Going by the most recent information forwarded by Patrik Andersson, the head of HTC in Sweden, the successor to the company’s flagship smartphone, Hero, will be launched early next year, rather than the originally-scheduled 2009-end launch.

Elaborating further, Andersson revealed that the Hero successor will be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in February 2010; and subsequently, the smartphone will be released in Europe shortly after that.

According to market sources, the forthcoming Hero successor will be the HTC’s first Android 2.0-based smartphone, featuring a 4.3-inch touchscreen and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1 GHz processor.

Though there has been no official disclosure about the forthcoming phone, sources in-the-know say that the Hero successor will feature a QWERTY keyboard, and will probably be called the HTC Espresso!

The present HTC Hero – which is the company’s most widely-available Google Android-based smartphone - is available in Europe and in the US from Sprint. There is also a Verizon version of the phone, the HTC Droid Eris; and HTC is reportedly also planning to release the phone through AT&T early 2010.

Running Android 1.5, the tablet-shaped existing Hero smartphone features a 3.2-inch HVGA screen, a 5-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and a GPS receiver. The phone does not have a hardware keyboard, and HTC has replaced the standard user interface of the phone with its own interface called HTC Sense.