[JASJAR, XDA Exec, MDA Pro General] gubbs:
Keeping Mine OK ...

1. The wifi on the Universal is very good. In fact it is better than the Ralink chipset in my Advent 7061M laptop and also better than a Belkin PCMCIA card I use in my old Thinkpad 770X.

It finds and retains networks very reliably. My bedroom is right on the edge of the coverage and it copes just fine.

To those with problems I would suggest you try a different band for transmission and check what protocols you are using as some can decrease the signal strength dramatically.

Also, check the power vs quality setting. It doesnt alter the signal reception strength or gain, it just limits the overall speed of the connection. Saves bags of battery life.

Dont use Bluetooth its crap. IMHO.

The screen and the DirectDraw capabilities of WM5 together are amazing.

I watch widescreen avi/mpeg/divx through TCPMP and they look gorgeous with no tearing or blocking.

Great for watching movies in planes or coach trips and also great for watching episodes of your favourite anime in bed.

Using the headphones supplied and TCMP's equalizer I manager to pile on plenty of base to override the default tinny sound quality.

2) The camera is unmitigated ****. Sorry. Can't defend it, it SUCKS. Still I use it to snap stuff on the fly.

I have found that it doesnt cope with light very well but the image quality is very good indeed CLOSE UP. It loves fabrics, textures and laminated surfaces. Also liquids etc.

Just dont try and snap stuff from more than 5ft away.

Overall it is more than adequete for a photo blog or MMS.

3) Battery life isnt very good to be honest. About 3.5 hrs here with wifi. Even in standby overnight with just the phone on it sues 40% of the battery. I suspect they are cheap crap batteries. I will certainly be investing in a high capacity OEM one as soon as they come out.

To maximize battery life, turn off beams, bluetooth and wifi unless you are expecting one at the time. Also turn off the sounds! They're pointless and chip away at the power reserve constantly ..

In addition get a widget slider to alter screen brightness. For phone use, it pays to turn it all the way down. Only turn it up to watch video or surf the net. I keep my brightness on the minimum setting all the time unless I need it for something specific. This adds to life considerably.

DONT run the battery all the way down. Top it off. Carry the USB lead with you, its tiny and you can plug it on while your're at work.

There's a thread on here about properly conditioning the battery for first use. Read it. It really makes a difference. Basically: Run it right down first couple of times. Then charge solidly for 12 hrs. Then NEVER run it down.

4) Dont install OEM calendar or task or today plugins. The ONLY ones that dont bring the exec to its knees are Resco today plugins (on compact skin mode). Basically any of the current third party apps are going to dramatically increase screen redraw time and flipping/scaling.

They are NOT Wm5 optimized and Spb's stuff especially is awful for memory leaks and knock on issues causing crashing and unresponsiveness.

Just resist the urge to install loads of crap basically. You almost certainly wont use most of it anyway - it looks nice - but thats it. Is that worth having to soft reset 4 times a day or (as I found with SPBDIARY) every time you want to add a contact or make a call.

Just wait for them to bring out properly wm5 stuff. Its coming, be patient.

5) DO close internet or connectivity stuff when you're done with it. It gobbles power. Now, even thought they say otherwise, leaving apps in memory will run down the battery faster than closing everything. You can't deny the physics of it. So CLOSE stuff.

6) DO get a 1GB SD card. Scandisk or Kingston. DO install ALL your OEM apps on it. Dont put anything in the program memory. Also install SpbTips & Tricks. Or if you cant get a torrent or something find out how to move your PIE temporary folder to your 1GB storage card. It makes a world of difference.

You will be AMAZED how much CRAP PIE CACHES. It caches basically _every_ image and every page. Talking 20+ mb of **** after 1hr session of surfing.

This is totally fatal to the ROM/RAM resource allocation as the memory management in WM5 is **** and doesnt properly re-allocate empty blocks the key is, sadly for the time being, not to fill it up in the first place.

7) Turn off start menu and window animation. This will rapidly increase flips/redraws and menu access.

8) DO resize your scroll bars. I do it using the tips and tricks tweaks utility from spb which also lets you fool websites into thinking PIE is IE 6.0. I set my horiz and vertical to 6 not 13. This basically gives you 2cm more browsing room!! Stuff fits in now.

9) Turn off error reporting and backlight power saving. When you're done, turn the screen off with the power button instead. Goes into standby then. That timer gobbles cpu cycles and memory as a deamon process in the background otherwise. A timer is an arithmetic operation - ARM aint great at those.

10) Dont use extended themes. They crawl. Stick with a normal VGA theme from http://www.wmthemes.com

Thats all I can think of for now .. but its plenty.

NB: You can get all the Spb stuff to tweak your settings off demonoid.com/torrents if you arent fussed about legality.