HTC said that the Hero would be updated to Android 2.1 by February-March. Well, that time has come and is on its way out. Still no Android 2.1 update for all the HTC Heroes out there. Now there’s new evidence courtesy XDA-developers, that HTC will not update the Hero till April.

Documents related to the timescale that were leaked on the XDA-developers suggest that HTC is looking at April  of this year to actually push these updates out. So it looks like they are delayed and will start on the 2nd of April with the unlocked version of the phone.

The same thing will be done with T-Mobile UK/Germany handsets and then the Orange UK/Spain handsets. The documents show a clearly dated update plan that tiers out all the different versions of the Hero that exist at the moment. There’s no guarantee that this information accurate or even true though. So till the updates do happen, there’s no way of proving this. Even though a lot real things have been leaked on this forum, it is still a forum and hence susceptible to things being faked.

However, HTC’s decision to upgrade the Hero might be costing them some sales. I am sure some people would’ve felt more of a need to upgrade to the Legend if the 2.1 update wasn’t coming. Now however, they might hold out. But in any case, Hero users are sure to be happy with the company for not going the profit way on this one. Goodwill is still a good thing for any company.

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This has already happened once before but back then the build was hardly final and it wasn’t available for a full download. This time, a near complete build of the Android 2.1 OS for the Droid Eris seems to be up for grabs courtesy of the fine folks at XDA developers. I say near complete because if it were complete, we would get it officially. However, My guess is that they will push it within this month.

This build has been reported to be working pretty well. The new Sense UI is apparently pretty good and different from the existing versions. We have of course seen some of it already on the HTC Legend and all. But this build will of course be slightly different from that experience.

And while everyone was busy digesting the risks of installing an unofficial release like this, folks just went ahead and ported the whole thing to the Sprint Hero. Is that cool or what? I don’t how pleased Google or HTC or the others are with this but they already know that this is how things happen. They knew well before they opened this Pandora’s box.

Android as of now is still lagging behind in total innovation and design when compared to the iPhone OS. I would also add WinPho7 to that list but we haven’t seen all that much of it yet. However, despite all that Android is an extremely capable OS that is multiplying and eating up market share pretty fast. If they can maintain this growth (and it looks they will), they will soon overtake Symbian as the world’s leading OS.

You know what Google’s hears when they hear all this? Ka Ching!

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