Yesterday afternoon, the folks at HTC finally announced the Aussie release of the HTC Hero and HTC Tattoo. The good news? They’re being sold unlocked through Harvey Norman for $799 and $599 respectively. The bad news? That means you’ll have to find your own contract with a data plan, which isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world.
Not exactly sure when the two phones will be hitting shelves, or which networks they’ll be on yet, but HTC sent me an invite yesterday to the launch of the Hero and the Tattoo Android phones next Wednesday, November 18. Considering it’s been four months since I had a preview of the Hero, it’s good to know that the handset will actually be here before the year’s out.
If, like certain people I know, you think the HTC is the second coming of Christ in phone form (he knows who I’m talking about), you might be happy to know that according to the Canadian HTC site, the Hero will be running on the 850/2100MHz spectrum for Telstra.
Would-be Hero buyers, look at the bright side: HTC will have ironed out most of the problems with the original. Like the slowness! Which you can now murder, to death, with an update.
Google’s dropped new code for Android Donut and it sounds too good to be true. People at XDA Developers are reporting it has system-wide multitouch, universal search, text-to-speech, automated backups, a new camera app, and somehow, supposedly better performance.
The tireless tinkerers over at XDA have assembled a definitive guide to loading the Hero’s custom-baked Android build onto G1s. It’s fairly involved and a little risky, but hardly unfamiliar territory to HTC fans. [XDA, GetYourDroidOn—Thanks, Patrick!]
Nearly a third of HTC’s phones this year run Android—more than I thought)—but by next year, half of HTC’s will be Android. Exciting, since it makes us dream of a next-gen Hero running something like a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, which would be magical. (See what I did there?) Not a great sign for Windows Mobile though, which used to be tied up pretty tightly with HTC as a brand. [Digitimes]
