So, I've had my 6800 for a couple of days now and wanted to pass along my thoughts. First off, I love the physical size of the unit. It's not significantly bigger than your average flip phone and indeed, is thinner than most. It fits comfortably in a shirt pocket. Adding an extended battery makes it about the same thickness as an Apache with the standard battery. I much prefer the keyboard layout and it has Cap lock and Fn lock indicators (woohoo!). Instead of the numbers on the keyboard being across the top row, they are instead organized like a phone pad centered on the J key. Still no control key, but I can live with that. The jog wheel on the side is great for one handed navigation, essentially echoing the up/down action of the d-pad. Pressing in on the jog wheel acts the same as the center button of the d-pad. The d-pad does take a little getting used to instead of the joystick, but I'm thinking it should be more reliable and less prone to breakage. There's a second "Ok" button under the jog wheel, further enhancing one handed operation. There are also hardware buttons for messaging, ie, the camera, voice speed dial (or voice command) and the comm manager. There's a switch on the side to turn wifi on and off. It appears to be software driven, not hardware as it is possible to get the wifi on with the switch off. The standard battery is a 1500 mAh unit and covers most of the back of the unit. The extended battery from Verizon is 2200 mAh and comes with a curved cover that doesn't really look too bad. It does add a fair amount of thickness to the unit, but if you've carried an apache with an extended battery you won't notice it.
The camera is a 2 mp unit, I've only taken a couple of shots with it, but it seems to be pretty good. As on the Apache, it does better with outside shots. Here's a shot taken inside
And here's one taken outside:
There are a lot of options on the camera app and I've not played with any of them yet.
Hacking the ROM is more difficult, as shipped, the unit is locked and will only accept ROM updates signed by Verizon, of which there are none. So you first have to unlock the ROM by installing a new bootloader. This is fairly simple, it's the next part that gets scary. To enable the GPS and Rev A EVDO you have to install the Sprint ROM with a radio update. The problem with this is that it screws up your phones ability to authenticate to the network and you'll have to spend some quality time with Verizon tech support to get it reauthenticated. They seem to be pretty good about it, it just takes time, I called at 11:30 pm and it took about 30-45 minutes. The good news is that you only have to do that after upgrading the radio, just upgrading the ROM won't cause a problem.
There is one very pleasant surprise with the 6800, compared to the Apache, the internal storage is enormous. There's much less reason to cook your apps into the ROM instead of just installing them normally. Because of this, you can use a fairly stripped ROM and still have plenty of storage for apps and data. In my case, with Opera, Mobipocket, PocketBible, Navizon, WisBar Lite, Pocket Mechanic, MortPlayer and a whole bunch of other stuff installed, there's still 115mb free in Storage. So, you can pick your kitchen for stability and not necessarily features. Me, I went with the base kitchen and left off all the shareware OEMs, installing only things a CAB file is hard to locate for. As far as the kitchen itself, if you've cooked your own Apache ROM you can cook a Titan (6800) ROM, the process is basically identical. The good news is that it takes less time to burn the ROM to the device, the bad news is that it doesn't work well under Vista. However, you can copy your ROM to an microSD card and burn it to the device that way as well.
That pretty much covers it, basically, if I didn't mention it, it's pretty much the same as the Apache. Oh, the GPS... yes, it's there (if you update to the latest Sprint radio) and yes it works with Google Maps, etc. It can take a little while to acquire satellites initially, but it works very well once it does. I've even managed to keep lock while indoors, so I'm fairly impressed. And Rev A does seem to work on Verizon, at least I'm noticing significantly faster download speeds than with the Apache.
All in all, it's a good upgrade. I wouldn't have spent my money on it (I'm holding out for the Raphael for that... mmmm VGA screen *drool*), but it's certainly an upgrade from the Apache and if you get offered one, take it.
jim