Sprint’s Hero and “with Google”
I guess it’s about time I put together a post regarding the day’s news on the CDMA version of Hero, eh? Well, as I’m sure many of you are aware, there is plenty to write about.
It all started at at 3:00 am this morning. I was laying in bed, listening to Coast to Coast AM through headphones, and tinkering with my iPod. You know, playing iMobsters, poker, and browsing TweetDeck -the same kinds of things all of you do at 3:00 am, except that I have embraced Apple’s Evil Empire… and George Noory.
Anyway, there was a tweet from @l3wish that announced Sprint’s unveiling of the Hero to devs. You can see my PhoneDog post on it here. It consists primarily of Leakdroid’s screenshot from the Sprint Developer Network (seen below). The most tantalizing bit – in my opinion – is the last line: “Oh, BTW we have some BIG announcements coming by the end of the month that will be of great interest to all Android devlopers…we promise it won’t disappoint.” (cont.)
After posting I went back to twiddling and eventually fell asleep. I woke up to find Noah Kravitz of PhoneDog officially announcing that Sprint would be dropping Hero on October 11th at 179.99 after rebate. I hate mail-in rebates, so I was happy to post a leak from quickpwn that said Best Buy would be selling the phone for $179.99 outright (confirmed):
Fine, good. I understand what’s going on at this point. And then, I watch this video:
Wait… what? Hero with Google?
O.K., now I am confused. Did he misspeak? Was that a slip-up? The Sense UI isn’t supposed to come to “with Google” phones. That’s part of what makes the Google Experience the Google Experience: vanilla Android. At least that’s what we’ve been led to believe. I remember quite a bit of disappointment when it was announced that Sense would make it’s way to Magic and not myTouch… so what gives?
Well, I can’t say for sure. But here’s some official Sprint literature that verifies the inclusion of Google services.
Apparently, Sprint and Google have come to some sort of arrangement. I don’t know what this means for the rest of us. I don’t plan on ever seeing Sense on a G1 (not in any sort of official way), but I think change might be in the air. Whatever is up, if you get yourself a CDMA Hero with Google and Exchange support, you might end up as happy as the folks below. Because, well… the complaints people had about the Hero at launch may no longer be an issue. I’m told said fix will ship on this device.
I have a question does anyone know how much the HTC Hero will cost? Like I just got a new phone during the summer but I did not know that this phone was coming out for sprint so I want to get it now and I to pay the full price. So can anyone help me pls
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like