Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Orange, T-Mobile The HTC Hero has made its first appearance on a UK carrier’s website, but finds itself burdened with a teasing “coming soon” badge. Having talked to Orange, we can confirm previous reports that the device will be available for free on some, as yet undetermined but surely eye-gouging, price plans. The company said they are still testing the device and should have pricing information by tomorrow.

Filed under: Sprint Screw the Pre — government contracts are where the real action is at, and Sprint’s got to be thrilled to know that it’s the first, the last, and the only carrier to be used by the US Census in its 2010 once-per-decade review of the nation’s denizens. We’ve known for some time that HTC would be supplying custom hardware to data collection folks in the field — a device cleverly codenamed Census — and indeed, Sprint’s press release makes mention of the fact that about 140,000 workers started using the Harris-branded devices with integrated fingerprint readers and GPS back in April of this year.

When it became clear that HTC’s oh-so-pretty Sense UI wasn’t going to make it to the G1 by any official means , we figured it wouldn’t be too long before the goods leaked and an unofficial port was made. Hell, we outright said so . Less than a week has passed since then, but a pair of Italian hackers has already managed to jam the final Hero ROM onto the G1.

Filed under: Handsets, HTC, T-Mobile, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS While we twiddle our thumbs and wait for the Dash 3G and the Touch Pro2 to make their fanfare-laden debuts on good ol’ Number Four (that’s our pet name for T-Mobile USA, of course), literature is starting to show up that should make the wait marginally more bearable by giving us a few pretty pictures to look at and words to read. There’s nothing Earth-shattering in here, but we see that the Dash 3G has 256MB of ROM and an impressive rated 8.3 days of standby time — we’ll believe that when we get that kind of performance ourselves — while the Touch Pro2 moves up to 512MB, keeps the 8.3 days of standby, and touts its unusual full-duplex speakerphone that dominates the rear of the device.

Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Android We doubt the July 15 delivery date is set in stone, but UK residents itching to get a little Hero in their lives are now able to pre-order HTC’s latest for

Filed under: Handsets, Others, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS, HSUPA As HTC’s already eager to demonstrate with the Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 and Toshiba with the TG01, Windows Mobile 6.5 should bring with it a pretty wide range of interesting compatible hardware — and we’ll admit that we’re a little intrigued by this alleged device from Mio codenamed “Amber.” All we’ve got here is a render, but it’s certainly within the realm of plausibility — it looks quite a bit like the company’s G50, after all, and we’d certainly expect them to be releasing new WinMo devices in conjunction with 6.5. Anyhow, we’re told that we can expect a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 series (we would’ve preferred Snapdragon-class silicon, of course), a whopping 3.61-inch WVGA display, 256MB of RAM paired with 512MB of ROM, a 5 megapixel AF primary cam, full HSPA, and an integrated FM transmitter. If it’s real, it looks like this one has the Touch Diamond2 squarely in its sights

Looks like the licensing nazi has struck again. The slick “Sense” UI on the coveted HTC Hero is not going to be available as an upgrade for anybody in the US any time soon

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According to pocket-lint , HTC CEO Peter Chou has confirmed that the HTC Sense interface will be available as an optional addition to “other existing [HTC] devices.” Though he did not detail which phones would receive the addition and when, it isn’t hard to extrapolate. There are only a few other HTC phones running on Android, though each has a few variants: the HTC Dream, otherwise known as the T-Mobile G1, and the HTC Magic, known as the myTouch, ION, etc. Speaking of variants: From what we’ve heard from our talks with HTC, it seems a bit unlikely that Sense will find its way to any “with Google”-branded handsets - at least not in any official manner.

Filed under: Software, Android Java-based development within a specialized, optimized virtual machine is one of the founding principles of the platform that makes Android what it is — but sometimes, you need a little more oomph and you’ve got to bend the rules to make that happen. Google’s totally cool with that, it turns out, and today they’ve released the Android 1.5 Native Development Kit (NDK) that allows developers to generate C and C++ libraries that run directly on the platform rather than being routed through Dalvik. The Android team pulls no punches that devs should be careful when going native, saying “your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug” — but as they note, there’ll be times when the improved performance and deeper access to hardware will be a boon.