Telus FAIL

Update: Somewhere around the middle of November the Telus HTC Hero was updated to Android 2.1. The battery life has decreased but at least they released it before Android 2.3 is out.

I love the Android platform for a whole host of reasons, including the fact that it's so open. I accept that this sort of openness can lead ( has ) to fragmentation. This fragmentation means that when the core operating system is updated, it will inevitably take longer for the version specific to my phone, the Telus HTC Hero, to be released.

I've been waiting for months to receive the Android 2.1 (Eclair) release for my Telus HTC Hero. At this time, I still haven't received it. It was ported to the HTC Hero months ago, but has yet to be released for Telus. Meanwhile, Android development has moved forward and Android 2.2 (Froyo) has been released.

The HTC Hero will never see Froyo, and this pisses me off. But not as much as the fact that I've entered into a 3 year contract for a phone that has yet to receive a single software update. If you're going to lock user's in, you have a responsibility to keep the software on the phone reasonably updated. I understand hardware requirements might preclude certain releases, but that's the only excuse.

In any event, I've learned my lesson, my next phone will be an official dev phone, as I always want to run the latest and greatest. In the meantime I'm going to be rooting my phone and installing a third party rom. Here's the info:

http://b2basiks.com/?p=701

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=581981

http://www.villainrom.co.uk/viewforum.php?f=95