[Touch Pro2, Tilt 2 Windows Mobile General] EWAdams:
Got a stock Sprint CDMA Touch Pro 2 (WM 6.1) from a European seller on EBay about a week ago. Put my Vodafone SIM card in it and away we go... worked fine. I unlocked it with Olipro's web site and replaced the radio with his 2.05.00WV so I can use it with GSM carriers in the USA when I go there. So far so good, and I began piling on a lot of software -- upgrades of things I had been running on my hx4705 iPAQ. SPB Pocket Plus, Pocket Plus Diary, SKTools, Flexmail, and so on and so forth. I sync it with Thunderbird using Birdiesync (which I can recommend).

At some point in this process it began to get very slow and flaky, with lots of crashes. I began to get worried and removed Pocket Plus Diary -- I have over 1600 contacts. That sped it up some, but I noticed my battery was draining at a terrible rate. I had installed Advanced Config and set it for maximum performance, but most of those settings have to do with cache sizes and don't actually burn CPU time. I also set all the power management settings to Enabled. But it was still dropping like a rock within a couple of hours.

Eventually I began to despair -- slow, buggy, no battery life... I thought I had bought a lemon. I was on the point of flashing somebody else's ROM (without knowing who in the hell's I should choose -- everybody brags about their speed but few brag about their battery life). I decided to hard-reset the thing and see what happened. I charged it back up to about 67%, left everything else alone and put it in Suspend Mode by my bed. (No Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, of course, I'm not an idiot.) I live in an area with good coverage.

In the morning it was dead as a doornail and I was sure that I had bought a pup. I can't deal with a phone that I can't put by my bedside for 8 hours -- I travel constantly and don't always have access to power. But since all the software was off it again, I starting putting things back, very slowly and carefully.

Long story short, I now seem to have very good battery life indeed WITHOUT flashing a new ROM. I'm not entirely sure why, but these are the steps I've taken, just in case it helps somebody else:

Touch FLO 3D off. It's a kludge anyway. I'm stylus guy.

Flashed yet another radio, 2.32.00WU

Phone network set to GSM only, not Global. (Settings > Phone > Network)

Backlight auto adjust is OFF, backlight turns off after 2 minutes on battery.

Device turns off after 3 minutes on battery.

Turned off Error Reporting. (Settings > System > Error Reporting)

Turned on all the Power Mangement features in AdvancedConfig.

Made a lot of registry tweaks recommended by Ninja Duck over at PPCGeeks. HAICH TEE TEE PEE ://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=110813 I didn't use his cab, just did them by hand. Among other things it turns off OBEX -- although I only turn on Bluetooth as necessary anyway.

HKLM\Drivers\BuiltIn\Battery "PollInterval" set to 20000 instead of 5000.

In the Comm Manager, I keep data connections OFF until needed. No push mail, weather, etc. for me. When I want to read mail, I'll check for mail.

ALSO using RedFrogFish's Data Controller 1.0.1.8 just to be dead certain data connections are disabled.

Renamed OperaL.exe in Windows to OperaL-.exe. This prevents Opera 9 from starting on boot.

Messages > Options > my account > Send/Receive Schedule > Automatic Send/Receive set to Manually.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\SDCARD\ClientDrivers\Cl ass\SDMemory_Class "DisablePowerManagement" = dword : 00000000

Removed PKG.lnk, poutlook.lnk, and HTCStartUp.lnk from Windows\StartUp. I dunno what these do but I don't seem to need them.

Put SBP Pocket Plus back on but NOT Pocket Diary.

One other thing -- on the strength of good experiences with PocketInformant on my old iPAQ, I originally installed the latest edition (9) on the Rhodium, but after the hard-reset I didn't reinstall it. It's slower than M$'s own Contact and Calendar managers, and while those aren't as good, they're good enough -- much better than they were under WM2003SE. I don't entirely trust PI. It's big and I suspect it of grabbing things that don't belong to it.

Bottom line: I am a MUCH happier camper. I don't know which of these was the most effective, but the phone is now both fast and easy on the battery. The battery savings might all be coming from the GSM Only setting and the new radio, for all I know.

Sorry this is so long-winded. I just wanted to say... if you're suffering... don't give up! I got much better battery life WITHOUT having to choose and flash somebody else's ROM. (I don't mind flashing ROMs but I'm damned if I can figure out how to choose one. Somebody needs to do a big review with a side-by-side table of features.)