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heropre Sprint has a number of good smartphone choices lately it might be difficult to decide which one will be your next device.  If you are like me then you would just get two and not have to worry about making these tough decisions.  But alas not everyone is as crazy as I am or can spend the extra cash so I’m writing this comparison to hopefully help out those who are on the fence.  The two top contenders in my book in terms of newness and functionality would have to be the Palm Pre and the HTC Hero.  Both are reasonably priced and have good options for both the average user and the tech geeks.

Here is a side by side comparison of both phones in terms of the most used features followed my some photos of the two devices.

Palm-Pre-Chart-1

Palm Pre

HTC Hero

Price

$150 (with 2yr agreement)

$179 (with 2yr agreement)

Screen Size

3.1 inches

3.2 inches

Keyboard

Physical

Virtual (great autocorrect system)

LED Notifications

None out of the box

LEDs for new messages, low battery, alerts

Browser

Renders full html pages, multitouch capable, starts zoomed out, full Adobe flash 10.1 support coming, supports downloading files, saving pictures, supports copy and paste of text, visual bookmarks

Renders full html pages, multitouch capable, starts zoomed in, crisp fonts, supports copy and paste of text, supports flash lite, visual bookmarks.

Email

One app for all emails,supports push gmail, unified inbox view, full html email, mulittouch capable. ability to search, but no way to mark all as read or delete all.

Gmail App with push gmail, labels and conversation view and a separate Mail app for all other email accounts, no multitouch or zoom features in Gmail app

Multitasking

Easily switch between running applications, applications continue to load in the background. Also very easy to close applications

Able to run multiple apps at once but switching between them is not as fluid. Can’t close apps without installing third party software.

Camera

3.2 mp camera with flash and extended depth of field, no video,recording. allows uploading to facebook and Photobucket.

5 mp camera no flash but has auto focus and can record videos, allows uploading to facebook, picasa, flickr and other installed programs (such as twitter clients)

Memory

8gb built in storage with about 7gb available to the user. no exapandable memory options

Expandable up to 16gb via sd card slot

Voicemail

Standard voicemail

Supports visual voicemail

Instant Messaging/SMS

Built in support for Google Talk and AIM (Yahoo coming with release of Pixi). Supports MMS. Combined messaging so all IMs and chats are in one place.

Built in support for AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo and MSN. Supports MMS. Plus tons of available apps from the Marketplace with other clients as well as support for other IM protocols.

Apps/App Store

Just over 300. Supports free and paid apps. Allows you to see screenshots of apps before download.

Thousands. Supports free and paid apps. No app screenshots.

Responsiveness/Speed

Phone/SpeakerPhone

Speaker phone is low

Really loud and clear speakerphone

Universal Search

Ability to search contacts, apps, locations, browser all from home screen

Not available on this Android build of the Hero.

browseremailappstore

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