BlackBerry Storm 9530 OS 5.0 Available from Verizon

BlackBerry Storm, the first touchscreen mobile phone the Canadian handset maker Research In Motion unveiled to the world about a year ago, is now getting ready to see a general software update. The new software version for the device is OS 5.0, which has been rumored to come for quite some time now, and which is also included into the new Storm 2 device from the vendor. While this comes as great news, even greater is the fact that Verizon's Storm owners are those to benefit from the update first.

The BlackBerry Storm 9530 is expected to see a great deal of improvements with the new OS 5.0.0.323 software version, including enhancements in rotation detection and screen painting, increased count of notifications, better rendering of the virtual keyboard that came with the device, resolved issues with the device resetting during voice calls or when idle, and fixed problems with the home screen background of different resolutions.

Other improvements included in OS 5.0 are as follows:
- When swiping down the virtual keyboard in an MMS message the send and save draft icons did not appear as expected.
- When viewing an SMS there was no simple way to call the current user. Now the user can select the number from the Callback Number field or from the message body and call that number from the pop up menu.
- The delete prior function has the unwanted side-effect of triggering the compose email screen.
- The user cannot configure their profile settings to increase the number of alerts when being notified of an event such as incoming SMS or email.
- If you paused a video recording and then resumed, the icon state may not have reflected the current recording state.
- After recoding a video of a certain size (7M) the saved video may be corrupted and unplayable.
- Intermittently, when streaming a video while doing a handover to 2G on a 3G network the video would stop playing.

BlackBerry Storm 9530 users will also benefit from a series of other enhancements and fixes connected to the handset's display, its notification features, SMS capabilities, network connectivity capabilities, application installation and usage, and more. The entire release notes for the new OS 5.0 can be seen here. The new software solution is available for download from Verizon's website.