Now my code is working I've taken another big step forward and got the game running on my physical device rather than in an emulator. It's a lot easier to set up debugging on a device than I was expecting. It did break when I upgraded my Hero using the new Android 2.1 OTA update, but reinstalling HTC Sync fixed it.
So now I have Plasma Duel running on my phone. You can't do much yet apart from move paddles around the screen, but from now on progress should happen a bit quicker.