Many rumor sites have offered a numerous dates on when the HTC Hero would be updated to 2.1.

April 26th was a mentioned date, but that is here, and there is no update.

It seems that June is the projected “preparatory” rollout. What will Eclair offer us HTC Hero owners? Quite a bit actuallly, since we missed the “donut” update:

• An improved Android Market experience.
• An integrated camera, camcorder, and gallery interface.
• Gallery now enables users to select multiple photos for deletion.
• Updated Voice Search, with faster response and deeper integration with native applications, including the ability to dial contacts.
• Updated search experience to allow searching bookmarks, history, contacts, and the web from the home screen.
• Updated Technology support for CDMA/EVDO, 802.1x, VPN, Gestures, and a Text-to-speech engine.
• Speed improvements for searching & the camera.

Eclair will add…

• Optimized hardware speed
• Support for more screen sizes and resolutions
• Revamped UI (this is the hold up, since HTC has the ‘Sense UI’ and needs to make it work with Eclair)
• New browser UI and HTML5 support
• New contact lists
• Better white/black ratio for backgrounds
• Improved Google Maps 3.1.2
• Microsoft Exchange support
• Digital Zoom
• MotionEvent class enhanced to track multi-touch events
• Improved virtual keyboard
• Bluetooth 2.1
• Live Wallpapers

But by the time June is here, we’ll all be drooling over the HTC Evo.