I can understand the frustration, but the point of the article is that while upgrades are "awesome", in the case of Sense, there isn't much that Hero (Sprint Heo and Droid Eris included) owners are missing. In the case of the CLIQ and MotoBlur, it's the same thing. You've got the same connectivity that the Sense UI offers, but minus perhaps some of the personal connectivity that HTC has offered in its phones for quite some time.

Personally, I can say that I have only one person in my contact list, who I talk to on a regular basis, that is also part of my twitter feed. So, I'm happy that Twitter does not integrate into the contact list in any way. But you're right about the Facebook integration; it does act more as a pain for the common user. But this isn't the first time HTC has made a phone, or a user experience, that maintained constant "perusal" through the contacts portion of the phone. I'm of the mind to believe that HTC wants you personally invested in your contacts, at all times. In this way, you have to go into your contact list to see updates, things like that.

I'm one of those people. I go into my contact list pretty regularly; whether that's to update my own status, or just to see at a glance who updated what. I'm more interested in those in my contact list, anyway, rather than a high school acquaintance's updates. Plus, the Facebook/Flickr integration is more about having access, right there on the spot without opening an application, like Facebook, or going to Flickr.com and looking at pictures there. I can do it all from the comfort of the phone itself, you know?

Yes, Sprint does offer that, and the Eris does have access to Verizon's TeleNav; but I was focusing more on the Google-oriented features. Navigation is a great feature, especially when you see it in action, and it is definitely one of the reasons I am looking forward to the update. I will go ahead and admit that I don't have the Sprint Hero, but the unlocked, European Hero; so if subsequent posts regarding the Hero seem to come off in a "non-Sprint" manner, that is probably why. I'm not doing it intentionally. But that's why we have the comment system, so comments like yours get heard.

@mshamp,

Above all, I couldn't agree more with your last sentence. I wish, more than anything, that HTC had been able to give me Android 2.0 two weeks ago. Or even a week ago. Or right now. But that's not going to happen. As I mention in the article, it's probably not coming until mid-December, and that may have a couple reasons, but they are intrinsically connected:

First, is that HTC is waiting to present Sense 2.0 with the release of their next major phone model: the Dragon/Passion, which is also rumored to release on Verizon Wireless, in just a matter of weeks. And the other reason, is that HTC might not have been able to get access to the Android 2.0 SDK until they "confirmed the rumors". If that's the case, then HTC isn't really at fault here.