Mobile Phone News

If you recall, about a month ago Sprint tweeted that it was working on delivering Android 2.1 upgrade for its HTC Hero and Samsung Moment in early Q2 this year. An optimistic guess would be April, right? Funnily enough, Techie Buzz has heard that two eager customers managed to squeeze a more precise date out of Sprint over a phone call — end of March or even March 26th. Don’t go reaching for that champagne just yet, though — a self-proclaimed Sprint employee shared a recent internal memo on XDA-Developers forum, revealing that it’s “actively working on having the Android 2.1 platform available to our Hero and Moment customers over the coming weeks,” and that “more information coming in April.” Oh Sprint, you do love playing with our little minds, don’t you?

Sprint to release Android 2.1 update for Hero and Moment ‘over the coming weeks’ originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Want Android 2.1 on your Hero? Of course you do — but don’t look for it from HTC… at least, not yet. It should be available eventually — and in the meantime, you’re obviously welcome to do some digging for a cooked ROM from the good people at xda-developers — but for at this time, High Tech Computer is kicking out another Cupcake-based firmware for Hero users on Orange in the UK. Don’t expect anything groundbreaking in this place, but CoolSmartPhone reports that there’s at least a new People widget with a 3 x 3 grid, which sounds particularly handy for anyone with nine or fewer friends. If you want it, it’s a quick download away — not as cool as an OTA, of course, but still better than accidentally submerging your phone in boiling water.

The Touch HD doesn’t benefit from the HD2’s mighty 1GHz Snapdragon, so you might think that emulating Android 2.0 on top of Windows Mobile on HTC’s last-gen superphone would end in tears — but surprisingly, it seems to hang tolerably well. xda-developers has a project coming along to run Android on the handset through a layer called Haret, meaning you can kind of have your cake and eat it too — if you consider Windows Mobile a cake, that is — by switching back and forth between the two environments at your leisure, and by all accounts, Android seems to be just a couple notches slower and more stuttery than your average MSM7200 device. it seems like you still need a cold boot to get between the two platforms, but it’s better than flashing your ROM every time, right? Follow the break for video of Haret in action.