[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] Steve-C:
Part 2!

2. HSDPA - I live in the UK, but haven't noticed a problem yet with this...

3. Shouldnt be a charge for switching between bands, but with your phone hunting for signals and changing bands all the time, you will find that your battery life will sufffer. Unless you actually need 3G / HSDPA you might want to switch it to stay on a particular band (phone settings). Best bet would be to let it do it's own thing for a while until you see what effect it has on battery performance and then decide if you need to start saving power or not.

5. Opera Mini will run through whatever data connection you have. I think you get a little box up showing when you connect to GPRS, 3G etc (least my phone does). I've used Opera with my WiFi network at home and it hasn't connected to the mobile data network. I would guess this is just a standard built in warning. If you have a WiFi connection and no little box popping up, just ignore the warning.

6. Flashing is totally at your own risk. Yes it can turn your phone into a paper weight (brick). I flashed my last phone to WM6 from WM5 as I wanted some of the functionality of WM6. I am perfectly happy with the stock ROM on my Kaiser (UK o2 network). It is easy enough to do if you can follow instructions. Unless the ROM supplied with your phone is terrible and you HAVE to flash it, it's probably not worth the effort or risk. I've flashed my old phone several times, trying 4 different ROM's (plus the original). This was to get the set-up I needed. The shipped ROM on my Kaiser is fine for my needs so I won't be flashing it.

7. YES! And a hard reset will only return your phone to the state it was when the flashed ROM was originally flashed. EG if you install a new ROM (lets call it ROM A) play around a bit, add apps, then the phone breaks and you have to send it back under warrenty. If you hard reset, you will end up with a phone set-up with the original install of ROM A. AT&T (or whoever you provider is) will spot this in a second and your warrenty will be void. You 'should' be ok if you can flash an original ROM from your provider back onto the phone, but if the problem is one that renders you unable to re-flash the phone, you have a big problem.

8. Some functions may cease to work. Like my old phone lost video calling when I flashed it to WM6. This was a known issue and I don't think anyone ver solved it. I didn't need or want video calling, I did need some things that came with the new ROM so that was ok by me. You may also find that the ROM is unstable and could cause your phone to crash a lot. Worst case scenario, unsucessfully flashing the ROM will leave you with a paper weight. Again, since this is a new phone to you, and you (I gather from your post) have no experience of PDA phones, stick with the stock ROM for a while, get used to it and then if there are shortcomings for your needs, see if any of the other ROM's on offer would solve these shortcomings.

9. In general yes. But you will loose everything and end up with a phone in the same condition as it came out of the box. If you have bricked the phone, the a hard reset will not solve it (I don't think). See above.

10. I have no idea about the AT&T ROM. The o2 ROM I have is pretty free of bloatware. There are a couple of apps I could do without, that bar at the bottom of the screen and the stupid o2 calender function. I have managed to edit the registry (using the PHM RegEdit) to restore the standard calender (hence the usefulness of the RegEdit program, there is no other way to do this) and I'll live with the other, it's not a big enough thing to make me bother finding a suitable ROM and flashing. Again, see above.

11. Hmmm. Basically, flashing will remove everything from the phone and replace it with a completely new operating system designed for a different version of the Kaiser. EG, if you flashed your phone with my o2 ROM, you would get everything that o2 ship their phones with. Likewise if I flashed mine with your AT&T ROM. If a ROM included a demo (or full version) of TomTom, then you would get that. It doesn't reveal 'hidden' software so much as add software that your supplier didn't include as standard. I would bet that most of this software could be installed independently. Again, see above re giving it time before deciding what you NEED the phone to do, and then searching or asking for solutions to that need.

Hope that helps, and thank you for reading the HUGE reply!