On Saturday I received my T-Mobile upgrade handset, the HTC Hero aka the T-Mobile G2 Touch. I must say that I’ve over the moon with it. It runs Android 1.5, but HTC are due to release a firmware upgrade reasonably soon to bring it up to Android 2.1. Even if the phone wasn’t upgradeable, the wide variety of applications installed and available from the Android Marketplace is wonderful.
Through Market, I’ve already installed Spotify, Twidroid (Twitter), an SSH client, and Google Sky Maps (which is *fantastic* – it uses the phone’s digital compass so that wherever you move the phone, it’ll update the map on screen with the stars and constellations as they would appear in the sky). Spotify makes listening to all my playlists built on the PC and Mac a breeze, and offline mode really makes the difference here (although note: I need to buy a much bigger microSD card to hold all of the playlists of interest).
As a phone, the call quality is excellent. I now have all my contact information stored using Google Contacts. Unfortunately my previous phone had all the contacts installed in the phone’s memory and I’m not really willing to take apart the Hero again to get the SIM to retrieve everything again – so I’m starting from scratch. I may need to get in touch with some of you to update numbers, addresses, etc. But at least this time I can take a copy of my contacts in CSV format in case Google explodes. And I really like the ability to add a photo next to each contact. I’ve got most of my family and colleagues photos in there (mainly taken from last year’s Christmas party <sniggers> 
I now need to get a case to protect the phone, although the screen and phone itself looks resilient enough to carry around in just my pocket or backback. The phone also comes with a fairly decent pair of in-ear headphones and the cable length is quite generous. Charging is through mini-USB to the computer, or through a wall plug adaptor (supplied). Transfer to and from the phone is through USB or Bluetooth, but I’ve still yet to figure out how to get Bluetooth file transfers working properly. HTC Sync does NOT work with Windows 7 64-bit, but this is not too big a problem for me as yet.
The only gotcha for me was attempting to link the phone to my Google Account. As I had re-instated my Google Apps account for drake.org.uk, and disabled email, I had assumed that Android would be happy to use that. It would be if I had email enabled. Trying to use my standard Google Account using my email address failed to work each time. So I enabled Gmail for my Google Account (not Google Apps) and used my @googlemail.com address instead for the login and it’s all worked nicely. So if you have both a Google Apps and Google Account using the same domain/email address – and you just want to use your Google Account – make sure that you sign in with your @googlemail/@gmail.com address.
Oh, and typing on the virtual keyboard is a real pleasure to use. While my fingers do occasionally miss the mark, the predictive/corrective system works flawlessly. Far better than the iPhone in my opinion.
I just spent a few minutes browsing that HTC Hero link. It’s very light on details: what are the phone’s features? Does it do wifi? VoIP? J2ME?