[HTC Excalibur] xdadevnoob:
Unresponsive, Freezing, Ready to Smash!

I apologize in advance for the length of this post.

I usually pride myself on being able to research a new toy before I buy it. Somehow my new Dash has managed to destroy my pride. I read lots of user reviews from all over the internet about the Dash before buying a pair for myself and wife. Overall, I found glowing reviews, and of course as always there were some naysayers, but the ratio of good:bad was something like 9:1 so i figured it was a good bet. I feel like I lost on this one.

I have the Dash which came with WM6. Most of the features on this phone are very nice, but the ones that have me scratching my head are:

- It freezes... to the point where I need to take the battery out to get the system back up again. At first I thought it was my fault because I added too many email accounts: outlook/exchange, gmail, windows live, yahoo and aol. I removed yahoo and aol but I would still have freezing while viewing email. Based on all of those glowing reviews I expected the phone + OS to be able to handle at least those 3 accounts without problems.

Email was the feature I spent most of my time playing with initially, so the freezing would occur while I was viewing the inbox and also while viewing individual messages (plain-text without attachents). When I started spending less time on email, then I realized that the freezing is also happening everywhere else!! It's usually after I've done a good amount of surfing around the interface. Seems like this WM6 OS is buggy. After a certain amount of loading and unloading different screens within the OS, it just locks up.

My wife's Dash has not had this problem, but I suspect it's because she doesn't spend much time surfing around the interface. She only has a very light volume of phone calls, and other than that she leaves windows media player running with her playlist while she plays the included bubble game.

- Slow... 1-2 second delay between any screen change (home screen to start menu, settings menu, etc etc)

- Memory usage... I'm assuming that WM6 is optimized to make good use of available memory, but usually task manager shows between 1MB and 6MB free, with NOTHING RUNNING... I really don't know whether I should even care, but it seems a little bit fishy.

So far I have installed only one third party app: google maps; and i have setup those email accounts listed above, which of course means that I have some mail messages now in the phone along with contacts. Wouldn't this phone be able to handle this much without turning into a sloth? Am i expecting too much?

I thought I should look for some updates, and the t-mobile site currently offers me a "T-Mobile Dash Software (Version 1.22.531.4)" - BUT the ROM version already installed on my phone is 1.22.531.6

Now I realize that the users who were giving very good reviews were the ones who had WM5; apparently this phone ran very nicely with that version.

I need some suggestions:

Should I downgrade my firmware to the earlier revision officially offered by t-mobile?

OR

Is it possible for me to downgrade my Dash to WM5?

OR

Should I wait until t-mobile and/or microsoft offer an update (this might never happen)?

OR

Should I dump this otherwise attractive phone for something else?

OR

Should I just live with it?

OR

Should I never post on this forum again?

Thanks for taking the time!!!!