[Epic 4G General] fsc137:
I'm a noob with android phone development, but I have 30 years engineering experience with computers (particularly Posix) and digital radio.

I bought my Samsung the first day, and I was disappointed at how much did not work on it: the digital connection was unreliable (even though I'm in a solid Sprint 4G area), skype didn't work, the camera didn't work well, the GPS didn't work reliably. There were various apps I had no interest in (NASCAR) that I couldn't delete.

Now it all works to my satisfaction, after a couple months of thrashing about.

This is a brief memo on what I have learned.

A couple of points:

1) Despite the use of hash codes, etc., writing to memory and the SD card is not always reliable. Make sure you have a good-quality USB cable! Get a high-quality SD card. If a memory write procedure doesn't work, do it again, possibly after a re-format.

2) Leftover data in the cashes and even on the SD card can result in failure or apparent success followed by bugs.

3) It's not that hard to restore everything from scratch. Gmail will backup your mail, calendar, and contacts in the cloud. The market remembers what you bought and will let you reload it. You can simply copy the full contents of your SD card to your PC and write it back.

I've seen a variety of bugs after semi-successful ROM flashes. Here's what I did to get everything working bug-free.

1) I copied everything on my SD card to my PC.

2) Removed SD card from Epic, put it in a USB adapter directly on my PC and used the GParted bootable disk to format a FAT32 partition, an ext-4 partition, and a swapfile. See this:

http://lifehacker.com/#!5350347/speed-up-and-back-up-your-rooted-android-phone

3) With the SD card removed, I used Odin

http://xdaforums.com/wiki/index.php?title=Samsung_Galaxy_S/SPH-D700#Odin_Stock_Flashing

to flash

Stock EB13 CW3+ext4

CW = Clockwork Mod --- google it.

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=853209

Note --- this gives you an ext4 file system, not the standard Samsung system,

and it roots your phone and installs the EB13 modem and kernel, all in one step.

I then installed the newly-reformatted SD card, booted a few times, then booted to CW3, let it do its thing, then used CW3 to wipe the battery cache and rebooted.

At this point, I had a Stock EB13 system modified only with CW3 and ext4 file system and no applications.

4) Installed Bonsai4All 3.0.0

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=976864

by simply copying the ZIP file to my SD card and flashing it with CW3.

I then immediately used CW3 (advanced menu) to "fix permissions".

5) Booted the phone, put in my favorite wallpaper, moved the icons around, and installed my apps directly from the market. Re-connected my bluetooth headset and home wifi.

6) Did the "screen rotation lag fix" described here:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=926098

A good test of this and the GPS is the app "Google sky", which should track smoothly as you move your phone around. Polaris should be in the right place, etc.

7) Did the modem parameters fix described here:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=925898

except that I set EntryRX to -100 instead of -110

8) re-connected to my PC, and copied my music and document files (nothing else) to the SD card.

Now, at long last, everything works!

In gratitude, I made donations to various people who did the work referenced above.