Greetings fellow frustrated Saga owners!

Wish I hadn't updated…
I, like many of you, now wish that I had not installed the update on my Saga.
It worked great before!... But now I am experiencing many of the same bugs that have already been mentioned on this forum.
I am pretty tolerant of bugs in general and I don't mind trying to find workarounds for them. Often, the workarounds add more functionality then would normally be there anyway… Plus I enjoy learning how things work.

Biggest problem…
The one thing that I can't stand is the loss of signal strength I have seen since updating! My data connection dies several times per day and I have to soft reset to get it back. Sometimes it is hours before I realize this has happened so I am not always getting my email right away. (Who has time to check their phone every few minutes to see if it has stopped synching or not?)
Other times it seems like it just stops synching for no reason. I use both an exchange server (MailStreet) and Windows Live and they both have this problem. Sometimes I check my phone when I go on break at Noon and I will notice that it hasn't synched since 9:30 AM or sometimes longer than that, yet there is no error message (like it tried to synch and couldn't) and I open the browser and can get on the internet. It is like it doesn't even try to synch. I have both of them set to synch every 15 minutes (greatly increases battery life btw) 24 hours a day. Then there are other times, it synchs more often than every 15 minutes… so I don't know what is going on!

Getting worse?…
Is it just me or do the signal issues seem to be getting worse? Or maybe it is just in my area? This past week I have actually started getting errors saying that it couldn't connect (whereas before, it just wouldn't connect... no errors)... and it seems to be happening more frequently.

Finally… my question…
What I would like to know is if anyone is working on a "cooked" ROM for the Saga. Either 6.1 or 6.5 would work for me. I have heard some good things about 6.5 (like dramatically increased performance), but I haven't heard about anyone working on this for the Saga. Waiting for Verizon to come out with another update is just a lesson in frustration and honestly I am not sure I would trust it if they did release one.
I consider myself to be a pretty tech savvy person and even enjoy some light programming on occasion (the .net framework is awesome… Something Microsoft got right!!), yet I am reasonably certain that cooking up my own ROM is beyond my skills (though I am willing to give it a shot if someone can point me to a clear guide)

Follow-up question…
If no one is working on this and no helpful guide is available, then I am wondering if a ROM from a similar phone can be used (maybe with a few modifications required?). For instance, is the Epix similar enough that we could use a ROM designed for it on the Saga? (There is a 6.5 ROM for the Epix that can be found here) Or does the fact that its hardware is GSM only make it out of the question?

More questions…
If using a ROM from a similar phone is possible is there a way to backup the current ROM so that it could be restored if the other ROM doesn't work? If so then I would probably be willing to use my phone as a guinea pig. Yes, I understand that there is a possibility that it could brick my phone and I am willing to accept the risk if there is a good chance that it will work. I have an old blackberry that I can use if something goes really wrong.
So I guess the real question is… How similar do the phones have to be? Or does it have to be identical hardware?

Any insight would be appreciated...
Steven

Well it seems like the saga won't be available to update to 6.5 (surprise surprise) BUT a couple other similar samsung phones will be. I do remember getting cooked stuff from those sames in the past, so hopefully someone here will be able to fix something up for us.

I cant upgrade for awhile but with the saga 2 coming out, i may try to talk vzw into letting me upgrade early.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobi...mspx#phoneList

has the epix listed as getting the update but not the saga...

Saga 2?? What's the srory on that?

I am not looking forward to bringing my saga back to CDMA land. I will say that across the pond in GSM land the Saga has given me all smiles..


Very spolied, my residence here in Poland is 1000feet line of sight to a monster tower..

I can't wait for the calls to VZW about CDMA signal strength at my home in the USA. Smack dab in between 3 towers, however topo map shows me in a deep hole.

CDMA mode at my house in the USA is a battery killer. phone just goes nuts playing round robin with the towers.

Still waiting for a text message from VZW team saying something has been done and that my neighborhood is no longer in a "Marginal Area". At least being in a marginal area exempts me from ETF. I plan on trying the broadband based home repeater.

Anyone tried the repeater/home cell unit?

I have come across something strange this week.
I was expecting an urgent email to come in so I switched my settings to 'As Items arrive' instead of 'Every 15 minutes' and I noticed 2 things:

1. My battery life has actually increased dramatically! My battery is usually down below 40% by days end... now it is over 60% (usually closer to 75%)... I don't get it.
2. I haven't had any synch issues. I seem to be getting my emails every time instead of realizing hours later that my phone had stopped synching. This one might makes sense if maybe it is keeping my connection alive?... Therefore eliminating my synch issues?

Side note...
Have any of you checked out the HTC HD2?
I just finished watching a hands-on video of it over on Engadget... and it looks very impressive!
It is coming to the US Q1 of next year.
Hmm... never been a fan of the touch-screen keyboard, but I may have to check it out

gizmodo got some marketing note about a saga 2

Details on Verizon's Holiday Phone Lineup - Verizon - Gizmodo

there's a thread here:
http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/samsu...-saga-2-a.html

but beyond the gizmodo story that got links all over there's nothing that google finds.

my GUESS (and I KNOW NOTHING- laughing) is that it's a verizon version of the just released sprint samsung intrepid which looks like a saga with 3G gsm, landscape 320x480 screen, beefier CPU, and winmo6.5 added to it.

I'm in no rush to get more of the same winmo mess so I'll let someone else experiment with that before i jump to it. The borg just suck at not being full of bugs. Seems the only OEM that was capable of exercising or working around all the MS bugs was Palm and they bailed on WM OS.

no keyboard = no use for me.

I'm usually right there with you on this...
the only thing that keeps giving me second thoughts is that 1ghz processor...
man it would be so nice to have a winmo phone that never lags!!
A pipe dream? maybe...

Nevermind... I think I figured out why my battery life has improved and why my connection is no longer dropping...
I completely forgot that I was playing around with the network settings the other day and switched my network to 'CDMA only'.
I'm pretty sure someone has reported before on here that this improves battery life because it stops the Saga from switching back and forth between the two modes.
I can definitely see how that would improve battery life and reduce synch issues.
So... mystery solved.

that would be wonderfull but I'm sure the borg will do the same thing they done with desktops to phones- as CPU's advance and memory gets cheaper the putzes in remond find more ways to waste resources.* Who knows what kind of a hog WinMo 7 is.

I'm hoping that the boys at Palm can make their WebOS the thing to beat. It's wide open- makes the hackability of HTC winmo devices seem almost trivial. Palm has always been good at the little UI bits to make a phone a pleasure to use (one example- never mind not being able to make the default input letters for MMS to field- the prehistoric Palm OS and it's browser from ~10 years ago was generally aware throughout any input screens if you needed numbers or letters) Just seems they need to stay in business long enough to make that thing mature and get out more than 1 or 2 devices to pick from. But it still seams maybe a bit too young to me.

Google's os might be nice too but all the OEMS seem to thing that's for the people who want sliders or touch screens.


* see windows vista.

After failing to read the bad reviews of this upgrade a few months ago, I went ahead and upgraded my Saga. Initially, it seemed as though I was not suffering the same issues that others had reported after upgrading their phones. However, like the OP states, it seems like the last month or so, my cell reception has gone into the toilet. I have never been in so many buildings before where I have absolutely no reception. I have dropped and missed more calls in the last month than I think I have over the past 5 years. I really loved my phone, but it is very quickly becoming useless to me due to the ridiculously poor reception. I can't believe they scrwed this update up so bad.

try switching to CDMA only mode.

that at least stops it from searching for a GSM signal so when it does lose lock on CDMA it gets it back quicker...