Windows Mobile 6! Now on my phone!

I have the Cingular 8525 as my cell phone/PDA. It comes with Windows Mobile 5. Which isn't bad.... It does have some querks about it and some things are hard to do. But overall, it's a HIGHLY functional OS for a phone/PDA.

They have released Windows Mobile 6. I have read about this upgrade, and it looks like it's going to be awesome. However, they did not release for my phone. :( (or my boss's and he's not happy about it either)

Well, I did some research and found out they they were eventually going to release WM6 for my phone... probably 4th quarter this year. Well, last night, I did some more research and found some people at had already gotten their hands on it! LOOOOOONG story short, I spent about 7-8 hours (only stopping to eat) reading, researching, hacking, flashing ROMs (which is basically erasing and reinstalling the OS for the phone) more reading and research, more hacking, more flashing ROMs and more and more stuff... it was a long and painful experience.... but it paid off!!! I now have a fully operational Windows Mobile 6 phone!

The UI is cleaner, nicer, and has a lot more options. (including some that I was really wanting in WM5 that I thought should be there, but wasn't)

Also, other news, I figured out how to get my personal email to work in the way that I wanted to on my phone.... So now I can be even more efficient with my email (both work and personal) I had my personal email working somewhat previously, but not efficiently.

For you techs, here was my problem...

I set up an email account on my phone... it would receive the email... however, next time it would send/receive, it would delete the email off my phone (which was every 15 mins) This is a problem 'cause I don't always check my personal email every 15 mins. The problem was that it was a POP3 type account.

What I needed was a IMAP type account. But GMail doesn't support IMAP. :( and I most certainly didn't want to change from GMail. So, after much research and with much regret and dislike, I found out that AOL was my best option. (i know AOL is the worst thing I could have chosen, but they are the only people that have a free email service with unlimited storage (or close to unlimited) that supported IMAP)

Here's what I did... I setup an email account on my phone... the incoming email was the AOL IMAP server. (I had GMail automatically forward all email to my AOL account) and the cool part.... I set up the outgoing email to be sent from my GMail account! By using IMAP, the phone will "sync" rather than send/receive as it did with POP3.

I tested this throughly and it works GREAT! I can now "SYNC" every 5 mins without fear of not having the email on my phone.