HTC just announced via good ‘ole Twitter that a new upgrade for the Hero aimed at Orange users has been released. Read more and download the update here.

Now that is an odd mouthful. For those who do not understand what it means, Rosie is the home screen HTC wrote that shows all those nice widgets. Hero is the phone the wrote the nice UI for and haykuro is the one who got it all from them. I have reports from the man himself that while it looks great, the speed is a bit lacking. The HTC Hero has better specs than the G1 and therefore can handle it a bit better. No word yet on when/if there will be a release. Watch the video below for the latest on Rosie from haykuro.

Haykuro, with the help of a Magic owner was able to find a method to obtain root access on the 2nd Android device. They found that fastboot was left unlocked and allowed for unsigned images (unofficial) to be flashed. A boot.img that was unsecured was flashed, giving root access in adb, which then gave them the power to flash a modified recovery. As we all know from the G1, having the modified recovery is the main step required to be able to flash custom roms. Haykuro has offered to build a JF-like rooted rom for the Magic community and is probably working on that now. >Full instructions on how to gain root access and flash the modified recovery on your HTC Magic/Sapphire can be found in the wiki.

A user at >XDA-Developers (haykuro) has been playing around with a rom from an HTC Sapphice/Magic and has made it run fairly well on the G1. I flashed it last night and have been messing with it (not much, its pretty incomplete because he is still working on adding back some stuff he had to remove to make it work). Overall impression is that it looks better, runs better and has a lot more features. Lots of stuff we were expecting our G1 to have when we bought it will be added. They have added video recording, soft keyboard and a few features you know about, plus a lot that you do not. If you are not a stranger to flashing roms I would suggest you head on over there, download the latest version (he updates it as soon as he can get things fixed) and try it out. Make a nandroid backup first so you can restore if you need to go back to a JF build because it is not 100% functional.