HTC Hero: pre-ordered

I’ve pre-ordered a HTC Hero. Its the white unlocked version. I went for this over the Samsung Galaxy (i7500) because of several reasons:

• 512Mb ROM in the Hero should be enough for my apps
• Flash in the browser to show off to all my iPhone owning friends
• The Hero has mini USB/Ext USB so I can charge it from any PC easily. Galaxy has micro USB which I don’t have anywhere.
• Taking photos with my phone is not something I do much. I have decent digital cameras for that.
• Although it might be possible to run a hacked Hero ROM on the Galaxy it probably won’t run very well due to the lack of RAM. The Galaxy is supposed to have either 128Mb or 192Mb of RAM depending on who you believe. The Hero has 288Mb.
• Being a HTC handset, the Hero is sure to have lots of support from the xda-developers community

I intend to keep the Hero unmodified except for rooting (if that’s possible). I’ll probably keep my G1 for dev and general messing about with.

One thing that occurred to me whilst developing my pro reader widget is why HTC have developed their own widget framework over the top of Android. Here’s what I think : with vanilla Cupcake developers are very restricted in what they can put into a widget. For example, having a scrolling list or animation is not possible. Its not even possible to use a TableView! Look at the various Hero demo videos and its obvious that HTC’s widgets don’t have such limitations.
It makes me wonder if the widget framework will be expanded for Android 2.0 (Donut) and whether all of HTCs work might be eventually duplicated by Google. Also I wonder what HTC will do with Hero when Donut comes out.