Don’t want to wait until SUNDAY morning to get your HTC Hero?

If you have a Best Buy Reward Zone Membership, you can get your HTC  Hero on Friday and drive your co-workers wild with jealousy.

You can easily get a Reward Zone Member by clicking here (it’s free), but how soon you will get the card/secret handshake, is anyone’s guess. Better off signing up in store.

Also, you do not have to wait for the $100 rebate! Best Buy applies the rebate immediately to your purchase!

Cellular South, the largest privately held cellular provider in the US, is taking pre-orders for the HTC Hero at a mere $99, versus Sprint’s $180 (after $100 rebate).

Their plan prices start at $50 a month, which is cheaper than the iPhone.

But, you have live in one of their coverage areas which is mostly in Mississippi.

The link with the info is all here.

The UK’s Daily Mail reports that the HTC Hero was voted Best Gadget of 2009 at the 2009 “Stuff Gadget Awards”, beating the iPhone 3Gs.

Fraser Macdonald, Stuff’s expert judge and Editor, stated

‘With the HTC Hero, we’ve finally got a phone that fully exploits the potential of the Android OS to be as clever and as sexy as the iPhone.’

The annual Stuff Gadget Awards reviews the best of consumer technology, and has a panel of expert judges.

To be fair, tho, the iPhone 3Gs was awarded the ‘Phone of the Year’ award.

We’ve all heard stories of iPhone developers swimming in cash. Apple makes flashy commercials highlighting cool applications (”There’s an app for that”) and everybody makes money.

Almost.

Is it not easy to become an iPhone developer. You have to jump thru Apple’s hoops, program in Objective C, there is a long wait before it appears in the App Store, and even then, you DO have to market it.

The Android market could be much larger, as Android is being rolled out onto both phones and portable computer devices, like the Archos 5 Internet Tablet. Of course, now you have jump thru Google’s hoops, program in Java and, yes Virginia, you still have to market it.

NOW the Android market is a fledging market but early developers will be richly rewarded, just as early iPhone developers were. As more phones are being added, market share will increase.

Apple currently enjoys 30% of the “smart phone” business, with Blackberry controlling 39% . But as users move away from “regular phones” into smart phones, they will have only three choices: iPhone, Android or Blackberry.

Carriers can sell Android with much lower costs, and there will be a surge of users to the Android platform over the next two years. This gives you time to code up your app now, test it and release it.

Looks like plenty of boxes went out from Sprint with the HTC Hero. Where is my box?

Oct 11th. $180 (after $100) with a two year contract.

Hands-on with the Sprint HTC Hero from IntoMobile on Vimeo.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal reviewed the HTC Hero.

Walt had this to say:

In general, I like the Hero and can recommend it to Sprint customers, or others looking for something powerful, but different.

The rest of the article can be found here…

Android 1.6 (”Donut”) was already released in September, and will be “rolled out” to devices in October.

The early Sprint HTC Hero were boxed with Android 1.5, but will updated after activation. Some of us may get the updated version.

This release brings some very cool features, as illustrated in this video

• Quick search box: Similar to the iPhone’s search/Spotlight, this lets you find most anything quickly.
• Camera Upgrade: Launching the camera will be faster and the lag between shots will be shorter.
• Battery indicator: Let’s you save battery life by seeing which applications are draining the battery.
• Smoother scrolling and better response.
• The gallery, camera and video camera UI is now integrated.
• Pico: Multi-lingual text-to-speech engine that lets any Android app to “speak” a string of text with an accent that matches the language.

Hey, how did he get one when the rest of America doesn’t get one until Oct 11?

Anyway, it is fun to watch….

Stephen Fry, the British comedian/actor/game show host, has added his tuppence to the many reviews of the HTC Hero phone.

His review can be found here.

His review is notable in that uses some English most Americans are unfamiliar with:

The screen has that oleophobic, fingerprint-repelling coating first encountered on the iPhone 3GS. The body (in the white version at least) is teflon coated. And whoopy-doo! – do my eyes deceive me? – a standard audio jack for attaching proper headphones! And wowzerooni! – a 5.0 Mp f2.8 autofocus camera.

Wowzerooni, indeed!