Well, I've managed to update the A780 to a 'transition' firmware (AP:61). This suits me since it is an 'unbranded' Motorola generic firmware (no China Mobile splash!). It now recognises the 2Gb Transflash card that the previous firmware wouldn't.

Took me a little figuring out and sweating to do (I thought I had hosed it for a while!). I needed to update to the 74 first (since doing the 61 5 step process failed on crucial steps) and then come backwards to 50 and then up to 61.

I've also installed some apps and midlets:

• Opera Mini 3 (Opera Mini 4 didn't seem to want to talk to the GPRS network even though it asked me if it could)!. This is quite a nice mobile browser.
  
• ezxmmsplayer - xmms for mobile - plays ogg. Yay!
• sugarsel - sugarcrm client - not so great, lacking the featureset I was hoping.