By the time you read this, the situation may be corrected but for now…

So today is the day that Cingular is releasing the new ROM…fancy schmancy press release and everything.

The site announcing/linking to the actual file went live yesterday. Cingular’s page takes you to this page on HTC’s site.

So far so good right? Bzzzzz…wrong. The file download is corrupt! It should be around 52mb, but it’s a 39mb download instead. When you try and run the file, you get this error (click to enlarge/read):

This is widely reported on Howard Forums and Cingular’s own forums.

Unreal.

What’s worse, is that HTC/Cingular employees are just as clueless as always.

I just got off the phone with HTC support and they said the file on their website is the 1.8.11.1 WWE version which is corrupted.  They said the new release is still being developed.  He stated that the date of 6/19/06 was in error and that there is no release date available.

Not content to go by what others say, I’m now on hold waiting to speak with a human at Cingular. This should be fun. I’m not going to tell him that I read the forums…I’m just going to say that I read the press release and the link is corrupt, what’s up? Will he/she have a clue? Will he/she have an answer that makes any sense whatsoever? Likely not…according to posts in the forums, I’ll likely get redirected to HTC. We’ll see…

As expected…completely clueless. Kamma (and I’m being kind to her by not giving her last name) informed me that Cingular does not support the software that’s on the phone. As long as the SIM card allows the phone to make a call, the software is completely unsupported by Cingular and if I want to know why the file doesn’t work, I should call HTC. She gave me the number for HTC support.

Update: Cingular finally got their act together and updated their page to mention that there was technical problems in the link to HTC. Sure enough, HTC got their act together and fixed the link. I installed the upgrade and so far so good. I have no interest in the new push email, but I wanted the upgrade due the reports that it adds some stability and speed to the device. So far, so good. I’ve done enough of these hard resets to know how fast the device is, even when wiped clean of data and there’s a definite speed boost. There’s a snappiness to the menu response that I didn’t see before. Reboots are faster, and there’s more available RAM. I’ve reinstalled everything but one small application, all my data is synced and I have 24 MB available program RAM when I had around 18-20 MB before and 32 MB storage RAM when I had around 22 MB before.

There are other improvements/differences…I’ll post more if it warrants.