TechnologyCrowd

I was excited last night when I started seeing tweets about Verizon finally launching BlackBerry OS 5.0.  At 10:15 pm eastern time I plugged in my USB cable and opened up the Desktop Manager.  After clicking on the check for updates button, I was told that an update was available.  I verified my backup options, hit next a couple times and let the system begin the download and install.  About an hour later the installation to version 5.0.0.328 was complete.

After the BlackBerry rebooted, a few permissions boxes popped up that I had to save.  I also had to go through the initial setup screens and had to reboot an additional time.  The system seems to be more responsive to commands and changing from portrait to landscape.  I haven’t noticed any major changes besides the performance, one thing that I did notice is when I type an e-mail it brings up a list of suggested words that you can choose to select instead of typing the entire word out.  I don’t remember this being available before, it seems like it could be promising although I wonder if it is any faster than typing the word out when you are using the keyboard.

It is a little frustrating when you go to use an application and have to go through the initial agreement, permissions, and enter in your login information again.  Some of my applications were missing or in different folders so I spent a little time reorganizing things.  I had to re-download AppWorld and Facebook and the Slacker application lost all of my cached stations so I had to reselect them in the application and reconnect with the USB cable to re-store the music.

Overall, the process seems worth a little additional work to re-download some applications and re-enter login information.  I am looking forward to continuing to test it out and see if there are any new features that I have not discovered in the first day.

Feel free to comment on your upgrade experience and any additional features that you have discovered.