I splurged. Got the HTC Hero on the day Sprint released it, yesterday. Its the first Android phone for Sprint. In short:
So many options
So many applications
So little battery life for them all

The phone works fairly well if you revolve your life around Google services. Or, I imagine, if you use Exchange / Active Sync. Sadly the Sprint service for storing contacts on the Samsung Instinct doesn't translate to Android - or at least, I haven't found a way to sync them. I could probably code one, but, really, it's not worth the time. Nope, the info no longer appears to be on Sprint's website. But I digress.

I remember my last flip phone. With the extended battery I could go an entire week between charging. Can you imagine a smartphone that lasts a week on a single charge? Ha. Yes, they do a lot more. A lot more. Sometimes more than you really want. I graduated to smart phones primarily because I wanted to be able to check my email when not at home. My solution way back in the day was to write a program that sent the first ~150 characters of the email to my phone via SMS as soon as the message arrived. This was awesome because it was instant, didn't waste any battery by polling for emails and downloading huge emails when you don't care about them. If I could combine that with being able to log in and read complete emails (none of this polling stuff), that'd be awesome. Hmm, maybe thats an idea for a side project...

I digress. So battery life wasn't stellar "out of the box". Yes, you can disable bluetooth, wifi, and an assortment of other things. Download cool apps that turn wifi on or off for you as needed. But really, turning bluetooth off and back on when you want to use it... really?

The device itself I'm fairly happy with. It's not quite as snappy as I would have liked, but it's a big step up. I will have to see how the Samsung Moment stacks up against it when it comes out in November. The o/s is very nice, and it's nice to finally have some applications to choose from (like connectbot - ssh client that one of my classmates from high school days wrote).