A couple of weeks ago I decided to do a wireless upgrade of my Blackberry. It warns you that it will take a couple of hours to do – and also stated that I need to remove some applications as I was running out of memory. This seems to be a common theme with the Blackberry – I don't know what is so hard about getting Blackberry to store data on SD cards but instead they insist on storing everything on the devices memory – and Windows SmartPhones and Treo's were no better from my past experience. Anyway – after the upgrade I went to access gmail and initially gmail would just lock up after loading. Thinking a deletion and redownload would fix it, I went ahead and deleted the application. When I went to download it again, the gmail website stated that gmail was not available for the 8830. I knew it was as I'd been using it about 4 hours earlier! I tried several methods of installing and nothing worked. The Sprint website gave me the ability to download my gmail into the main blackberry email application which then meant I had a mixture of gmail and work mail in one inbox. It was also only downloading some of the emails – not what I wanted. I tried searching online and couldn't find much information and no solutions on this problem.
The other difference I've noticed is that pushing 1 for Voicemail no longer worked and instead the phone asks me to assign a shortcut for the w key. The solution for this is to delete the empty speed dial entry for w and then reboot by pulling the battery out.
I discovered that Sprint have finally released the 4.5 version of firmware for the blackberry 8330 that will work with a BES server. I took the plunge to upgrade my device (as I *really* want the html email functionality). The upgrade went fairly smoothly apart from the following gotcha's.
After the reboot, my theme was set back to a different one than what I normally use. No big deal but surprising this was the case.
My Cacheberry software lost the database and registration details – again no big deal as I can reload the gpx into Cacheberry and I have the registration details saved.
Blackbird, my twitter client, lost it's settings so I had to re-enter the username and password again. Again, no real problem.
The biggest thing was that the device lost it's ability to synchronise with our corporate server – so no incoming or outgoing email – oops! This is a big deal as my blackberry is used primarily for corporate email AND I had to go and get my BES manager to reactivate the phone for me.
Unfortunately I don't have html email or the ability to view other people's calendars yet as both these features look like they need the blackberry server upgrading to a new version – something I've requested we look at doing, especially as this will make us a lot more effective.
I did like the fact that one of the new applications is voicerecorder – functionality I miss from our old phones as I was able to record timekeeping notes on the phone as I left a client site ready for updating back at the office. Now this functionality is in the phone and you can quickly and easily send the recorded memo via email. It saves it in amr format (for some weird reason) so you will probably need quicktime or another program to play the recorded message if you don't listen to it on the blackberry.
I also now have the ability to send/receive mms messages – I'm much more likely to receive them as this phone doesn't have a camera but as everyone else in the office also has the same phone it's unlikely that I'll ever use this functionalilty.
One really cool feature is the web browser – finally we have a real mouse cursor that moves around the web – much easier to navigate and as it has a flash player I can also watch youtube videos now.
Overall, a great upgrade – I'm looking forward to the enterprise server to be upgraded and then I'll really be able to be more efficient with work emails and checking what everyone else is scheduled to be doing at the office.
For more details on the upgrade check the v 4.5 Blackberry release notes .
Last night the blackberry started to act all sluggish again and lock up at random. Sure enough, the memory was down to zero bytes. Unfortunately I've already gone through the suggested options of reducing the amount of email stored on the device, calendar entries, deleting the help file etc. I did delete the log by pressing alt LGLG and this gave me a bit of memory to allow me to reboot. After the reboot I had 3.39mb of free space. Not a lot considering it comes with 64mb and has a 2gb SD card attached. Why RIM were so shortsighted to force apps to run from memory only I don't know but I am sure there is a technical reason. This was also one of my pet peeves with the Windows Mobile and Palm devices – why can't programs run from removable devices?
Anyway, after about an hour I checked the free memory on the phone again – it had gone down to 2.4mb free. I hadn't used the phone at all – the free memory had been eaten up by mail that had come in on the phone or something else. The weird thing is that deleting the new email made hardly any difference to the size of the free memory available.
This morning I am down to 1.09mb but I have tried installing and removing a couple of apps and checked gmail. The one app I did download was softreset that allows me to quickly reset the phone – it does the equivalent of pulling the battery out without the hassle of removing the cover and the battery. I've been reluctant to constantly remove the battery as this often leads to loose fitting batteries (and I shouldn't really have to do it!) The icon for softreset looks like a blue screen of death which is rather amusing. After my reboot this morning I had 3.6mb available which is weird considering I have one more app than I did yesterday and I have overnight email downloaded. It does look like I have a memory leak somewhere though.
The blackberry is rapidly becoming my thirdparty authentication tool – the ability to run programs on it to generate secure passwords is very handy – I have another post on this coming up shortly.
RIM have come up with a fix for the issue of the 8703e reboots. A couple of our guys have installed it and haven't had any more problems with them rebooting so it looks good.
The update was released to fix reboots in several markets (Richmond, Chicago, Raleigh, Honolulu, Cleveland, Columbus OH, Norfolk, Knoxville) and will need to be downloaded to a PC and loaded with desktop manager (v3.2 or better suggested). If on a BES, the customer will need to do a new enterprise activation after update.
In addition 4.2 software supports WAV files. The first point of contact for support is Blackberry care 877-654-9111.