HTC Corporation today announced the debut of its third Android-based smartphone, HTC Hero in India. With this, HTC marked the introduction of the HTC Sense, a customized user interface that will be integrated in a suite of future offerings from the company.

“The Android-powered HTC Hero further underlines HTC’s commitment to push the boundaries in mobile phone innovation and design. HTC Hero introduces a more natural way for reaching out to the people and accessing important information in a much more easier and hassle-free manner. We are also very pleased to introduce a fully customized user interface called HTC Sense with the HTC Hero,” said Ajay Sharma, Country Head, HTC India.

The HTC Hero features a five-megapixel autofocus camera, built-in GPS and a digital compass for simple navigation, 3.2in touch-screen, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and an accelerometer that can sense whether the phone is being held in portrait or landscape. It has 512MB of integrated memory which can be expanded to 16GB using a microSD memory card.

Additionally, it also provides a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, finds emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

For the Airtel subscribers, the HTC Hero offers a special exclusive offer providing them with free data download of 100 MB per month for six months in addition to a bundle of utility-based applications that include Portfolio Manager, Hello Tune Manager, Weather Channel, Mobshare, In-mobile search and City Search.

The HTC Hero will be priced at Rs. 34,600 in Maharashtra and Rs. 31,990 in the rest of the country.