Newsflash: Consumers don't care about whether Google's playing nice with the Linux community or not.

No. You need a valid SIM in your phone to access the market, and as far as I can tell (with my HTC Magic on Virgin), you can only download apps over 3G. You can queue them up over WiFi, but I've never seen an app start downloading until I've disconnected from WiFi.

No. It's a network setting that Optus needs to change. You can get around it by using the "Market Enabler" app that's available on the net, but you need to root your phone* and void your warranty etc to use it.

*and in Australia, this phrase is rather amusing because "rooting" something is usually vernacular for "have sex with"...

The billing system for a contract I was recently on tried to bill a customer for negative 33 pence. That is, it didn't try to credit him with 33p, and it didn't send him a notice saying "you owe us -£0.33" - it put through a request to his bank to deduct negative 33p from his bank account.

Needless to say, when I discovered this, I immediately rang the customer and advised them to check if their bank was still there or not. Then I took two aspirin and lay down for a while.

Just because it runs on Android doesn't mean it's "based on" it or automatically open-source.

Yeah, it would have been 1.5 - the problem with the Hero is that because it's so heavily customised, you can't just update it to Donut and run with it, unlike the Sapphire/Magic/myTouch3G.
Having said that though, there is a recent official firmware update that supposedly significantly speeds the device up. I don't actually have a Hero, but I've tried one of the backports to the Magic hardware, and it seems to work fairly well.

However, I'll have to agree with the spirit of your post; the Hero's OS is biting off more than it can chew. Sadly, 1st-generation Android hardware is underpowered for such things.

unfortunately not. CTRL+ALT combos only, I'm afraid.

you're probably being facetious, but typing numbers for an extended time is a hell of a lot faster and easier on the numpad than with the main keyboard ones.

You raise an interesting point though - I use all those symbols a lot more than I use the numbers they're set to by default. If I were to design the computer keyboard today, I'd leave the numbers off those keys and force people to use the numpad.
It might even have the bonus side-effect of reducing the amount of SMStalk in the online world. Maybe.

...and the Print Screen key also doubles as the Insert key!
I'm one of those people that uses CRTL+INS/SHIFT+INS to copy/paste. Quite often while using one of those keyboards, I'd simply take a screenshot of some highlighted text, rather than copying it.

I beg to differ - my work uses this arcane software package for some services (Ericom PowerTerm). It has this "feature" that stops the screen from updating if Scroll Lock is on.
Couple that with some of the keyboards at work having a retarded layout where Print Screen/Scroll Lock/Pause are directly above the arrow keys, and you have a recipe for annoyance.

You know, the Windows Key has been there for going on fifteen years now... I think it's time you got used to it and learned not to hit it.

Hen I got my Logitech G15 Keyboard, it had a feature where you could turn the winkeys off. The only thing I thought of when I saw this was "What kind of hamfisted people keep pressing it by accident?"

Lots of things work well for Apple, including;

• Bundling their own media player
• Bundling their own browser
• Locking out competitors

Let's see Microsoft try that and get away with it. Oh wait, they tried and didn't.

This is only true for a small percentage of the world's population.

Maybe, like Apple's previous poster child Firewire, it will be freaking awesome but have absolutely no uptake in the consumer market, leading its own champions to drop support for it (see 5G iPod, recent Macbooks)

well I guess you have no summer then...