HTC Hero

One of our friends at HTC cleared up some of the speculation that has resulted from HTC CEO Peter Chou’s comments that we could see the Hero’s Sense UI on existing HTC Android smartphones like the Dream and Magic.

Turns out that HTC is trying to do just that – but there’s a major catch. There’s no possibility that users with HTC phones featuring “with Google” branding will get the update, since those phones are required to offer the phone with the “Google Experience”, as it is called.

I’m looking at you T-Mobile G1 and Vodafone Magic users…not to mention future myTouch 3G owners.

This is the same case as we saw with the Microsoft Exchange client and improved dialer/camera apps on some of the HTC Magic smartphones in Asia and elsewhere. They are not “with Google” phones, so HTC is not limited in what it can do with the UI and other parts of the system.

But even if you are rocking a non-Google branded device, this is just something that HTC is attempting.  It may not pull it off for any number of reasons, so don’t get your hopes up too much.