Sprint has announced that at the developer’s conference it is holding on October 26 it will be giving away free HTC Hero handsets and a month of free service. The free phone and service will be given to the first 400 developers who attend the HTC Coding Lab.

To get the free handsets developers need to have a laptop with the Android development environment 1.5 installed and running for the hands-on session. Sprint also added a number of support features for Android developers to its dev support website.

The new features include implementation information for Android handsets, access to developer tools and Sprint network services. These services include location-based, messaging, and geofence services.