MORE HOT CAB INSTALL ACTION – voice command, picture mail, battery enhancements, etc….mostly cab fixes and add-ons.

PICTURE MAIL AND TEXTING

I won't lie, getting things configured properly is a P in the A...especially Picture Mail. 2.5 brings with it an entirely new Messaging App from HTC. It seems like it will work great...some day. As far as regular texting is concerned, the HTC App works fine out of the box. I would highly recommend trimming down the number of texts you have stored on your device or you may find the texting in the HTC App to be very sluggush. As an alternative, I've included a link to a thread that will show you how to bypass the HTC App and go straight to the old Winmo style...it's not as pretty, but we're concerned with functionality for the moment.

Picture Mail is a bit more involved...I've included instructions below, but I'll warn that individual results may vary...and it may take some dancing to get things in working order. Hopefully we'll see a fix in the HTC App's MMS...it's a very cool interface, just not working 100% for us yet.

DISABLING THE HTC MESSAGING APP
If you don’t like the new HTC Messaging App, or find it to be slow, you can use the old style winmo texting instead. Check out this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=556614

[OPTIONAL] MANILA 2.1 MESSAGING APP FOR 2.5 - http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...&postcount=570 – this is the “People Messaging Classic Client”. This will revert your texting app from 2.5 to 2.1. I don’t particularly like this mod, but if you’re trying to get MMS set up or don’t like the new HTC Texting App, then this is another alternative you can try out. FYI - there is still development work being done on this, so it may not be 100%.

SPRINT ARCSOFT PICTURE MAIL
[UPDATED ARCSOFT to V5.2.1.22 with voice texting]

• Run the Remove Picture Mail & Arcsoft cab [soft reset must be performed for this to work]
• Run Sprint Arcsoft MMS 5.2.1.22 cab [requires soft reset] – this cab was taken from a Diamond2, ported for VGA devices, and set up for Sprint PCS. This updated version of ARCSOFT adds an option to send a voice message as a text.
• You should now have picture mail installed. NOTE: picture mail is now part of your regular text messaging – it’s not in a special separate location. Received picture mail will show up in the threaded view along with your other text messages for a given contact…except they’ll have an attachment icon. Click the attachment…view the pic. If you’re looking for an earlier version of Arcsoft, try this: Sprint Arcsoft MMS 5.0.82.79 cab
• IMPORTANT NOTE: 2.5 just doesn’t want to play nice with MMS. You can send a pic from the Sense interface [not in the actual threaded view, but from “Pics and Vids”] and a received pic will display a notification in Sense, but you cannot open a received pic in Sense. Kinda weird…and rather confusing. As a workaround, set one of your quick links on the home screen to the old winmo style texting START-INTERNET-Messaging. Set a second quick link for “Pics and Vids”…so you can send a pic easier. When you get a pic, go through the quick link to view it. It’s a bit odd, but it works. Here’s a step-by-step:
  
  To send a picture from Sense:
  a.Go to START-MULTIMEDIA - Pictures and Videos [it’s recommended that you put a quick link on the home screen if using this method for MMS]
  b.Select the image you want to send
  c.Hit the “Menu” softkey and scroll down to select “Send via MMS” to launch Arcsoft
  d.Enter in your recipient’s name, configure your text, and press send
  
  To view a received picture in Sense:
  e.You will get a standard new text notification with an attachment icon, but you won’t be able to access it in Sense. To view:
  f.Go to START-INTERNET-Messaging [It’s recommended that you put a quick link on the home screen if using this method for MMS].
  g.Click on the conversation for the contact that you received a pic from
  e.Click the small attachment icon to view the pic.
  
  

ADJUST ARCSOFT SETTINGS

• Open the Messages App [START-INTERNET-Messaging]
• Press “Menu”
• Scroll down to MMS Options
• Scroll down to change your photo resolution settings to match VGA – this will help with sending pic mail
• To adjust your server settings, go to the “Servers” tab and click on SprintMMSC
• Here you can adjust the server settings and attachment size

VOICE COMMAND
MSVC1.6.20771 or MSVC 1.6.21725.cab [installs voice command– soft reset is recommended] – I have used both v1.6.20771 and .21725 without any problems, but I do not regularly use Bluetooth with this program, so I cannot confirm which cab works best with Bluetooth [for announcements]. I provided both, so you can figure out which works best for you and your needs.

• If you get an error during/after installing the cab, soft reset, and check if it installed. If not, try it again until you get it – sometimes it seems like the install failed, but it works fine after a soft reset.
• Set preferences in START-SETTINGS-PERSONAL-Voice Command - to stop announcements of texts, events and phone calls, if you’re not into that. …or enable it, if you are.
• While you’re in that section [START-SETTINGS-PERSONAL], go into “Buttons” and assign a key to launch Voice Command. I set the long press of the send key to launch the voice prompt. “Send (Hold)”.
• Check Voice Command – activate it using whatever button you just assigned, and then speak something like “Call Jim” or someone from your contacts to see if it’s responding. If not…do over!

FACEBOOK INTEGRATION IN CONTACTS
There are some things here worth noting:

• Be sure that your phone contact names match your Facebook friends’ usernames [first and last names] or the integration won’t work – you’ll get a “no data” type error.
• It can also take a long time to update or sync data if you have a lot of friends.

BATTERY STUFF
This stuff may or may not work for you. You really need to do some research about what you can do to help get better life out of your device in general, then, apply that knowledge to get at the battery life you want/need. All I know for sure is that there are no known “sets” of enhancements that work for everyone across the board.

So many factors come into play with regard to battery life. You’re using a custom ROM…try to use some common sense before blasting the Chef for his free ROM sucking up your precious battery life. Any increase in speed or performance will degrade battery life – something’s gotta give. Backlight settings, what radio you’re using and where you live, polling settings for various features, checking your email every 5 minutes on seven accounts, etc. will all impact battery life. Do what’s best for you and your device. Google search to see what others have done…experiment.

Also, keep in mind the battery icon will drop from 100% to about 90-95% VERY fast. This is, again, a known issue. Don’t judge the battery life on the first five minutes of using the ROM…use it for a day or two to get a better gauge of what’s really up. Even on the older versions of the ROM, I never once had the device die on me. That said…read on.

• Install LUMOS!!! [I posted a link earlier in the Guide and I highly recommend it for battery life]
• Look into switching up your Radio. If your device isn't getting great service, it will use up a lot of battery power constantly searching for a good signal. Experimenting with different radios can have a dramatic impact on battery performance, depending on where you live...especially if you're in a poor coverage area. Here's the link to the "12 Radios" thread: http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=74422
• Check to see that Location Setting is off. This can cause general sluggishness as the device collects location data and isn’t necessary. START-SETTINGS-SYSTEM
• Here's a thread with some great information on batteries - calibration and such: http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index...arch&s=battery
• Maxx134 – BatterySaving ReducePollingIntervals.cab [makes a bunch of polling edits to reduce power consumption. http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showpost.p...ostcount=11227
  • Here are the individual registry values that are changed with this cab:

Drivers/BuiltIn: error reporting -12000000
battery/poll interval -25000 GSensor 1000
Software/: HTC/HTCSensor/GSensor -1000
Opera/GSensor -1000
System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Power/Timeouts/:
batterpoll -1000
For GSensor settings: I did not increase values further because it would increase rotation delay.
I set them to "average" rom values.
The original settings were way less than other roms and prob set for faster rotation, at expense of battery.
Other polling was found on my reg search and so also increased moderately.

NAVIGATION
I recently got my hands on the Telenav Sprint PPC 5.5.18 cab. This is a significant upgrade to the cab I list below. In order to get things set up, you will need your pin number - try the last 4 digits of your phone number. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to install Sprint Navigation [cab below] first and go into options to find it. Once you get Telenav set up properly, you can always delete Sprint Nav.

[OPTIONAL] Install Sprint Nav PPC 2.1.23 cab
a.After install, I usually log in and check to make certain GPS is working, since I rely on this program when I’m on-the-go.

ALARM - I prefer G-Alarm to the standard built in version. I use my device as an alarm, so I definitely recommend people check out G-Alarm. It's not freeware, but there are older free versions available if you Google search [versions prior to 2.x, I think are freeware]. Otherwise, I think I paid $6 for the software license and it performs flawlessly. It's very customizable, has a ton of features, and integrates perfectly with Sense. Check out the developers site: http://www.ageye.de/index.php?s=galarm/about

LOCK SCREEN - I’ve had success with S2U2. Calls come in fine, notifications work, and I can get four or five appointments displayed on the screen [beyond today and tomorrow]. You can also set the weather to “touchflo 3d” [in S2U2 Settings] and it will pull your city’s weather and display it as well. Check the developers website for the latest release.

WORLDCARD MOBILE – this is no longer preinstalled in the ROM. Use this version WorldCard Mobile.cab

NEW VERSION OF INCALL TWEEKS - Touch InCall Screen Tweek – Link to Thread or Link to the v 1.2.0.cab