[HD2 General] ASCIIker:
greetings all!

i am a 2 years Tytn2 (HTC Kaiser) user. i just got a shiny new HD2 two days ago. after doing several weeks of reading and research, i knew what to expect. the essence of it was that the HD2 rocks, but the SMS lag issue and dodgy battery life can be crippling to the experience.

i am writing this as a guide for others like myself that have the following requirements/goals with their new HD2s:

1. want to migrate all the SMS messages from previous phone, using either PIMBackup or MS MyPhone.

2. are comfortable with disabling HTC Sense Messaging and reverting back to the native WM6.5 messaging (threaded or classic).

3. want to have an HD2 that plays well with PIMBackup and MS MyPhone so that further backups can be made on the HD2 in case a hard reset is needed, or to flash another ROM, or to migrate to still another Windows Phone.

with the above goals and my numerous different attempts and approaches, i also observed the following "bugs" in addition to the known lagging issues when more than a few SMS messages are present:

1. on a fresh HD2, the obvious approach of restoring with PIMBackup prevents Sense from correctly building its threads. the sorting of the final threads after restoring 6000 messages when viewed in HTC messaging was extremely jumbled up. opening a particular thread took ages (as expected) but it did open correctly and properly sorted. just the main thread list was wacky.

2. on a fresh HD2, MS MyPhone was able to restore in a manner friendly to HTC messaging. HTC messaging showed the main threads list correctly and each thread was well formed. the catch? it took ages! it took almost 8 hours for 6000 messages!

3. either way, NEW SMS messages after completing either of the above restore methods would create a different thread! on closer inspection, i noticed that contacts that were present in my phone ONLY were unaffected by this "bug". however, contacts that were present in BOTH my phone AND my SIM caused HTC messaging to create new threads for SMS messages arriving from such contacts. this means that my restored data was in another thread and the new data received on the new HD2 was in a new thread. WTF?!?

thus, my conclusion was that this is ****! not only does it lag, but it is also not friendly with PIMBackup or MyPhone. on top of it all, once you have your migrated data, newer messages are not added on to existing threads for contacts present in both the phone and the SIM.

what follows is my final idiot-proof tutorial for SMS bliss on the HD2 while maintaining migrated data as well as maintaining the ability to safely migrate it further to another Windows Phone device.

1. first, you have to be willing to sacrifice any new SMS messages on your HD2 that was captured and threaded by HTC messaging. see my note below for more details.

2. go here and get "Zenyee Disable HTC Messaging 1.2.CAB". this wonderful cab is already known to a lot of HD2 users apparently.

3. install the cab and let it soft reset.

4. after the auto soft reset, disable Sense on the home screen.

5. now disable windows mobile's native threaded SMS support by toggling from 0 to 1 the following registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Inbox\Settings\OEM\SMSInboxThreadingDisabled

6. soft reset!

7. now keep your PIM backup handy from your previous device. in my case, this was taken on my Tytn2 where no horrible HTC messaging exists to mess up the data (see my note below)

8. fire up pimbackup and select the archive for restoration. remember to enable "delete all previous messages" (see my note below)

9. let pimbackup perform the restore! with the Sense home screen disabled and no HTC messaging service running thanks to the cab in step 2, you will notice the true speed of the snapdragon processor! my 6000 messages were restored in less than 10 minutes!

10. if you like windows mobile threaded SMS view, go ahead and undo the change made in step 5 and soft reset!

11. after the soft reset, you will again notice the speed of the snapdragon processor. the threads were built in less than 15 minutes!

12. now you can enable the Sense home screen and enjoy the SMS bliss!

catches! there are always catches! the cab mentioned above and my tutorial works perfectly fine on my stock ROM. however, when trying to open SMS messages from the messaging tab within Sense, the device will try to load HTC messaging but no thread will be visible. also, trying to send a message from the call history invoked from the dialer will also not work (because the call history is also part of Sense). similarly, tapping the notification area to reach a new SMS will also bring you to a blank list of threads within HTC messaging.

but the lock screen will take you to the native SMS view just fine! SMS alert tones work just fine! the "new SMS" icon on the notification area appears just fine (but reaching the SMS from the notification area is no longer possible)!

all in all, shame on HTC for showing so much promise with so little testing. it looks nice and professional but its nothing but fluff and eye candy when theres a lot of data. the native implementation by MS is much much better and efficient and almost equally usable because of the HD2's huge screen size.

NOTE: i have noticed that HTC messaging seems to use the SAME database as the native messaging. however, it seems to build its threads within a DIFFERENT "folder" in the native messaging database. this folder is called "Conversations" and will be visible once you activate the native view using the above tutorial. of course, pimbackup will have nuked the contents of this folder if you enabled the option as suggested in step 8. it MIGHT be possible to move messages out of this custom "Conversations" folder back into the native inbox folder. so the only opportunity to try to move the contents of the "Conversations" folder is before step 8. but i strongly suspect that this will confuse the native messaging's ability to build its threads after you migrate archived data on top of new data. i also suspect that creating a pimbackup file on such data will keep the conversations folder in the backup file, thus bloating the backup file. similarly, MyPhone MIGHT also upload the conversations folder redundantly. for me, i only had to sacrifice 1.5 days of new messages but i gained a lot more as described in the requirements earlier! so i recommend letting pimbackup nuke the contents of the folder...then you can nuke the folder itself after you complete my tutorial.