[Omnia 7 General] chemeng:
So, I am considering buying Samsung Omnia 7 on a 2-year contract with T-Mobile on their £15/month tariff. I consider it a very good deal.

Beforehand, I've got some questions and I would like those that have recently bought the Omnia 7 / T-Mobile combo, to help me clear some things out...

A. The £15,xx tariff comes with an inclusive bolt-on, and guess what? I'll take the data allowance. On paper, that bolt-on offers 500 MB of data. But I've heard that those having a contract directly with T-Mobile (that will be my case) are not charge for excessive data till the fair usage policy limit, which is 3000 MB? Is that true? (I'm not talking about the £25+ tariffs that recently were boosted to include unlimited data.)

B. Is the T-Mobile Omnia SIM-locked to T-Mobile network? Has anyone tried inserting other network's SIM? If it is locked is there a free way of SIM-unlocking?? Orange devices are sim-unlocked most of the time. But what about T-Mobile ones?

C. Are all the Omnias plagued with the bad boot-loader??? Ok, so I press the 3-button combo to get into download mode... and what will I see if I am good to go or in the undesired situation of blocked boot-loader?

D. So let's assume I've got a blocked boot-loader. I make USB jig to force download mode, then connect to the pc, it gets recognised, I install the drivers... Is the official patch released by Samsung in May any good? Or should I proceed with flashing a new boot-loader following xdamir's handy guide?

E. What firmware / OS version do a recently bought retail Omnia 7 come with?? Is that pre-NoDo 7.0.7004/8??? Or has T-Mobile updated their devices to a No-Do version like 7.0.0.7390/2??? In case of a NoDo version, is downgrading to a pre-NoDo doable? Just flashing a generic Rom? (no hardspl stuff from the 6.x era?). As you understand I want to jailbreak. What should I avoid so as not get an update (OTA or via Zune)

E. De-branding is only possible with flashing an unbranded retail Rom, right? Is T-Mobile branding evident only on the boot screen logo and search engine? Are there any other useless T-mobile rubbish? And how do you remove branding? You just flash a generic retail rom? Or is there any hack?

F. So we have 4 flashable filetypes. Correct me if wrong...

- Phone: .bin (firmware, radio)???

- Eboot: .eb0 (boot-loader)

- PDA: .nb0 (actual OS version)???

- CSC: .csc (network specific settings, branding)

Am I correct??? When flashing do I need to flash all these 4 at once?? Can I skip flashing the .csc to have a generic rom? Can I just flash .eb0 to update the boot-loader? Can I combine different .bin .nb0 and so on (from different releases or retail roms)

G. Let's say that i have chevron unlocked the phone. Can I upgrade to No-Do and keep unlock? I'm not interested in the Mango beta for the time being.

H. I have already registered with AppHub (as a student) and I 'm getting my 1st app compiled so that I can be verified as a developer and subsequently get my phone officially unlocked. Will the fact that I will have been chevron unlocked prior to this, create any problem?? If i get developer unlocked, is it any different that chevron unlocked?? Does chevron offer any more capabilities. Or I should just stick to developer unlock?

For those brave having read the whole of my post, I would really appreciate your answers you Omnia masters :p