Earlier this year we bought a T-Mobile-branded G1 from the US, simply to allow our engineering team an opportunity to check out Android in all its functional glory. The handset physically arrived in the office while I was in Europe, so it was with some surprise when I returned to Brisbane to find the handset back in a box on top of our testing device cabinet.

To be clear, our office is full of mobile enthusiasts and early adopters – but unusually pragmatic ones  – and the G1 just didn’t really float anyone’s boat. It did see some use, as one of our iPhone-enamored colleagues carried it around for about a month as a second device, but when said colleague sheepishly entered my office earlier this month to confess he’d accidentally “bricked” the device while performing an upgrade, nobody queued up to ask me to buy another Android device.

(And in the spirit of full disclosure, while our engineering team have personal tendencies towards iPhones, we are doing a big project currently on the Blackberry, so any new handset requests have been for RIM devices of various form factors and software revisions).

Anyway, on Sunday I was browsing Sim Lim Square (or “Nerd Nirvana”, as a friend refers to it) and decided to haggle a bottom-floor vendor down on a HTC Hero. I’d seen Stefan Rust’s device in Hong Kong in October and liked the look of it, and also witnessed a Mobile TV demo in the offices of an Asian MNO that looked superb – the phone literally transforms into a personal HDTV viewer.

So new purchase in backpack, I traveled to Kuala Lumpur, where I had commitments earlier this week.

I’d purchased a Maxis prepaid 3G card for around MYR15 in a local mall, bought a couple of MYR10 topup vouchers, and worked out that the daily price of mobile broadband is MYR8 (less than AUD$3 – a bargain). At dinner on Monday night I sat down with some friends and, by the time our mains were served, I’d initiated and completed a complete sync of our Google Apps mail, calendar and contacts data. Which, given how attuned I have been to using software like the Blackberry Desktop and Nokia PC Suite (or even iTunes) to push initial data to handsets, I found stunning.

As I became more familiar with the device UI, the more impressed I became. Google Market is quite useful, and well-populated with free applications. The widget-based approach allows complete flexibility and personalization, and while on the subject of personalization – the “local” weather display is just so simple that it’s stunning.

I’m still pondering whether I can use the device for any serious e-mail input in the same way I make use of my Bold 9000, but that’s symptomatic of the touch screen in general (and the same reason I never got my head into an iPhone). But as a complete package – and noting HTC’s rebranding as HTC Innovation – this is really an innovative device, and one that I’m going to play with as a personal handset for a few weeks.