[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] sbarne3:
note... I posted a message over on PDAPhoneHome.com and everythingwm.com and then found this thread... since it is similar in nature to my questions, I thought I would reply to this one instead of starting a new thread.

Greetings fellow frustrated Saga owners!

Wish I hadn't updated…

I, like many of you, now wish that I had not installed the update on my Saga.

It worked great before!... But now I am experiencing many of the same bugs that have already been mentioned on this forum.

I am pretty tolerant of bugs in general and I don't mind trying to find workarounds for them. Often, the workarounds add more functionality then would normally be there anyway… Plus I enjoy learning how things work.

Biggest problem…

The one thing that I can't stand is the loss of signal strength I have seen since updating! My data connection dies several times per day and I have to soft reset to get it back. Sometimes it is hours before I realize this has happened so I am not always getting my email right away. (Who has time to check their phone every few minutes to see if it has stopped synching or not?)

Other times it seems like it just stops synching for no reason. I use both an exchange server (MailStreet) and Windows Live and they both have this problem. Sometimes I check my phone when I go on break at Noon and I will notice that it hasn't synched since 9:30 AM or sometimes longer than that, yet there is no error message (like it tried to synch and couldn't) and I open the browser and can get on the internet. It is like it doesn't even try to synch. I have both of them set to synch every 15 minutes (greatly increases battery life btw) 24 hours a day. Then there are other times, it synchs more often than every 15 minutes… so I don't know what is going on!

Getting worse?…

Is it just me or do the signal issues seem to be getting worse? Or maybe it is just in my area? This past week I have actually started getting errors saying that it couldn't connect (whereas before, it just wouldn't connect... no errors)... and it seems to be happening more frequently.

Finally… my question…

What I would like to know is if anyone is working on a "cooked" ROM for the Saga. Either 6.1 or 6.5 would work for me. I have heard some good things about 6.5 (like dramatically increased performance), but I haven't heard about anyone working on this for the Saga. Waiting for Verizon to come out with another update is just a lesson in frustration and honestly I am not sure I would trust it if they did release one.

I consider myself to be a pretty tech savvy person and even enjoy some light programming on occasion (the .net framework is awesome… Something Microsoft got right!!), yet I am reasonably certain that cooking up my own ROM is beyond my skills (though I am willing to give it a shot if someone can point me to a clear guide)

Follow-up question…

If no one is working on this and no helpful guide is available, then I am wondering if a ROM from a similar phone can be used (maybe with a few modifications required?). For instance, is the Epix similar enough that we could use a ROM designed for it on the Saga? (There is a 6.5 ROM for the Epix that can be found here) Or does the fact that its hardware is GSM only make it out of the question?

More questions…

If using a ROM from a similar phone is possible is there a way to backup the current ROM so that it could be restored if the other ROM doesn't work? If so then I would probably be willing to use my phone as a guinea pig. Yes, I understand that there is a possibility that it could brick my phone and I am willing to accept the risk if there is a good chance that it will work. I have an old blackberry that I can use if something goes really wrong.

So I guess the real question is… How similar do the phones have to be? Or does it have to be identical hardware?

Any insight would be appreciated...

Steven