A sordid tale...

[Guest bendalton]

Foreword

Let this be a cautionary tale for you fearless, early-adopters out there.

The Set Up

This past summer, I purchased a used ATT SMT5600 running Windows Mobile 2003se after selling my MPx200 w/ WM2003 on ebay. I am, and always have been, an early adopter. I alway lust after the latest-and-greatest gadgets and software. I had a great experience with my mpx which maybe froze once every 3 weeks.

The Drama

After the announcement of WM5, I began to scour forums and search the web for any hint at an upgrade for my smt from Audiovox. I saw that dell was going to offer updates for their pdas as well as hp. I figured that since the smt was THE poster-boy for windows mobile here in the US from microsoft that SURELY there would be an update.

I waited, waited, and waited. There was no update to be had. Finally I started hearing about a version of WM5 that was installed on one of the pocket-pc based smartphones. People were reporting great things including fast startup times and an improved interface. By this point I was drooling.

Finally, there was word that a version of WM5 had been leaked for the Typhoon class phones. I found a link with instructions and waited on p2p until I finally found a complete installer.

I flashed my bootloader and installed wm5 as fast as I could after arriving home from work. Wow it was nice.

I couldn't wait until there was an updated version. Sure there were a few setbacks... but who needs a functioning camera anyway?! Voicedial?! Who cares!

I loaded up my 1gig minisd card and loved automatically syncing my shows from my media center pc. I was showing this thing off left and right.

After about a month, I had a problem. I turned the phone off... then back on and I noticed that it was taking an EXTRA long time to boot. Finally i got a windows error and it came up to the home screen and showed no signal. Oh well I thought, time for a soft-reset. The soft reset did NOTHING! Same problem. Okay, hard reset. Same thing.

Crap! I had lost the WM5 image in a hard drive failure. But, after a day of searching, found it on p2p again. I finally re-imaged my wonderful SMT (which I had finally corrected all the settings to work with Cingular).

Again, I was in love... that had to be a fluke... what a weird thing I thought.

Then.. it started happening. With increasing frequency this problem would happen. I was always around the apartment, so a quick reflash and a re-sync w/ outlook and all would be nearly back to normal. An annoyance, yes. But not a serious issue. Or so I thought..

Finally, I traveled back to my home town for thanksgiving. Along the way, my phone had it's problem happen again. This time, I was stuck w/o a way to correct the issue for a week in a tiny town in Indiana. Not good.

I finally was able to re-flash the phone on my arrival home. Sure enough, my next trip out of town brought the same result. This time, I was forced to sit on a very important conference call from a payphone on a busy street. I had had it.

Lesson number one:

Do not use pre-release software in any mission-critical application.

So I started researching how to turn my phone back to the original OS. After much searching and reading, I realized lesson two.

Lesson number two:

Do not use pre-release software in any mission-critical application ESPECIALLY without making a restorable backup first!

I was lost. Finally i found some information on the web about manually reflashing the bootloader. I ended up with a gazillion step process to reflash the bootloader and reload an OS.

The good news is that all my efforts were successful. I had WM2003se back on my phone! The interesting news was that this was an Orange rom and my phone now thought it was officially an HTC! Oh well I thought... no big deal.....

EXCEPT, Orange phones are application locked by default. Yes you can unlock them by contacting orange w/ your imei number... but my phone couldn't be found in their database (*sarcasm* I wonder why? */sarcasm*). Hours of searching later, I found a solution to my problem and was finally able to unlock my phone.

At this point I made a FULL backup.

My message to everyone else out there: Whatever you do, please be certain of the consequences before you go and mess around w/ something you rely on for communication. Listen to people who say that something isn't ready for prime-time and shouldn't be installed. And for God's sake, make a FULL backup before you do anything like this.

Thanks for reading!

[Guest Disco Stu]

Thanks for sharing :)

What a beautifully eloquent report of the risks of installing unofficial software.

[Guest tomsull]

Out of curiosity, since you are running an Orange ROM image, does your radio always report it was ROAMING in the US? You might want to get the AT&T and/or Cingular Radio stack back in there, as it would likely (true others?) give better signal coverage. I have one with the Orange ROM and it prefers AT&T over Cingular, but says it's roaming. Couldn't get GPRS internet to work either, so I'm going back to the AT&T image.

[Guest Dr Who]

I'm amazed you got it back. I would have had an expensive paper weight on my desk in the same situation.

[Guest awarner [MVP]]

Out of curiosity, since you are running an Orange ROM image, does your radio always report it was ROAMING in the US? 

The phone should not report roaming because of the ROM, roaming will down to the SIM and network.