The HTC Hero was my first experience with Android. It was a strange device which I loved, until it decided to do terrible things to me.

Out of the box, the first thing I noticed was "Huh... that's not very smooth. My friend's iPhones are better than that." Alas there was a waiting update which helped, but didn't quite fix the smoothness. Everything else ran pretty spectacularly though. Overall I was happy with my purchase - Sense was nice back then (Shock!) and had a pretty uniform feel to it.

That was - until the incident.

The HTC Hero was promised the 2.1 upgrade before I had purchased it. Alas, 6 months later it finally got it - which subsequently DESTROYED any performance the device had. By the time I upgraded to an iPhone 4 a mere 6 months after using the device, my Hero was barely usable - I couldn't even put it up on eBay for fear of backlash from the buyer.

TL;DR? The HTC Hero was generation 1 hardware which was running generation 2 software. While it paved the way to the seemingly-much-better HTC Legend, the Hero itself basically a stopgap between the G1-based devices and the high-end HTC Desire.