Rob Young

Since their announcement at MWC 2010 of a “February to March 2010″ timescale for the Android 2.1 update, the community has had only hearsay and rumour on which to base their excitement.

Speculation of “some time in March” has been rife for a while, but as the month drags on it’s looking less and less likely that HTC will meet their deadline – even more so given the latest rumours indicating an April/May release date.

Hype about a March release has been based on a representative from the Irish mobile carrier Meteor posting on their forums:

Just got another update on this and HTC have said they are releasing 2.1 on the Hero and we are hoping to have this available by the end of March.

.. and then the team at HTC Benelux announcing that the Hero would get Android 2.1 with Sense in “mid March”.

The most recent rumour has come from a member of the xda-developers forum, who posted the contents of an email received at work containing the update schedule for European carriers:

 2/4/2010 - HTC EU (Nordic/Greek/RUS/UKR/SA)

 16/4/2010 - T-Mobile UK

 16/4/2010 - UK/ES Orange

 16/4/2010 - T-Mobile DE

 22/4/2010 - SFR Signature Orange

 22/4/2010 - ZA (Vodacom) HTC

 22/4/2010 - H3G UK

 4/5/2010 - HTC BE

 4/5/2010 - HTC TUR

 10/5/2010 - T-Mobile PL

 10/5/2010 - T-Mobile HU

 10/5/2010 - T-Mobile MK

This is not only good news for European customers but also for Sprint Hero users in the US, who will also be receiving 2.1 in April according to advice issued to Sprint employees in the last few days:

Let your customers know we are actively working on having the Android 2.1 platform available to our Hero and Moment customers over the coming weeks.
Look for more information coming in April about Android 2.1 platform for Hero and Moment.

I’m hoping for a noticeable speed increase on my Hero with the 2.1 update (mainly for text input) as well as looking forward to being able to use applications from the market which don’t support 1.5!