I know it's been done but I am going to address the OP as well...
Here are the issues I am having:
1. Can't lock screen while in a call. Red button just hangs up the call.
This is completely an HTC issue and has nothing to do with Android. HTC designed this part badly.
[/quote]2. Apps cannot be installed to sd card. Internal Phone Storage after a device wipe shows about 136MB free. I downloaded about 5 or 6 apps and the phone ran out of room. I deleted the apps, but the space was not reclaimed. This is why I had to reset the device. Now I am afraid to install apps without filling it up again.[/quote]
Again this is not Android since the custom ROMs and rooted phones support this feature. The very fact that custom ROMs and rooted phones support this shows that Android does. The blame again lies with the device manufacture for not implementing this functionality.
I also call bullshit on your space claims, which incidentally are a manufacture issue as well, as there are not 6 apps that will fill up a Hero. Furthermore it's total bollocks that you uninstalled the apps and didn't reclaim your space. And it's just icing on your cake of crap that a reset didn't get the space back. This claim is provably wrong. Support your claim and list the six apps you downloaded. You won't because you can't. I have easily three times that many apps and space left over.
3. Bluetooth does no always connect back to my headset. sometime I have to turn on/off bluetooth on phone. Sometimes I have to reboot phone. One time I installed Pandora and bluetooth would not work until I figured out that removing Pandora would fix it.
I haven't used BT with this handset but your description matches pretty much any BT device I've used with any phone to be perfectly honest. I don't doubt there may be BT issues but once again the manufacture chooses the BT chipset and Android just accesses the chipset. If HTC chose a crappy chipset for the Hero then this is also on HTC.
Of course it's not. It's a reduced frame sensor without a flash. Most reduced frame sensors are crap to begin with. Strap one a cell phone as an add on and it's still crap. 5MP or not it's never going to take great photos. It takes passable pictures for what it is if you understand anything about digital photo technology and how to take pictures with a reduced frame sensor and how to hold still.
5. WIFI cannot connect to an N router running in mixed mode (a,b,g,n). You must "dumb" down the router to b,g mode in order to connect the phone. This means hat other users who have no issues with N have to suffer the reduced speed of b,g.
Wrong just plain wrong. I am currently connected to an N router running in mixed mode with no issues. If you are having issues you may have a cheap router that doesn't behave according to spec. Windows Vista had problems connecting to WPA-PSK for a long time and that was an OS issue. Since there are no other claims of this not working I would suspect you either have a bad phone, and that would be on HTC and not Android, or you are simply making stuff up.
6. No way to "EXIT" an app to reclaim RAM.
It's not necessary unless an app is misbehaving. Android is a Linux OS and is a true multi-tasking OS unlike the WinMo and the iPhone OS. If you need this explained you can go look
this post.
7. KB not as accurate as the iphone.
The KB is a accurate as your touch is. If you go through the learning app under settings it can be even more accurate. It's not the greatest KB in the world but neither is any on screen KB. If you want an accurate KB get a G1 or wait for the Sholes devices. I am faster on the Hero KB than I am on any of my friend's iPhone's KBs. This claim is subjective at best.
8. I have disabled HTC Sense and it is still slow. For example, often when I load favorites, nothing displays for about 3-4 seconds. This is not acceptable.
What "favorites" are you loading? I rarely see slowdowns but when I do I usually discover it's updating two or more email accounts along with syncing data for multiple widgets and once that passes so does the slowness and it's never 3 or 4 seconds it's a second at best.
Overall, not a very tested or mature OS. I feel like I should not be starting from scratch like this. The folks at Android are guilty of using the consumer as a guinea pig. This is not acceptable. We are not reinventing the wheel, so why are obvious features missing?
Features missing from the OS? There are none. Features not implemented by HTC on their devices: sure there are but that's on HTC. Android is running on netbooks doing things a phone will never do. What the phone does, in this case, is limited by the device manufacture and not the OS. It's a Linux bas for God's sake you can write anything you want to for it however a device manufacture can keep you out of anything they like which is why we root our phones.
To be perfectly honest I suspect I have wasted my time even responding. It looks like you have browsed a bunch of forums, found some complaints, exaggerated the claims, and made up a post. If your phone really has all of the actual problem you described then you got a bad phone, which is obviously not the fault of the OS, but I suspect that you don't even own a Hero or any other Android based phone.