For the past couple of months I've been patiently waiting for the Eclair (Android 2.1) update for my HTC Hero phone. Even though I have little idea what improvement, if any, to expect. I just like to keep things like that up-to-date.

So, I'd read that - unlike the last firmware update where I downloaded it from the HTC support site - this update would come OTA ("over the air") and my phone's auto-update would tell me when the time was right.

So, I waited and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Then today I decided to get to the bottom of why it seemed everybody else had updated apart from me. After some searching I found a comment in this blog entry which said:

From trial and error what ive worked out so far is that if you have a sim free hero and want the update, set the calendar to 2011 and it will give the update option within a few seconds.

Crazy as it sounds I was desperate enough to give it a shot. Sure enough, within a couple of seconds of pushing the clock forward a year the phone alerted me to the update. WTF.

Within an hour or so I was all up-to-date and am happy to report it was worth the wait. In particular I like the new Twitter app/plugin and the small tweaks to the core apps. Most of all I like that it didn't, in the end, wipe all my data like the last update did, even though it said it would and so I'd hand-written a load of new phone numbers on a scrap of paper. Thumbs up for HTC. They've redeemed themselves.