Sifting through today's BlackBerry OS upgrade, I keep finding improvements and tweaks.
With 5.0, the upgrade via the handset is no longer an option attaching us to the tether and Desktop Manager. A new option appears during the upgrade for an email alert which replaces the handset push.
The entire operation of backing up and restoring data, preferences and apps is accomplished by the desktop manager. Always do a backup first.
Blackberry OS 5.0 finds.
- A new startup screen with a status bar that measures the entire boot-up process
- Menus feather in and out with bouncy scrolls that are more responsive
- Horizontal word correction replaces the vertical making it easier to see all entries
- Larger icons in the media folder for photos
- A touch icon to send email
- Auto-focus now has a maco mode letting you focus almost down to an inch
- The camera responds quicker and the option to customize a physical trigger key is in the camera interface
- You can scale photos sent out via email. The scaled down .png files are as crisp at the full rez. Great for blogging! and direct posting
- Permission approval for apps appears before the download
- MMS/SMS is identified by a bubble instead of the email icon
- SMS has gone fancy with smiles and bubble threading - grouping a thread in the directory. MMS remains utilitarian. I'm not too thrilled with the tiny scrolling windows in the SMS. Pretty takes up too much space. (I have always wondered why if MMS costs the same as SMS and has a longer word limit, why not use MMS all the time?)
- The BlackBerry web browser has been updated
- Steaming radio volume adjusts with the physical buttons while running as a background program.
- The Alert icons have been updated so you no longer confuse medium sound with calls only
Best of all, the upgrade was flawless, free and the phone hasn't crashed or bogged down since I upgraded. So maybe the memory management has improved.
It's great to get a major upgrade just BEFORE RIM releases the Storm 2 giving Storm 1 users a taste of something new before the dulling the sting of hardware envy.
Now on to see how many programs I can run at the same time before it crashes....
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