That's all understandable, Werner, I respect copyrights as well, but tell me, why can't HP, after all they owe us,(!)that's right, owe us for their miserable screw ups with WM6. Why can't they upgrade their hx4700 to WM6 when some Russian kid can do it in less than a week? I think that would be the only way that HP would regain my trust.

Make that screw ups with WM5.

Werner,
I understand your desire to retain your Microsoft MVP designation and the position in which that places you. It's truly unfortunate for us 4700 users that we will not have the benefit of your knowledge and expertise with the latest kozhura WM6 ROM. It is truly ironic that HP released their disastrous WM5 ROM which I see nothing more than a fraud, and then refused to fix it and abandoned the device and the users they scammed.
Kozhura saved us all from this mess and we benefited from your endorsement of his work. I know HP will never follow-up on this, and so we are left to the "hacker" community for improvements. This would not have been our choice but such is life.
I have asked to be removed from the list of users at Mobilitysite because their previous policy amounted to censorship. The new policy is better. However, we 4700 users have been abandoned by the creator of this device which is unquestionably still the best standalone PDA available. I respect your decision, but regret that we will miss your guidance in this new conversation.
Regards.

To the first question / comment:

well, it seems the folks at HP don't really concentrate their forces on either quality assurance (see the REALLY bad bugs in version 2.00 - and even 2.01 - easily (after some minutes of playing with the upgrade) spotted and fixed by me and some other hackers) or hiring some real programmers / system engineers.

It's all water under the bridge but, looking back I think this article and thread from Mike Caligaro of Microsoft sums up the failure most succinctly:
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/06/07/621132.aspx

"It's extremely difficult to XIP and do persistent storage on the same flash part. So, both of the upgrade devices did XIP in WM2003, but don't in WM5. However, we found that the sector size was still set to 4K, not the more appropriate 512 bytes." -quote from Mike Caligaro of Microsoft.
The article is worth a read.

Yup, the ROM type does have a direct effect on the speed of compaction.

However, the original 2.00 (and, to some degree, even the 2.01 - for example, the touchpad bug wasn't fully fixed in it either) version had a lot more problems, completely unrelated to compaction.

I don't fault HP for the ROM type problem but the sector size setting which seems to have been a design flaw. In some ways, it seems HP would have been better off just not offering WM5 at all. The politics at the time must have been a factor, what with MS switching to persistent storage right after HP released their fancy $600 device with the wrong kind of ROM for PS. To be a fly on the wall. Still, if you're a multi-million dollar corporation and you decide to go for it, you shouldn't leave your customers out in the cold. You know, right now they're still selling WM5 on their website for $39.00 (!) Do you think there's any explanation of the fixes that need to be done to it to make it halfway useable? I doubt it. Honestly, if it weren't for the help of you, Solnyshok, Kozhura, Football, Mike Caligaro, Mamaich, and a few more for sure, all of us would have been up the proverbial creek many times over.

HP *had* to release their WM5 upgrade because they had promised it and didn't want to go the Fujitsu-Siemens (F-S) route.

The F-S folks had also promised the upgrade for their flagship model 718/720 but, then, refused to release it. It was already existing and being betatested; even some FirstLoox members had the chance to play with it. This was one of the first blows to the, up to then, really popular F-S brand. I think it also contributed to their recent leaving the Windows Mobile scene - in addition to their other cardinal mistakes (not releasing a REAL successor, keeping the feature set of the original device, to the 718 / 720; not officially selling the handheld in the States, releasing the far-from-perfect T830 etc).

The same stands for Asus and Toshiba - they have also refused to release a WM5 upgrade for their VGA devices. No wonder they are pretty much out of the market right now (except for Toshi's returning with the G900 and Asus' some - not very popular - PPC phones and navigation solutions; still, they are in no way as famous as the Asus / Toshi handhelds were between 2002 and 2004 - particularly in the e800 days.)

Of course, HP should have spent a LOT more on careful planning (sector size) & testing (various other bugs discovered & fixed by users in an hour). Still, I think HP has done the right thing by releasing the upgrade - they, at least, released *something*, even if it was a pretty crappy one.

yer true Werner.
it's honourable that they decided to make a WM5 rom.
i think what they're getting at though is that,
they didn't put much effort into making it better after they released it. when they easily could have.

HP would have licensed SDK's from microsoft, and have alot of intel on the hx4700 hardware.
yet they released a rom that wasn't half as good as a previous rom, even after users find the tweaks themselves and fix them.

their follow-up revision took so long to be released,
and wasn't much of an improvement.

compare this to the work of kozhura and co. on xda-dev.
they had to use third-party tools to modify the rom, with minimal knowledge of the hx4700 hardware,
and within weeks, produced WM5 and WM6 rom editions that turned out better than the previous 2003SE edition, as should be expected.

it's not that HP's programmers are incompetent that frustrates me,
it's that they abandoned the hx4700 yet they tell us we can't use the third-party roms that do the job.

I think it would be helpful to both Microsoft and the user community, if some thought was given to the licensing model for Windows Mobile.
Microsoft has intellectual property in the OS which they can not afford to have escape into the public domain - so they are forced (reluctantly?) to react to attempts to analyse and publish their "secrets". On the other hand, they benefit from the efforts of the clever people at XDA-developers and the like, as their ongoing developments leave you and me with much more comfort about buying a Windows Mobile device. (I have anHx4700, and I was more than a little annoyed with MS and HP when I flashed the officail WM5 release. With the recent ROMs, I am more positive about my PDA, and I expect my next device will now also be WM.)
My proposal is that MS officially sanction a site for ROM development, but ont he condition that any posting on the site becomes MS intellectual property - this is like the linux IP model in reverse. This allows the development community to progress their ideas, but gives MS the comfort that this activity does not threaten their position.
Under this model even MS engineers could make a contribution and give helpful direction to the ongoing development of the OS. (Remember Mike Callagro's contribution to the development of the ram-disk last year.)

In the interest of keeping the planet green anything people do to extend the life of their devices if fine by me.