After buying my 8390, backlight worked fine only for one week.
ONE WEEK!!!

Now, my phone is one year old, so I dismantled (it's the right word?) it for repair it!
You can't follow the 8380 howto, because they used a different pcb and if someone use a soldering iron will damage it.

You can find the guide clicking on my site (my signature)
home page is only in italian (i'm lazy)
but on the left frame click smartphone
after this is english+italian so maybe you can find without problems

Weird!
I have a vodafone sim card. My sister've a wind sim card.

We have swapped our phones. My sister took my 8390 and i took an old ericsson (a great free upgrade for her )

With the wind sim card, phone lasted for 70 hours, making video, calls and photos.
With my vodafone sim, phone die after 12 hours!!!

Any suggestions? Wind is too expensive for my usage, so don't say: buy a wind sim.
Or is this the problem: my phone have gprs configurated for vodafone only and not for wind, so it can't connect to internet. I have a "pay to use gprs" and it don't seems to do "illegal" connections?

Or is sponsored by wind? 

i have a recent rom:
mms application is Anny way mms and is in english, german, french, italian, spanish. all other mitac apps are in these languages. btw, gapi isn't fixed 

battery lasts for only 12 hours
when battery is over, led blinks red and green  :?:  :?:

manual is updated at july 2004 but: hard reset howto is wrong and no mention of green led blinking 

THIS IS NOT TESTED!

Download the tool pack here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme/projects/xda/tools.html
the binaries are inside of build/

Sign the itsutils.dll with the (gapi solution) code signing pack

then run cmd.exe and goto build/
pmemdump 0x81a00000 0x02000000 mybkuprom.bin

and you get your backup rom 
thx itsme

haven't tried flashing the rom yet cause i wanna use my phone for the last night
before I screw it up....
but i've checked that the first few kb and last few kb of the file i get from this match with the roms i got earlier.

have fun

Edit:
successfully flash my backup rom back to phone with the flash rom tool downloaded earlier
seems this version of bootloader won't check if your rom is a old one or a upgrade
now I think it'll be more convinent to raw write the image to sd card and flash using the bootloader only, haven't tried this yet

Have you tried the ROMreader here?
http://www.modaco.com/index.php?showtopic=200094
please post results... I'd like to upgrade my ROM, it's the oldest there is.

ftp://down:ccmove%2Ecom@211.140.138.2/Upl...90ROMreader.rar
it's the client and the R42CHS simplified chinese rom
don't think anyone here would need this coz english rom or way to dump rom from your phone is not yet available
take a look if you are bored

As far as I know it's not possible. Mitac doesn't have anything available to back up a rom. Besides, it's rom, what's to back up? It's not going anywhere. If you try to flash the phone with some other rom (mitac hasn't and probably never will release an update, assuming they're still in business), it will most likely turn it into an expensive paperweight so there's no point in backing it up.