[Advantage X7500, MDA Ameo ROM Development] vma:
Hi,

This is just a sum up of my last two day's experience flashing my Athena.

When I got it from eBay, it hat the german WM5 installed. Though I speak German, I did not want a german Firmware, so I installed Michy's WM6.1.

I was quite happy with it, but one thing annoyed me: on the original WM5, I could scroll in IE by tilting the device and Opera worked quite well, too.

On Michy's firmware, that functionality lacked somehow.

What I never got used to, was the huge size of icon's and menu's, so I started to use RealVGA. Unfortunatly the phone dialer doesn't like it, so I had to install an alternative software for it.

Over all, the phone worked pretty OK.

Because I got the swine flue, I had some extra time on my own, specially inbetween the fevers and so I decided to try out AP40, specially in order to get the SPL35 done for future WM6.5 releases.

1) AP40

The install went through fine and I had no problems.

First thing I checked was WIFI, because of the dreaded MAC-loss, but WIFI worked straight ahead.

I finished syncing, rebuilding all links in Start Menu and was happy about the new firmware...

...until I tried to switch on WIFI again. It could see my AP's, but Athena would not connect to any.

2) WM6.5

Because I did not find any fix for that, but found a few posts of others complaining about the same problem with AP40, I moved on and installed avengerpenguin's WM6.5.

While the ROM is great and the only bug I noticed was the wrong mapping of the FUNCTION key, I discovered something else:

WM6.5 sucks!

Huge icons, in a kind of honeycomb arrangement, making you have to scroll forever until the required icon is found.

Everything slow like hell (and Athena's CPU is fast enough, I would say).

Also, the menu structure is ridiculous. Makes no sense at all.

3) Back to Michy WM6.1

At then end, I went back to the ROM I had in the beginning of this journey. Now I need to rebuild all the Start Menu links (stupid me, I deleted the backup). It's about 30-40 programs I have installed on my SD - what the heck.

Conclusions:

1) AP40 has indeed a WIFI problem besides the missing MAC. This renders AP40 pretty useless to me.

2) WM6.5 sucks big time. I hate it.

3) Not sure if I should try an official WM6.0 ROM, before restoring all links. Curious about IE supporting the tilting to scroll.

4) My next phone will be an iPhone. Yes, I said it. Here is why:

- best browser around

- has some great applications

- best touch screen around

- just works

Perhaps I am getting old, but I do feel frustrated of having to flash all these firmware and none is giving all I need. Each firmware has something great but lacks something else.

Of course it's not the cookers fault - they are doing a great job.

It rather seems that Microsoft and the Provider (not even HTC's fault), just don't seem to give a F*** to their customer's satisfaction.

Example: How can it be possible that a device as the Athena, with such a big screen, has to be put up with the same menu's like a QVGA device? It almost hurts the eye to have such big menu's and icons.

Of course, you can install RealVGA, but then half of the programs don't work properly...

I just hope the company switches provider soon and gives me the option to pay the price difference for the iPhone.

Cheers,

vma