ColtonCat

Research in Motion have been busy working on version 5 of the venerable BlackBerry operating system which seems to be ready to be released on the upcoming Storm 2 and the new Bold (9700).

A few weeks back BGR Reports did a “Hands on: OS 5.0 on the Bold” post. That post was based on 5.0.0.90, and early leaked version of the operating system. At the time I installed 5.0.0.90 on my own Bold, but since I use the phone day to day, I found it just too unstable to actually run on the phone. Also, many of my applications just did not work properly.

Well, OS5 has evolved a lot more since then, and RIM have officially released Messenger 5, the popular PIN messaging application for BlackBerry (and one of the reasons I believe BlackBerry is so popular), giving us a look at the cosmetic updates in OS5, so after discovering 5.0.0.238 leaked on the Internet, and assuming that the .238 meant that this was probably very close to a version that would be released to the carriers, I decided that I should try it out, and write an updated preview.

As BGR pointed out, this is more a refinement of the Interface than a radical overview.

Personally, I have been thinking for a long time that RIM probably need to start writing a completely new operating system for the BlackBerry as this one is probably very quickly reaching its sell-by date. On the other hand, the BlackBerry Interface is now completely familiar to users who have been through many iterations of devices. I remember that I used to only buy Nokia cell phones, simply because I was so used to the Nokia interface that I knew I would be totally at home on a new device the minute I turned it on. The few times I tried something else, I was crushingly frustrated by little things like having the key that places a period in a text message on the other end of the keypad.

Subtle Changes

Press the Blackberry key and you won’t notice much new, other than some minor stylistic changes to some icons that are displayed. The one that obviously stands out to me is the new icon for text messages, which now represents the new conversation based texting.

Familiar look

Threaded Text Messaging

Conversation based, or threaded text messaging, is my favorite feature in OS5 thus far.

Threaded Text Messages (Message List)

Text messages are grouped by conversation, pretty much the same as Gmail does with e-mail, or as you would see in BlackBerry messenger. Open a text message conversation, and it has the same familiar “speech bubble” look that BlackBerry Messenger 5 has. I did initially find the new text message icon that is displayed in the BlackBerry status bar to be confusing — it too closely resembles the BlackBerry messenger icon, but you quickly figure that out.

Threaded Text Message (Conversation Expanded)

Media Manager

The media manager has been replaced by something that I think is a lot more familiar. Gone is the older flashy media manager, and something that looks exactly like the rest of the Blackberry interface.

OS5 Media Manager…

The Memory Use function has been cleaned up and looks quite different to the one in the BGR review of 5.0.0.90, again the look is much more consistent with that of the OS5, nothing major just a refinement.

Memory Use Overview Screen

Something that I did notice is missing, is the program memory statistics. This does appear in the Memory Use screens on the BGR review, so perhaps this has been removed by RIM, as it appears in AppWorld?

Memory detail drill down has also been altered to resemble the rest of the operating system.

Memory USe Detail Drill-Down Screen

On the topic of internal memory. While the Bold has a nice generous 1GB of built in flash, it only has 128MB of program memory. This version of OS5 is around 113MB, so that does really not leave you with a lot of room to install applications in. I have just a few, and I have about 20MB program memory left.

Still on the topic of the media applications. Both the still camera and the video camera have been given nice overhauls. They look much more slick with translucent control overlays, and they also work – subjectively – much more slickly.

New Camera Interface

New Video Camera Interface

The video camera has had a major speed overhaul. I never used it a lot previously on OS 4.6, as anything over 10 seconds resulted in a long “saving file to memory” stage. With the new video camera application that wait is gone, and you can stop and start to record a new video right away. RIM have definitely put some much needed work into this application. Since Messenger 5 can now send files up to 2.8MB I believe, sending short video clips of your cat doing something silly has become practical and easy on the BlackBerry.

Browser and Google Gears

I cannot really notice major changes to the browser. It feels a tad faster — but then that is my whole experience with this version of OS5, the whole BlackBerry feels a lot snappier, from the moment you see the new boot screen till the time you start to click around in the device. After reading about support for Google Gears in the original BGR review, I decided to have a look see and hook it up to this blogs admin page, to see if it actually would work.

Google Gears with Permission Granted to coltoncat.com

Enabling the Turbo function in WordPress quickly cached the files locally (over a Wi-Fi® connection – but still).

WordPress Turbo Caching Files

Application Compatibility

I have tried all the applications that I routinely use on my BlackBerry and all work as one would expect on this build of OS5 — at least as far as I can tell from the briefly testing them. There has definitely been a maturing process from 5.0.0.90 that BGR previewed. Briefly, the following list of apps worked perfectly for me:

• Facebook 1.7.0.18 (By RIM)
• Windows Live Messenger 2.5.27 (By RIM)
• Google Talk 2.5.27 (By RIM)
• Oanda FXConverter 1.0.12
• Google Maps 3.0.2
• Google Mobile App 3.4.16
• Ka-Glom 1.3.0.0 (My current favorite Tetris App)

Would be interesting to find out the application compatibility from others who are using this version of OS5…

Final Thoughts

BlackBerry Home Screen

While you won’t notice wildly new features in this version of BB OS, it is definitely much faster on my Bold. Multimedia just seems to work better and slicker and I love that the video recording function in now actually useful on my Bold.

There is very little application incompatibilities that I have discovered thus far, and I would presume it would be even better in the version that will soon be released to the carriers.

I agree with BGR, the Browser is a little insubstantial and could do with some beefing up, and adding support for Google Gears kind of seems like the last thing that one would look at — heck, Google themselves did not add Gears support for FireFox 3.5 for a long time!

Update: If you are looking for some sources for this and other leaked unofficial versions of OS5, there are links in this post over at Blackberry Cool.

Disclaimer: This is leaked software, so bear in mind if you install this stuff on your BlackBerry and you have issues, you are on your own, so think twice about it if your livelihood depends on it. Also, you may be in violation of corporate IT policy at your place of employment if you mess with this…