[MDA III, XDA III, PDA2k, 9090 Software Upgrading] willpower102:
After trying every single rom on the forum for a week each i'm going to downgrade to wm3 and try and see if there's anything i'll miss besides the persitant storage. For reference i have an sx66 w/ add on camera.

The main issues i have are:

1. Poor performance under a load,

nes emulators, video players, even mp3 players bog down the system. I am talking about playing back the same 150kbps video through tcpmp that i was able too on wm3. Even overclocked to 530, it can't compete with wm3 stock speeds. Ivan w/ ramdisk is currently the closest as of 7/12/06.

2. Poor wifi performance:

Switiching between wifi networks with radio 1.1.15 on wm3 was a breeze. It was fast, always notified correctly and didn't bog down the device. The wifi on wm5 is terrible. For starters you have to have the reset on resume hack turned on, (this turns off the wifi after every resume). So whenever i take a one minute break from the net, it disconnects. (can't turn the suspend timeout up higher or battery life will suffer).

Whenever wm5 tries to connect to a network it takes many times longer than wm3. If it has a wrong key it will some times still try to connect over and over with a 0.0.0.0 ip address. After several days of use logouts rom will keep the activesync ip of 169.254.x.x while OFF the cradle. And ivan w/ramdisk can't browse a network share while connected to wifi, and suffers general wifi connecting issues as well.

3. Poor keyboard performance:

I need to type a lot while i'm out, notes, forums, text messages, and more notes. The keyboard lag and keyboard repeat problems are severe ones that we didn't have to worry about in wm3.

4. Poor phone operation:

As a phone the on screen keys lag, and the keyboard numbers lag. If you do alot of banking or enter sytems with pins it gets old real quick.

Ok. So on the plus side, it looks cool and has all kind of neat apps. But the current functionality is terrible. Ivan's rom is maybe halfway there. The thing is i know we will never have 100% functionality on this device. The wm5 on the wizard doesn't even have that! It works maybe 80% as good as it should. Hopefully Tuma 1.5 will push us just a good bit further.

My solution? Sell the ba and get a wizard. If you do it all on ebay, you can get away with 100-150 dollar price difference once it's said and done. If i had put the 60 hours i've put into this phone into my work instead, i would have been able to buy another phone outright. Don't get me wrong i'm not complaining. I love doing this stuff.

But to all those who's time is worth more than mine, don't bother, just upgrade your phone. Personally i'm going to have to go with an apache through verizon because having EVDO would solve all my wifi-woes!

p.s.- i'm getting ready to go to wm3 for a bit now, my prediction is that after the first hard reset where i loose anything important i'll be back to ivan w/ ramdisk. :D :roll:

[UPDATE] 9/13/06

well, after a little chaos, a corrupted ext_rom, corrupt boot screen, and a 169.254.x.x ip address problem, i'm back to a fully funtional copy of wm3. There is something i noticed that i like WAY more than on wm5.

When you turn on wifi, it disables the GPRS connection so that the network browsing AND the internet explorer both go through wifi. On wm5 when you turn on wifi GPRS connections remain active and the ONLY way that i've seen to fix it is to go through the settings menu and turn it off. This is a pain in the ass when you are switching between the two alot.

I wonder if someone could write a utility for this for wm5, or if they have?

Also, i decided the reason that i have so many problems and others have perfect operation is because of the method of use. I need the pda to be a lifeline to the internet first, a pda second, and a phone / bluetooth last. Other's that don't have this need for constant remote administration won't experience the problems i am having because, just like i haven't even turned on the bluetooth, they probably don't use wifi as much.

[Update] 9/13/06 <evening>

I went back to wm3 for a bit and started messing around with the wifi while heavily documenting it. I also moved back up to wm5 for bit to heavily test the wifi with the same scientific approach and document it. The one i'm on again is Ivan w/ Ramdisk. I'll probably test the aku's after a day or so.

I've done about 20 flashes on this device over the last day and i had a lot of time to read. I had been using magic button on wm5 to constantly close everything but it, vbar, and anything else i tried would often lock up when trying to close the programs or setting windows about a day into use.

Anyway, the point is i'm testing the device for a day or so WITHOUT using magic button and leaving programs open as they were intended to do in wm5. I've already noticed that things i use alot like programs, settings, calender, contacts and messaging run A LOT faster when not closed after each use. I'm monitoring the processes and it seems like they use almost no memory when just idling.

So that's a plus, Don't close programs that you use alot.

The next thing i'm going to test is turning off all the sounds, Remember i have an SX66 which i've heard lots of reports about turning off keyboard sounds, alerts, and even all sounds will speed up the device drastically. So i'm curious to check this out. Maybe it has some problem with cacheing the sounds.

I also noticed that the bottleneck for game emulators in wm3 is the sound. As soon as it's enabled they will drop down to 20 fps. (can't run emulators in wm5 because to os is too heavy) This seems to support that turning off the sounds will improve speed.