Fustrated with the Diamond

[Time_Lord]

I"ve been using Sprint's version of the HTC Touch Diamond for a while now (2? 3? months) and I have come up with some very annoying issues with it.

First, I have tried multiple ROMs from different "chefs" and I'm currently using MightyRom.

Maybe somebody has suggestions that I'm missing but, my currently list of gripes -

1) I leave the phone in my pocket, I can't say how many times I've called people unintentionally or dropped calls when I'm trying to remove the phone from my pocket.
2) Audio volume (and quality) - it sucks, my hearing is bad enough I'd like to be able to hear the caller
3) Touch screen is nice but - I find that when using the stylus it works great, but using my finger? not so good. especially when trying to send an SMS message.
4) You can't dial by "feel". I guess this is just the nature of the beast with touch screens.
5) Why can't the phone rotate the screen easily in all modes? When it does rotate it's slow to do so when it does rotate.
6) just a general gripe but... My car (a Ford product) has Microsoft Sync, don't you think that a phone with a Micro$oft operating system would be able to pass SMS messages to the Sync system in the car so the car could read them?


Things aren't all bad, there are a few things that I like...

1) Web browsing is usually doable on the Diamond
2) I like that I can sync my outlook calendar and phonebook with active sync


Maybe somebody has some suggestions as to how I might overcome some of my gripes before I smash this thing into a gazillion pieces!

Oh and this is my shortcoming, I know that there is a way to backup all the applications I have installed on the phone so they can be restored quickly after doing a ROM upgrade. Somebody want to point me to a tutorial on how that's done?

Thanks!

PA23