For those of you considering a Blackberry device, Eric has sent in the following which offers a good background to what you can expect from the latest Blackberry OS.

Blackberry OS4.5 – coming soon

Having migrated to the BB recently with an 8310, it was a phone which offered connectivity to email, internet and so on. Unfortunately, it offered basic functionality and the applications were pretty simple to user unfriendly.

The downside with using a RIM product is the BB OS is a proprietary and closed system and writing apps for it are a lot harder to enter. This has the unfortunate effect of limiting the number of applications available on this platform.

My wife also had a BB Pearl (8130) and the user interface looked better presented, more features and for all the feature packed handset it is, my 8310 (Curve) did not have a video camera! I know a video camera in a handset is not a deal breaker, but it’s a creature comfort which I have found in every handset … except the 8310! It’s like buying a car today and it only has a cassette tape in the console and no option to upgrade to a CD / MP3 player or having an Ipod adapter.

Having poked around the 8310 and 8130, it turns out that the 8130 is running newer OS software – version 4.3 and I was stuck on OS 4.2.2. Lurking on the Crackberry forums (www.crackberry.com), Blackberry Forums (www.blackberryforums.com) and goodness knows other BB fanboy sites – there were a lot of mutterings of the new OS 4.5 in beta testing (which is a repackaged version of OS4.3 for the older BB – such as the 83XX, 81XX etc). RIM enforced the “no links to unreleased beta software” throughout this year until June – when carriers started to release the new OS4.5 (either release beta versions or packaged in new handsets like the 88XX). The folks in the US still have to wait until September (estimated) for the official release of OS4.5.

Having covered the historical background for the last 4 months on OS4.5, I got my hands on a copy of it and took the plunge to upgrading my 8310 to OS4.5 …. Or brick it!!!

The upgrade process was running an application on the PC with the USB cable connected to the BB and waiting up to an hour for the backup of data, download of new OS, handset reboot, restore (why does this sound like Palm OS3 to OS4 upgrade?)

Initially, OS4.5 had a lot of teething issues – and memory leaks with third party apps was more of the norm. We are now up to OS4.5.0.55 (rel 81) and the reports of memory leakage has improved markedly. Unfortunately, there are still leaks around (why does this sound like the fond days of Unix in the 1990’s?)

The new OS has Documents To Go from DataViz (why does this sound like Palm OS5 in the early 2000’s?) and a pdf document viewer.

Calendar and Addresses look a lot better presented and Intellisync does a better job synchronising to Outlook.

It also can handle memory cards to at least 8GB micro-SD and performance of the handset seems to be better than OS4.2.2

Overall, my impression of OS4.5 has been favourable. But it still has a way to catch up with the rest of the Windows and Palm devices in terms of functionality and use. In one respect, Blackberrys do a few things well and other things not well at all, other devices do many things – but they don’t do it well. The only product that seems to have done everything well is the Jesus-phone (Iphone) – but that is a story best left for Shaun and the mods at PDA247!:)

Oh yes – OS4.5 has a video camera! Eric Shen.

The Inquirer is running an article called Linux Smartphone Axed which may have an impact on various other manufacturers, including Palm- "IF YOU were anxiously awaiting "The World's first smartphone based on Access Linux Platform (ALP)" then wait no more, and the Samsung i800 has gone the way of the dodo.

Access systems announced the Samsung i800 smartphone back in February, which, according to the firm, was going to be introduced by Orange in the second half of this year: "Orange is expected to introduce Samsung SGH-i800 with ALP in 2H of 2008" said the FY2008 Business Plan.

So earlier this month, the Palm OS / Garnet OS advocates started asking some questions: "It was reported with so much fanfare in Feb this year that finally, the first ALP phone is going to be launcheded by Orange and Samsung this June. Now it is already July, and Samsung just released its i900 (Omnia), where is the i800 ?"... Thanks to Dmitry.

Mobile executives at a Silicon Valley roundtable discussion threw down the gauntlet to Symbian, Android and other software platforms to match the impact of the iPhone.
 
Talking only about two weeks after the introduction of Apple's iPhone 3G and the App Store, where third-party software for it is offered, heads of some software companies reported huge numbers of downloads and proclaimed a new day on the mobile Internet. The jury is still out on whether the open-source phone platforms coming from Google and the Symbian Foundation will be able to match Apple's success, according to the panelists at the TechCrunch Mobile Web Wars event in Menlo Park, California, on Friday afternoon.

For example, Pandora Media began offering its Internet radio application for most other mobile platforms, through carriers, about 18 months ago, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad said. That resulted in about 12,000 paid monthly subscriptions to the service, he said.

"In six days, we had 350,000 installs on the iPhone," Conrad said. A key factor was that the App Store let the company give away its client and support its service through ads. On other devices, Pandora has had to use carriers' monthly subscription model, he said. More at Yahoo.

WaterBox uses the accellerometer to work out how to splash some water around on your screen. Pointless but great!

WaterBox is actually a fluid simulator that uses the built-in accelerometer to detect the phone movement and simulate the fluid moving across the screen according to phone position and moving direction.

All graphics are done with OpenGL ES although it probbably isn't the best possible choice for 2D graphic but since Teemu is already familiar with codding in OpenGL he decided to use OpenGL engine for this cool application.