This morn­ing, Tel­stra announced the 25 review­ers in it’s HTC Social Review com­pe­ti­tion. I feel pretty lucky to be one of them.

I’m in there with 24 other peo­ple who I’m pretty con­fi­dent will give these devices a solid work­out and pro­vide great feed­back. While we’re all obvi­ously tech­ni­cally adept, some­what geeky and active on the social web (isn’t that the point, though?), we’re not all tech types. There’s an actor, a cup­cake artist, a jour­nal­ist or two.

So, yes, I’m get­ting a valu­able piece of hard­ware for free and I’m get­ting some data and calls for free, but Telstra’s con­di­tions for the com­pe­ti­tion and for our reviews are pretty open. We are fully within our rights to be crit­i­cal if we encounter prob­lems. And, with some of the peo­ple on that list, I expect lit­tle hold­ing back.

That said, I’ve been want­ing an Android smart­phone since my wife pinched the Nexus One I man­aged to get hold of, so I’m espe­cially keen to play.

Should I just post my thoughts here (and at Telstra’s Exchange blog) or should I start a whole new blog just for Android stuff like my fel­low reviewer, Mark Pesce, has?