HTC Hero and Moment to get Android 2.1 Flan soon

As you know, the Google Nexus One mobile phone went directly to Android 2.1, bypassing the Android 2.0 running in the Motorola Droid. The working name of Android 2.1 is Flan.

We told you at the beginning of this month that HTC Hero is going to get the Android 2.1 update – that is now confirmed. A bunch of mobile phone blogs are reporting that not only the Hero, the Samsung Moment too will get Android 2.1 bypassing the 2.0 version of the open source mobile OS like the Nexus One did.

The news seems to have originated from a tweet by Sprint in USA, which said that the Android 2.1 updates would come in the first half of 2010. So that is not entirely good news either. Both the Samsung Moment and the HTC Hero currently run Android 1.5 – so owners of those handsets will have to wait, what, six months? A lot of people are going to be quite irritated.

From a user’s point of view, it is better to get Android 2.0 now rather than Android 2.1 6 months down the line. Probably, what this means is that Android 2.0 is not ready to run on the Hero or the Moment mobile phones. I remember reading about how the Android 2.0 on the Motorola Droid is really not a finished OS – just something that is optimised to run on that specific piece of hardware, and the real 2.0 OS would be the 2.1 version. This news actually makes that quite believable.

The only hope for Samsung Moment and HTC Hero users is that the first half of 2010 could mean January 2010, too. Pray that is the case here.

Of course, those who have unlocked Samsung Moment or HTC Hero phones, or those who have them on other networks, may not be affected by this announcement and might be able to get updated to 2.0.