BlackBerry Storm OS 5.0.328 Review

I have mixed emotions about this new OS. First I'm peeved that The Storm could have been this good in the beginning. Once again I paid good money to beta test their phone. Second I'm grateful that RIM and Verizon could work together to service the customer's complaints. Now I'm happy to report that this is the phone I wanted and the phone I'm going to stay with until I'm eligible for an upgrade( Probably Storm 2. ).

My most vocal complaint about the Storm is the memory management on the device and lack of memory. This OS version has solved most of this issue in aces...very little lag now. That is to say that now apps open and close quickly...very snappy. Also so gone is the "hanging condition", where the tiny clock symbol appears and the rest of the device is frozen. The "hanging condition" could only be cured by doing a battery pull...thus causing a reboot and sucking up valuable battery time. Battery pulls still occur but rarely...before 3-4 times a day...now 3-4 times a week.

The next improvement I noticed was improved performance on all apps...opening and closing especially the internet. Let me tell ya the internet was almost unusable before...now...very snappy! Pages load slow on all phone of this type...even...you guessed it the iphone too. Now the web browser rocks with a major speed boost. So I can look things up on the device without tethering to the laptop every time...Yeah!!!

Other items of lesser importance to me are faster response time from camera when taking pictures, more camera settings to play with, SMS text threaded messages, word search and select slider whenever you are typing on the device. These are all very cool items I'll call the icing on the cake.

Improvements so good I will stick with this phone for a while. As a matter of fact, the only improvement left is for me to buy a 16GB media card and install it. Really....no kidding.

More on Life with my BB Storm

I can't tell you how happy I have been since upgrading the OS on my Storm to version 4.7.0.148. It has made the phone performance much peppier. Not any where near the amount of battery pulls (also do to installation of Quick Pull app). This device is truly solid now, in my opinion it is better than iphone.

I believe that the storm is better than iphone due to the more open nature of the Blackberry. For instance I subscribe to Vcast-Rhapsody but I am not bound that service. I can use any music service I choose including itunes. I may also elect not to use a service and convert my cd collection to mp3 files and transfer to my Storm.

I can tether to my laptop, for Internet service on the go. I also have my choice of places to get BB Storm apps. Apps can be purchased from BB app World, Crackberry, and other sights as well. This is basically the same experience as my laptop or desktop at my home. I don't need to be kept in a protected bubble From Apple Inc. Some people want or need that type of experience...I do not.

Having given the prior remarks...I still would like to see some much needed improvement in upcoming OS's. With OS 5.0 just around the corner, I would hope that we could get better memory management on the Storm. This would drop the number of quick pulls or battery pulls down to probably 5-10%. That alone would save precious battery life. Speaking of which, maybe a tweak towards better battery life would be better unless you had to take a big hit in performance. Last but not least by any means make sure you give us wifi on the Storm 2.

That my thoughts lately...catch ya later!!!

Given 48

New OS for Black Berry Storm

This isn't exactly the freshest news, however it needs to be said that this upgrade solves so many problems. So many in fact that I feel this phone is now very close to even with iphone and a tick better than iphone in a few areas. v4.7.0.148 is the version we are talking about. What happened to versions .75 to .147? Anyway I noticed after upgrade, my Storm was much quicker, and the best thing that I noticed right away was that I didn't have to take the battery out and reboot every 4-5 hours (My phone would freeze up and this was the only way to fix this). Believe me rebooting 3 times will run a fully charged battery down to 50% or more(nice). Battery life seems to be a tad better probably due in part to not having to reboot so much. Media performance also seems to work better. This phone is fun again and always gets serious comments from people when they see it. I do more demos than Verizon(it seems like) they should pay me for my services(jus sayin). What people should take away from this post is that the Storm is the phone that they wanted to deliver in the first place.

Having said that there are still some issues. One being that the Storm does not handle memory all that well, or I should say manage. Plan on rebooting at least once during heavy work loads to free up memory and bring the device back to maximum performance. The other problem is a minor annoyance. When tethering to my laptop to use the "modem mode", once in a great while the phone hangs in "modem mode" after disconnecting from internet. Usually the phone will bring it self out of this condition after a few minutes or I will reboot to correct this condition. I give RIM a little wiggle room due to this phone being version 1.0, these problems are little more than minor glitches that should be fixed in Storm version 2 devices.

It's OK to go get a Black Berry Storm. These are great phones that can so many things so well. You can also wait until later this year for the rumored release of Storm 2. Either way In my opinion the Storm is finally ready. Now if we could just fix Verizon customer service more on that later.