Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

Biggest difference is just the OS. others like me are just bored with the windows OS and looking for something new to play with. the android OS with the Sense UI looks promising to me as well as fun to use. windows mobile is great though it lacks the flashyness of the iPhone and the Hero, and you can only do so much customizing to windows. the android OS is open source so the customizations with it are nearly limitless.

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

I'm one of those that are ready to make the jump to Android, but I am going to miss all my windows apps. Having to learn to root the phone...hmmm

anyways, I spoke with a Sprint Rep...and wanted to confirm the following...

If one possess a full 150 upgrade...we can receive the advertised $179 after the mail in rebate (obviously if we qualify!)

Now, Best Buy...will I be able to charge the phone to my Sprint acc't even if I bought the phone thru Best Buy to take advantage of their handling of mail in rebate?

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

Thanks....

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

i don't know for sure but i think you have to be in a sprint corporate store to charge to the account

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

For anyone who's owned a Sprint Touch (non-Pro/non-HD) at some point & used a G1 more than casually, how does Android really compare to WM6.1 annoyance-wise? I have to admit that one of my biggest fears is that I'm trading one phone that's dysfunctional for voice telephony and halfway-decent as a pocket laptop for one that's equally dysfunctional.

Specifically, the Touch drives me *nuts* when -- at least once or twice a week -- I'll end up having an incoming call go to voicemail because the damn phone wouldn't respond to the green button. More precisely, it will partly redraw the screen and act like it's about to answer, then decide that it would be a good time to go do garbage collection or system maintenance instead. It'll just kind of hang for 3 or 4 maddening seconds (ringer still sounding, of course), then kind of heave a sigh of relief and finish drawing the phone UI just in time to tell me I missed the call -- and narrowly miss getting smashed in rage for the umpteenth time. Other times, it'll just go off into its own world and not even respond to incoming calls, despite (claiming to have) a solid signal, no background network activity, and nothing allegedly (as far as task manager is concerned) running. Then, there are the moods it gets in every few weeks when it'll aggressively run my battery into the ground within a few hours for no apparent reason, continue doing it for a couple of days, then suddenly go back to making it through a day and a half or so without needing to be recharged.

As a programmer, I do kind of know what its fundamental problems are... Microsoft's stupid architectural decision to try hiding memory and process management from users, even when you try really hard to aggressively keep an eye on them anyway (because when you DO, and manage to keep only one or two heavyweight apps alive at once, the phone almost works well), and the fact that despite allegedly being a company run by programmers, manages to create user interfaces that almost always make inappropriate decisions when trying to anticipate my needs & leave me feeling like I'm fighting with them more than anything... and losing. An occasional victorious skirmish and short-lived detente, but generally acting like they know what I want... and refusing to let me have it.

Fundamentally, that's probably why I have the most faith in Android. My first PDA phone was a Samsung SPH-i300. I was part of the crowd who bought one the weekend they came out, swept up in the excitement of being at the forefront of a revolution in wireless connectivity. Waiting for Samsung to release the SDK. And waiting. And waiting. Eventually, discovering that they DID release one, but it was so incredibly useless -- failing to address *any* meaningful API-type feature we wanted -- nobody really took much notice of it or cared when it finally appeared. At the end of the day, Samsung and Sprint destroyed the phone. They chucked it out the door ~4 months later for a replacement with congenital birth defects (the SPH-i330) guaranteed to brick it within months of purchase, and left the pioneers doubly pissed about having been cheated out of a proper SDK to create the custom phone UIs we were all eagerly dreaming of AND consignment to second-class citizenship as owners of an "End of Life" phone that cost almost a thousand bucks new & wasn't even a year old.

The i500 was a bit of a diversion... it sucked as a Palm (writing area too small, hardkeys in the wrong place for gaming), but was good enough as a phone for most of us to forgive them. Especially since most of us got ours for ~$50 after our then-2-3 year old i300s finally bit the dust. But as the months went by, the phone's limits as a device for wireless web-browsing (even with low expectations) just mounted.

Enter the PPC-6700. While most people griped about its size, the old i300 crowd loved it. Hardware-wise, it was the device we'd wanted to begin with. A decent, holdable size that traded thickness for narrowness (a slightly thick narrow phone is more pocketable than a wide flat phone), its only real flaw was the fact that Windows Mobile 5 was a complete & utter disaster as a UI for interacting with the device as a telephone for making and receiving voice calls. The thirdparty add-ons eventually saved it and fixed its worst failures, but THEN its more fundamental problem came to light -- it was too slow for the operating system it was running. WM5 was pokey, and WM6 completely brought it to its knees.

Enter the Touch. The day I got it, it seemed like a gift from god himself... perfect in every way (compared to the 6700), and giving me everything I wanted. It was only over the next few days that its warts slowly emerged... like a missed call (or Outlook Alarm) waking it up in my pocket unnoticed, and Bad Things(tm) happening when it made contact with other things and triggered random (usually unwanted) events... like calling the last person who called me, and keeping the call going for around 45 minutes before I heard its dreaded "tink" sound that usually meant something was triggering input events in my pocket, and noticed the glow through my jeans. Or, later in life, its bad "battery-rundown" moods that seem to happen at random. The missed calls it was too busy doing something to let me take. And all the rest.

And so... there's Android. Intellectually, I know it's made by HTC, and is likely to be as inadequate hardware-wise as every other phone I've ever owned by HTC... but at least the OS is open source, so there's the *promise*, if not the *reality*, of being empowered to fix whatever I don't like *myself* instead of having to hope that someone with access to better API information than I have can fix it instead (I personally regard the guy who wrote S2U2 as a demigod worthy of unlimited accolades & praise for having single-handedly saved my phone from assured rage-induced destruction last fall, and elevating it from "completely dysfunctional" to "almost tolerable, occasionally OK."

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

I'm one year into my contract so I'm eligible for the $75 off. When Sprint says "A new two-year agreement" does that mean they tack on 2 years to the end of your existing agreement (making me have 3 years left), or is it just 2 years from the date of purchase, in effect canceling out my remaining 1 year from my initial 2 year contract.

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

And does anybody here know the full (non-contract) retail of this phone yet??

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

$439.99-549.99

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

2 yrs starting the day you upgrade.

Re: HTC Hero on its way to Sprint! Confirmed!
 

Assuming you used your upgrade rebate though. I had bought a Moto Q9C and not used my rebate on it, then less than a year later, got the Diamond, and was able to use my full $150.

This was probably already mentioned, but if you are a premier customer, you get your $150 every 12 months, instead of only $75 after 11 months, or $150 after 22 months (no longer 12/24 months).