About a month ago I got an HTC Hero on Orange. It is awesome, though it could be a bit laggy at times, I got round this by restarting the phone each morning, which ain't ideal.
Then about 2 weeks or so ago a leaked ROM was released that fixed the speed issues with the phone, and added a couple of other features. To install it would mean rooting my phone, so I decided to wait for the official release from HTC.
Which was yesterday. I went to download it, and upon putting my serial number in it told me it wasn't available for my device. Turns out I'd have to wait until orange add their own shit to the ROM and they release it. So I thought fuck it, rooted my phone and installed the leaked ROM. Instructions here:
http://theunlockr.com/2009/09/04/htc-hero-official-update-to-fix-lag-released-unofficially/
The whole process was piss easy. I now have a rooted and updated Hero without the pointless orange gumph on it.
And it is well fast now. Home screens are smooth all the time, I have the screen transitions on now, most importantly the keyboard doesn't lag, and my contact list scrolls far smoother than before.
It is now better than an iphone, this is fact, it does everything and more than the iphone. All iphone has over the Hero is the app store. Android market really is full of a lot of shit. Some good apps here and there but generally they don't have the polish of the iphone apps.
Hopefully this will change, with 3 androids out now, and at least 3 more due out in the next month or so, plus at least 10 more in the pipeline.. you'd think more money would be spent developing decent applications.
I got the SDK on my computer, I thinks I'll try writing something well bad using my terrible coding skillz. more on that later.
