[MDA III, XDA III, PDA2k, 9090 General] DonJohe:
I have an MDAIII Purchased from T-Mobile in Germany.

This software "works" but there are several irritants which I wanted to cure. My overall goal was a device which would do:

-Motorcycle Navigation

-Palm with MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint

-Blackberry (My company requires it)

-Quad band phone (I travel to North America)

-WiFi

My previous device was a Blackberry 7290 and except for not doing everything I needed, it worked very well.

Now, I have to admit, this Blue Angel (I almost said "this Swiss Army Phone" but that would imply a quality many orders of magnitude beyond the HTC device) will do everything listed.

However;

- It won't send BB PIN messages (will receive them)

- I can't use it in English (replys to English mails say "Betr."

- MS Word doesn't support all the functions

- The missed call light only blinks for a fixed amount of time instead of going off when I've looked at the phone.

- The keyboard is the same size as the BB but unusable where the BB keyboard works very well.

- It requires several reboots a day

- The call quality is horrible and varies

- The Wifi range is half of the other devices I have

- PPT presentations say "made for an old unsupported version of PPT"

- Word doesn't support many of the formatting stuff I need

- Excel is also very limited in support

- I can't insert todays date and time in two keystrokes like I could on my first Palm years ago

- There is no standard command to close a program, it just stays in memory when clicking the red X

- The BB software doesn't handle the mails well (store, copy, delete, etc)

In the vain hopes of trying to conquer this thing I attempted to increase the software versions of the various programs.

After spending most of today failing, I am now resinstalling the T-Mobile version.

Here's what I tried:

I started last weekend with an update of the radio in an attempt to make the telephone problems go away.

After much much trial, error and reading (often in that order) I was able to use the trick of the entry in RUU.conf, and then the program MaUpgradeUt_noID.exe to force foriegn upgrades onto the device.

I also learned that a .CAB file will run as an installable executable so I installed the Blackberry cab after updating the roms to 1.4 and the radio to something also very recent.

While what I saw looked good, I didn't play with this configuration very long because I found no matter what I tried (including downgrading the radio version), the Blackberry refused to work.

So now I'm on the way back to 1.22 rom (The current released software which can be downloaded shows dates on the .nbf files of 26 April 05.), and I find that the BB software here is newer (2.0.1.26-26) than the one I downloaded as a cab (2.0.0.25). This also has a few more whistles and bells in it.

I also found that the 1.4 imate roms in the RAR file here are different than the files downloaded from the Imate site. (These here have an O² splash screen)

One more time I have to commend the RIM people. It is evident that the devices were made by people who need to use them.

In the meantime, the reinstall has completed and I'm going to bed.

I think if I had it to do over again, I'd get a device with a built in GPS antenna but no phone, and just keep the BB.