The HTC Hero had its big launch announcement Wednesday. Since then, most talk about the Hero has centered around either its new Sense UI or the fact that it will be the first out-of-the-box Flash capable smartphone. That's not to say the Hero's hardware isn't worth geeking out over.

First off, the Hero has a 3.2” capacitive touchscreen display with an fingerprint-resistant coating similar to the iPhone 3GS. It packs an impressive 5 megapixel camera that supports geo-tagging, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a Qualcomm MSM7200A 528 Mhz processor, a gravity sensor, a digital compas, WiFi, a 1350 mAH battery, and a GPS. Probably the biggest upgrade that the Hero packs is 288 mb of RAM, which puts it leaps and bounds ahead of the G1.

The HTC Hero will launch in Europe in July. Orange UK is expected to offer the Hero for free with certain plan options. There's no news yet as to when we can expect this baby to hit stores in the U.S, but it's likely we'll see the Hero cross the pond late Summer or early Fall.

There's a great look at the Hero here that shows off the new Sense UI as well as HTC's latest Android build. So far the Hero looks fantastic, and the Sense UI has drawn almost as much acclaim on its own as the phone itself. Flash seems to work fairly smoothly on the Hero. All we've got are promotional videos right now, but the Flash game demo played well on the Hero. Smartphone browsing is going to be so much more convenient now that we can actually view flash videos.

All in all, the Hero looks like a very solid smartphone. It's not going to kill the iPhone or maim the Pre, but it'll probably end up being cheaper than either. This is the phone that's going to help Android break out of its niche this fall.