Unofficial Android firmware updates look spectacular

Cooked firmware, as it's called, has been very popular for platforms such as Windows Mobile, despite the often grey areas around their legality.

The homebrew community often achieves the kind of functionality that makes an unappealing device far more attractive, and it appears that cooked versions of Android are now starting to appear.

The first is suspected to be a skin created by popular smartphone manufacturer and Android pioneer, HTC. It's unclear exactly which hardware version this firmware is intended for, but it appears to borrow heavily from the style of Palm's new WebOS, and improves enormously over Google's lacklustre effort.

Then, over on the hub of smartphone community development the XDA Developers Forum, a leaked version of the forthcoming HTC Hero firmware has apparently been ported to the G1, adding a lot of new features and some very appealing design tweaks.

Whether or not these will appear any time soon for the public remains to be seen, but it's definitely interesting to see developers are working to unlock the real potential of Google's operating system.