This should be of interest to anyone purchasing the XDA II (i-Mate Phone Edition) or O2 XPhone (Orange SPV e200 / QTek 8080 / i-mate SmartPhone) in Australia. Carrier Devices are the company who rebadge these phones as i-mates (which I hadn't discovered until now - a little slack), and their website at http://www.carrierdevices.com.au is wholly devoted to the i-mate Smartphone and i-mate Phone Edition.

As many of you are no doubt aware, the HTC Himalaya and HTC Voyager phones are rebadged under many names - as provided above. In the previous versions of these devices, the ROMs were compatible between phones - with the possible exception of the radio stack (GSM/GPRS component) which in the case of the HTC Wallaby (aka O2 XDA) was probably best left at the localized version, as I have found through personal experience. The HTC Tanager (aka QTek 7070 and Orange SPV e100) had its radio stack and radio unit ROMs provide in the ROM upgrade, and this meant it was a much riskier proposition to update your phone.

Nonetheless, it's crucial to know where the support sites are. Judging from the past, some distributors of the phone will be quicker than others at releasing patches. In particular, with the O2 XDA II, if http://www.myxda.com doesn't help, try http://www.sourceo2.com. If that doesn't work, you can now try Carrier Devices. Naturally a degree of caution should still be exercised when updating one's device with the ROM from another iteration (eg. updating the XDA II with an i-Mate Phone Edition ROM). But you should be careful updating the ROM on any of these devices anyway. Take at look at xda-developers.com's forums to see any number of reasons why!

Getting back to the topic at hand, this all helps to reinforce my current impression that both devices are going to receive better marketing and support than their previous versions. Of course, that could prove to be wrong, and it will be interesting to see!

In further news, Organiser World have now listed the XDA II's accessories with local pricing. The bulk of these are pretty much the same as XDA accessories, from what I can see, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to buy a spare battery if you plan to use your XDA II quite heavily ...