WM5 (UK T-Mobile) to WM6 (Black Majik) and the latest (1.43) Radio

[Guest Tony W]

Same here, I installed the HTC Official ROM from Asia, along with Hard-SPL and its much faster on my Vario II.

Black Satin is now available from JJ and I have moved to that now. The change went very smoothly and without a single issue (HardSPL checked of course). I have to say that so far I have seen no difference. Performance and features are just the same - I understand that Black SATIN is based upon a newer core OS set though and that 'may' be even more stable and capable (but yet to be even suggested by anyone as far as I can see).

On Black MAJIK I had not even a single freeze and so I only did soft resets because I'd got in the habit of doing so with the previous WM5 build. I have not had a single Micro SD card issue at all (tempting fate I know). I am going to stop routine soft resets now to see how things go - mind you even Windows XP and Vista like to be restated every now and again so it seems a good idea to 'restart' the Hermes OS too.

My recommendation - go for Black Satin if still on WM5 but if on Black MAJIK already then I'd not bother to cross over unless you have problems. The posts on SATIN over at XDA dev and on 4WinMobile will keep you up to informed on any issues being encountered. I think I am one of the first to move to Black Satin.

Glad to here the post was of help :) .

Regards

[Guest crazyc]

Black Satin is now available from JJ and I have moved to that now. The change went very smoothly and without a single issue (HardSPL checked of course). I have to say that so far I have seen no difference. Performance and features are just the same - I understand that Black SATIN is based upon a newer core OS set though and that 'may' be even more stable and capable (but yet to be even suggested by anyone as far as I can see).

On Black MAJIK I had not even a single freeze and so I only did soft resets because I'd got in the habit of doing so with the previous WM5 build. I have not had a single Micro SD card issue at all (tempting fate I know). I am going to stop routine soft resets now to see how things go - mind you even Windows XP and Vista like to be restated every now and again so it seems a good idea to 'restart' the Hermes OS too.

My recommendation - go for Black Satin if still on WM5 but if on Black MAJIK already then I'd not bother to cross over unless you have problems. The posts on SATIN over at XDA dev and on 4WinMobile will keep you up to informed on any issues being encountered. I think I am one of the first to move to Black Satin.

Glad to here the post was of help :) .

Regards

I would second the points made above.

I have moved from Majik to Satin, and whilst I am happy with Satin, I had no complaints with Majik, it was excellent.

[Guest tigersim303]

Hi Tony,

Do you still have your UK T-Mobile ROM? The camera in my Vario II (running Black Satin) has borked itself and it's looking like a warranty issue :)

Many thanks!

sim

[Guest DarkWanderer]

Hi

I've been following this guide and others regarding upgrading my newly purchased "unwanted upgrade" mint condition Vario ii on eBay. I was unable to back up my ROM due to the device was application locked and the process wouldn't work. So I went ahead and Installed HardSPL and the cooked radio rom to remove network and CID lock so I could run it on Orange. That's as far as I got. I considered installing the official update but thought I'd see what people were saying about Satin when it came out. I kept checking back to the Black homepage because JJ had removed the download link while he worked on Satin. However now it is available for download there are 3 different versions Normal, Medium and Light. Does anyone know what the differences between the versions are apart from size?

Thanks

[Guest Pondrew]

I think you guys are brave putting an official rom on your devices. Seems an un-necessary risk given there's offical WM6 roms available for the HTC Hermes.

I'm running the Dopod one on my Vario II and I've been very pleased with the improvement over T-Mobiles old WM5 rom...

[Guest MikeSel]

I think you guys are brave putting an official rom on your devices. Seems an un-necessary risk given there's offical WM6 roms available for the HTC Hermes.

Do you not mean unofficial?

I guess it is, but i thought the official one was from asia or somewhere?

I am happy standing out from the crowd and having a phone that looks much nicer and is much quicker then the official one.. I seemed to be rebooting all the time until I switched! I still get CRAP phone signal mind you, but that looks like a provider problem! Only another 16 months left in my contract :)

[Guest jchamier]

I guess it is, but i thought the official one was from asia or somewhere?

True, but all that means is a built in utility that knows about Far East and Australian networks for auto configuration, and it has a dopod splash screen. Otherwise it works really well and has fixed all the issues I had with my Vario II. Very impressive, and recommended.

Although most of the fixes are probably WM6, or the new radio, rather than being 'official' - so any WM6 Rom will give 99% of the same benefits.

[Guest Tony W]

I think you guys are brave putting an official rom on your devices. Seems an un-necessary risk given there's offical WM6 roms available for the HTC Hermes.

I'm running the Dopod one on my Vario II and I've been very pleased with the improvement over T-Mobiles old WM5 rom...

There are a great many people that have upgraded and it may actually be safer to use one of these 'cooked' roms versus the official one. I say that because someone known as Olipro developed a new bit of software used to actually load the OS ROM. Called Hard SPL it really does minimise the chance of you completely wrecking (bricking) your device. On the other hand using one of the official ROMs makes no such promise.

Of course if you follow the clear instructions with any ROM upgrade (Radio or OS) then the chances of bricking your device are very small indeed. The biggest threat might be from a power failure during the flash upgrade (perhaps something in favour of a laptop-based upgrade where you have a battery to keep the laptop going...).

You can get lots of advice from these forums (esp XDA Dev) on such upgrades and the indications are that some of the 'cooked' ROMs might actually be better than the official ones (because known faults have already been addressed). It's all a matter of choice. Of course there is a chance that a recently cooked ROM may have faults - so it may be worth waiting to see how the forum discussions on a particular ROM go before taking the leap.

I suspect that the enormous effort being expended to create WM6 OS ROMs will now die down somewhat - but only time will tell. The same people doing all this 'cooking' of ROMs are also providing cab files for many programs and features 'ripped' from other WM5 and WM6 devices - so there are lots of add-on goodies too if you want to try them.

Regards

[Guest Pondrew]

Its a matter of choice. The most damage from distribution of roms is done when people attempt to install the wrong rom onto their device. Something we sadly have seen a lot of over the years. So if you don't want to risk losing your expensive device then don't.

There's also copyright infringement and the end user licence agreements to take into account...

...Still, as long as the forum rules aren't being cut in half with a chainsaw I'm happy to make my own decisions on such things and let others do the same. :)

EDIT: oh, and the idea that an unofficial rom is safer then sticking with official releases for your device? Interesting idea, can't say that makes sense to me.

[Guest crazyc]

I guess the cooment about "safer" depends on how you look at it.

The advent of HardSPL has made a fantastic improvment as far as custom roms are concerned. My intial thought was that at least the official ROMS will have been thoroughly tested before release - but then I remember WM5.....With the unofficial ROMs if there is an issue then there are people on it straight away trying to fix it.

The benchmarking that has just been done shows that although the DOPOD Rom is an improvement on previous ones, it (per SPB benchmark) performs worse than the majority of the custom roms on almost all scores. Having said that, I have used Black Satin (Lite version being the quickest) and Schaps full ROM, and per the benchmarking Satin should have been quicker, but that is not the feeling I get from using it. Obviously this does not test reliablility etc and is just an indicator.

Schaps ROM seems much more open to recooking as well. I have started to strip out some unused bits and add some of my own (so far so good). The lack of rgus in Satin makes that a bit more difficult.

[Guest jimbouk]

Its a matter of choice. The most damage from distribution of roms is done when people attempt to install the wrong rom onto their device. Something we sadly have seen a lot of over the years. So if you don't want to risk losing your expensive device then don't.

There's also copyright infringement and the end user licence agreements to take into account...

...Still, as long as the forum rules aren't being cut in half with a chainsaw I'm happy to make my own decisions on such things and let others do the same. :)

EDIT: oh, and the idea that an unofficial rom is safer then sticking with official releases for your device? Interesting idea, can't say that makes sense to me.

The better cooked roms are as stable and simply faster than most of the official roms (the AT&T and HTC/Dopod ones). They have been developed by device users with plenty of testing by themselves and others - and they have managed to free up loads of storage space too.

Considering the advice that users have at their fingertips, I am not surprised there are now 10's of 1000's of WM6 cooked rom users happily using their fast, stable devices.

[Guest MarkNi]

Great post, I just upgraded using your guide last night and all went well.

I have two questions I hope you could answer.

1) How can I change the two soft keys (default Calendar and Contacts) I was able to change these in the old version.

2) I previously had separate menus for SMS and MMS, I now have one combined mail box for this and it only appears to have SMS settings and not MMS. So I have no MMS. When I used the T-Mobile site to configure MMS, I only get the first PIN code SMS and not the second one that actually does the configuring. I also downloaded a cab for UK T-Mobile settings, this got my GPRS/3G working, but still no MMS.

Hope you can help,

Mark.

[Guest crazyc]

Great post, I just upgraded using your guide last night and all went well.

I have two questions I hope you could answer.

1) How can I change the two soft keys (default Calendar and Contacts) I was able to change these in the old version.

2) I previously had separate menus for SMS and MMS, I now have one combined mail box for this and it only appears to have SMS settings and not MMS. So I have no MMS. When I used the T-Mobile site to configure MMS, I only get the first PIN code SMS and not the second one that actually does the configuring. I also downloaded a cab for UK T-Mobile settings, this got my GPRS/3G working, but still no MMS.

Hope you can help,

Mark.

Don't know about T mobile settings - I used Rabdo's Orange cab.

The change is because the Arcsoft software that deals with texts/mmss has been updated. 3.5 had separate boxes, 4.0 combined them. This has caused some issues with media within MMS and I think the final Black ROM will return to 3.5 if the issues have not been fixed.

[Guest jonc]

2) I previously had separate menus for SMS and MMS, I now have one combined mail box for this and it only appears to have SMS settings and not MMS. So I have no MMS. When I used the T-Mobile site to configure MMS, I only get the first PIN code SMS and not the second one that actually does the configuring. I also downloaded a cab for UK T-Mobile settings, this got my GPRS/3G working, but still no MMS.

Create a new MMS. Using the right soft-key, select menu, options, message options. This should bring up a very similar set of screens as in WM5. Quite why they decided to put it there I'll never know...