[Touch Pro, Fuze General] grill13:
Just over a week ago I saw three used Docomo HTC HT-01a phones (Raphael 100) for sale in a used electronics shop for 2000 yen. That's about $20. I've been successful in getting Linux and Android to run on all sorts of things so I thought I would see what I could do with one.

Luckily for me there was already a rom in development.

The first thing I had to do was flash the bootloader. That was pretty easy using the ActiveSync software. Then I downloaded the Windows Mobile 6.1 English Rom from HTC. I tried out a few other custom roms but really the one from HTC was the best I just needed English instead of Japanese.

The new Rom was able to connect to Docomo and everything set up nicely.

Then I came back to XDA to get Android roms.

I tried 2.1 first and it didn't work so well. If the phone fell asleep it would not wake back up. If I tried to make a call the call would only last for about 30 seconds until the phone would quit on me. On top of that I would actually have to take the battery out to reboot the phone. Also, if I plugged in the charger the phone would be fine, but if I unplugged the charger it would crash.

Then I tried the FRX06 and it was much better but not that much. The phone could do some things and I could actually make a call. I set up Skype and Sipdroid to turn the phone into a wifi house phone for my son and things seemed ok. But it required care, a lot of care. I basically had to look after the phone. If I didn't use App Killer and do something with the phone about every 20 minutes then it would crash.

A couple of days ago I put in the FRX07 and this is a huge improvement. The phone can now basically last all day and won't crash. It still needs to be plugged in frequently but I guess thems the breaks. Skype and Sipdroid both work well but they seem to work best if only one is running at the same time. Also the official Skype from the market is broken so I went to Freewarelovers to get the old skype and it works fine. Don't use anything after 1.0.0.84. All the 2.0's are broken.

Anyway, FRX07 really seems to be a winner. I went one whole day using only this as my main phone and it gave me no problems besides wanting lots of energy. I didn't have to reboot or fall back to WM 6.1 for anything. I did have to be patient when looking up a few things on the internet or using the new app but it was still faster then WM would have been. I did find that it functioned better if I turned off animations and streamlined the homescreen.

Now I just wish that I could replace WM completely with Android or at least install android onto the internal memory and have the full use of the SD card. I seems like there is enough memory for that but I may be wrong.

Also, it looks like the screen turns off when I hit the power button, but I think the OS still thinks its on. It still gets hot and uses more power than it should. I don't know exactly what's going on there. I'm more of a hardware guy than a software guy so I noticed. It isn't a big deal but that might be where the battery is going.

Anyway, thanks to the new rom I now have a $20 wifi phone for my house and a second phone in case my Xperia X10 ever dies on me.

Thanks a bunch to the developers.