There is a fairly standard montage in the canon of bad 80s movies. It involves the protagonist(s) working hard to build/do/invent something to beat the stuck up and dismissive antagonists. See, for example, Summer Rental, a John Candy vehicle in which Candy and crew convert a seafood restaurant that was originally a boat back into a boat in order to win a big, rich boat race against snobs. I don't quite recall why they needed to win the race, but that's immaterial. In the end they thumb their noses, triumphantly, at the crews of the other, more richly appointed boat. It's the tale of the underdog - an important tale to be told in that dark decade - and it is applicable here.This brings us to the HTC Hero, HTC's first Android phone using their new Sense UI. In one sense the Hero is "just another Android phone"; in another sense, it's an entirely new direction for HTC and the platform.The Hero is a great phone. It is on par - and ultimately better - than the Palm Pre and, some would say, the iPhone on many points. It also turns those lumbering Windows Mobile and Symbian into something that you will fondly remember from your youth, a set of dinosaur technologies now extinct. Furthermore, we can easily extend the metaphor above to say that the Hero is John Candy lacquering the deck while Apple and Palm are the rich, stuck-up yacht club members laughing at the upstart. I'm here to tell you that these yacht club members should ignore this upstart at their peril.