Engadget Mobile lets us know that HTC Hong Kong has posted a World Wide English ROM that supports the 850 MHz radio band for EDGE data. The folks over at XDA are poking away at it and finding that it does indeed support the 850 MHz band for GSM (read: EDGE speeds) but that 850 3G data is still tough to come by. Reports are mixed on that front -- as Engadget notes and a read-though of the XDA thread confirms, there's some weirdness with the band selection in the settings.
On other fronts, though, the ROM apparently rocks. TouchFLO 3D is reportedly much faster! The other nice thing is that the weird “we're turning the screen off whether you like it or not during a call” behavior now defaults to friendlier settings based on your global power preferences (after the initial default power-down. Yes, it's confusing, but if you have one you know what we're talking about).
We were very pleasantly surprised when a hacked ROM came out a week ago with 850 support, we're just as pleased to see HTC officially supporting the 850 band. Looks like, for once, CompUSA has been somewhat vindicated. Whoodathunk?
