-light on the actual screen, and the headphones were no longer being acknowledged by the handset. Both of these issues were fixed by performing a software update from HTC.

The keyboard, which was once effortless and quick to use, now lags a ridiculous amount, making texting even the smallest of messages a real chore. There are 3 different ways to have the keyboard style, I have only ever used the QWERTY keyboard as I find it easier to use, anyone with slightly larger fingers might find the bigger keyboards easier to use.

The camera is ok but not fantastic considering the price of the handset. It has no flash and camera shake is a big problem for this phone. There are applications available on the Android Market to help combat this problem, but in my opinion, this shouldn't need to be an issue.

I have had nothing but problems since I had to update my Android system, I think that the phone is not designed to have the extras that Android 2.1 brings and in fact, some of the features offered to other phones have been completely dropped for this model because of capability issues (Such as the live background).

My overall opinion is that this was a wonderful phone when it was first marketed, however it's general life-span as a phone is fairly short lived and I would not want to have this on a 24 month contract! Not an awful phone, but it has a few bugs that can be pix 'n' mix between phones, some seem to be perfectly fine whereas others can have every problem in the book!

With so many new and fantastic Android phones available now, I would hesitate to recommend this one to many people.