[Hero, G2 Touch Android Development] princedwi:
nprussell, thank you so much for your continuous work with all of your roms, and for releasing this wonderful hybrid of sense and stock android. I'll surely be donating to you as soon as I have cash..and hopefully that'll inspire you to continue development on this rom, and even slowly bring it to full stock in the future. Truthfully, your rom is more worth paying for the online cooker from modaco (almost makes me wish I could get a refund for not having roms developed as speedily and as feature-specific as yours).

Here are some of the things are appreciated and working well as far as my initial experiences:

Nexus Launcher - very beautiful, and transitions and animations are very fluid and fast. Panning left and right between panels are a bit sluggish but definitely livable.

Modified HTC keyboard - so many new settings that I've never seen before, and playing around with them, very very nice! I love this enhanced keyboard. And I've never been more impressed with the HTC keyboard before, I usually default to the stock android keyboard. This one is very responsive. Looks like this one will be a keeper =)

Multitasking - I noticed that multitasking is enhanced in a way that the android OS does not feel as bogged down and can continue to download/install applications as I tinker about the rom without considerable slowdown vs the Villain/Sense roms.

Application stability - Droidlive did not work for any of the Sprint-based Villain roms with exception to this one, and it's passing with flying colors. Very very fast. Barcode scanner is also working, just that you need to fiddle to the camera's focus point, and not keep it within the rectangle are that the app suggests.

Browser - Working very speedily, multitouch is working. If possible, just remove the zoom in/zoom out buttons on the top right, not sure if it's specific to the version of the browser implemented in the rom or not.

Youtube - Fast at loading, fast at searching, and buffering is speedy. Loads videos fine, no issues when switching to high quality. Actually, the video's buffer is much bigger than I'm typically used to. I tested this on HSPA first and couldn't believe it. WiFi was even faster..

Blue highlights - A very nice change. Blue loading screen too was interesting to look at! ^^

Some of the not so much finer details that I've experienced:

Live Wallpapers - Setting a live wallpaper will freeze the phone for a few moments and refuse to load.

Wallpaper gallery - No wallpaper loads up at all, so no stock wallpapers.

Personalize Menu - Scenes should be removed as it doesn't pertain to the stock android theme layout, and that causes a FC when trying to access it.

Accelerometer - Looks like it's not detected, I've tested on the home screen (since spare parts allowed for horizontal homescreen orientation). Not too sure, but I'm sure that will be an easy enough fix (hopefully ^^).

Compcache enabling - I ticked it on in spare parts to see if it'll do anything, I noticed the nexus launcher acts up, and makes the phone unstable. Just a forewarning, it was a hopeful inclusion, but of course, just testing out various things to maybe aid and improve the rom. Gallery starts to act up and cause me to remove the battery to restart the phone with this option enabled.

Voice to text on HTC Keyboard - sadly, the voice implementation isn't working on the URL bar on the browser, searching in the market, when pressing the search button on the phone to do quick searches, and when writing SMS. Haven't tried any other areas where it could be used, but pressing the voice button on the keyboard didn't prompt for any voice response.

Facebook sync - Option is present, but doesn't seem to be working. I'll give it a bit more time but I'm sure it's probably just there as a broken link to the old sync feature from the Sprint rom.

Calendar Widget - Initially gives an FC when the widget is loaded for the first time and is recurring everytime the phone is turned on. After the first FC, it's fine and wont be a bother. Unsure if the app is working or not. Will try soon.

Button backlighting - They will work when you unlock, but once the backlighting is turned off after a set period of time, they won't relight. It could just be me, but maybe something to look into. Bringing the phone back to the lockscreen will address the small issue.

Some cosmetics - When highlighting the google search bar widget with the trackball (orange highlight), the top part is not highlighted orange, sort of cut off. Again, it's merely cosmetic, just something to point out.

Partial wakelock - Android system seems to be hogging the battery tremendously. Again, small and reasonable considering the nature of the source (sprint rom).

This is all I can find for now, but I can say that with this rom, I have faith in developers of the Hero keeping this device alive. I survived with older 2.1 roms and kept switching every day for a ROM that feels right, but ALL of them fell quite short. This rom is fast, fluid, has great features, and is only hampered by mostly the nature of the Sprint ROM leak. nprussell, you should expect some donations coming your way. I've been so tempted to sell my Telus Hero to get a Nexus One ATT variant or the HD2 model with Android when it came out. With this rom, I can expect only the best in the future for it, and hopefully when the official 2.1 ROM comes about, that you'll port this and even make a pure stock android ROM derived from it.

I'm blown away by this 2.1 rom. It truely deserves to be crowned the title of "fastest 2.1 rom for the HTC Hero". If I could pick on it, I would say, please try and add the Eclair or the Nexus One lockscreen and live wallpapers. If those were implemented, I'd never need to go to any other developer for ROMs.

Here are some benchmark scores too, using Qualcomm's "NeoCore" app, version 1.19.18. To my dismay, after testing, when trying to go back to the home menu, the application froze. How strange of behavior O.o

NeoCore (with sound) - 24.6 fps

NeoCore (without sound) - 29.0 fps