The phone itself was, alas, not on display at CTIA in San Diego, a phone convention increasingly known for its lack of actual new phones. But in these studio shots, it looks really good. If it didn’t have the Fender logo, I’d be like, “Hey, look at my sweet phone. Doesn’t it kind of remind you of a guitar?” But emblazoned as it is, the bearer is forced to apologise for it, like, “Yeah, I really liked how it looked, even though I know how corny it is to have a phone with my guitar’s logo on it. Will you forgive me?”

And the ghost of Les Paul played on… [T-Mobile]

To be fair, we should have expected this: Back in June, there were reports that HTC representatives had been talking about a “With Google” licensing issue, which disallowed them from loading phones with propritary modifications to Google’s OS. Sense is all HTC, and the MyTouch 3G is slapped with a Google logo, so this forthcoming update, which was announced at a press conference in Taiwan and will be available from HTC’s website at some point in the near future, sounds like a distinctly foreign interest. So, balls.

It’s worth holding out for possible “clarifications” on this one—please, HTC, Google, or both, say it ain’t so!—but this hemisphere’s outlook isn’t so great. There’s nothing like a massive, terrible caveat to piss all over some otherwise wonderful news. At least we’ve got our homebrew.

AU: If I were a betting man, I’d place my money on the Three version of the Magic to be able to load Sense, but not the Vodafone version. The Vodafone version has the Google Logo on it…

[ePrice—Thanks, Denis]

I’m also sure the giant party they threw in the Embarcadero, complete with T-Mobile and myTouch branding, helped to justify that $US18,000 pricetag as well. Anyways, the SF Chronicle says T-Mobile dropped 100 little men out of the sky in four different locations across the city, and one of them was ELVIS and another had a DSLR attached to his HEAD. CRAZY!!!

Then they wrote some fancy stuff in the sky using smoke, and everyone oggled for a second, then ran to the nearest T-Mobile location to buy a myTouch 3G for each member of their family (CHARLES BARKLEY! MYFAVES!). Well done, Catherine Zeta-Jones. [SF Gate]

Also intriguing is CDMA support—as in the kind of network that Sprint runs—adding on to Sprint’s Dan Hesse remark that Android is coming to Sprint this year and rumours that it’ll be Hero. You can see a lot of the new Donut features in action here, like universal search, in this video from the Google I/O conference.

Folks at XDA are working on a build that’ll run on the Dream (G1), though it works in the emulator right now. [XDA Developers, Images via XDA's cyanogen, Thanks Will!]

A couple interesting things gleaned about the Hero as I barely refrained from cramming it down my pants: There’s a ton of HTC software on there, not just the Sense UI—they’ve built their own mail client with Exchange support, and even a slick, iPhone-worthy Twitter app. Also, the grey Hero has a rubber back—only the white one is rocking out the Teflon (but it’s the only one that needs it).

Oh yeah, dear god please give me one. Right now. Thanks.

This is unconfirmed for now, but Peter Chou, the CEO of HTC, reportedly noted that “HTC Sense will be available on some other existing devices,” after his announcement of the Hero. HTC’s existing Android devices are, using the American names for the sake of ease, the G1 and myTouch 3G, which share similar enough hardware that if one received the upgrade, the other likely would as well. Again, this is unconfirmed, but we were pleased enough with Sense that we’d be pretty excited if the rumour was true. [Pocket Lint]