Well the 4.5 OS finally came out for the Blackberry Curve. I have been waiting for this to come out for about 6 months now. It really upgrades the funtionality of the device. Some of the major upgrades are:

• Video Recording capability
• Ability to read html formatted email
• Streaming Audio/Video
• Voice Recorder

I have played with youtube and it seems to work fairly well. The streaming videos on mobile youtube are pretty downgraded in quality. This is to be expected I guess since youtube has to cater to all mobile devices. Since the resolutions on their videos arent as big as my screen the videos wont go truely full screen. They seem to be the perfect size for the Blackberry Pearl though. I have not yet found a site to stream audio from. I am praying that I can somehow finess this thing to hook into di.fm. I’ll let yall know when I get this working.

The Video camera is a feature that I was dissapointed wasnt a feature on this phone when I purchased it 11 months ago. This feature has been available for about 2-3 years from other manufacturers. I am happy that Blackberry figred out to give my device an upgrade instead of releasing a new device with the functionality. That aside, the camera seems to work fairly well. Its not feature rich but it works. It takes video at 240x180 resolution and can shoot in color, Black and White, and Sepia. It can also use the flash as a light. I tested the automatic light feature in a dark room with a computer monitor on. While facing the monitor, the light would turn off, but as soon as i faced the camera into the dark room, the light would come on. Pretty cool feature.

3rd party voice recorders for the Curve have been out for a while. Most of the free one provided only limited functionality in weird audio formats unless you purchased a full version. The blackberry voice recorder stores voicenote in an amr format (?) and allows me to send any voicenote I create to any email, bluetooth device, phone (mms), or IM account straight from the application. Pretty cool. It seems that when recording voicenotes that you should be talking very close to the microphone. It does not pick up room noise well. Thats a pretty good thing unless I’m trying to record a meeting or a Movie at a theater. 

The ability to read email in an html format may not sound like a big deal, but for those of you out there that have had to read modern emails on Blackberry’s.....You understand how important this is. There is nothing like an trying to sort through the text of hyperlink after hyperlink trying to ciphon what the $%d^ the email is actually about. Blackberry has had a "Unifed Messaging center" where all text, IM, and emails could be accessed. Otherwise you can access each list seperately. The display of emails is a lot more readable. There are 3-4 distinct sections. The top section is a "received using" section which lets you know which email address the email was sent to. I personally have 5 email accounts being sent to my phone so this is kind of important. The second section is the "From" and Subject feilds. The Body of the message is the 3rd section and any attachments will be in the bottom or 4th section. Previously, these feilds were in this order but were not sectioned off. I feel this makes the emails much more readable.

One of the cool things Blackberry did but didnt really annonce was the upgrades to their web browser. When you 1st open it, you are directed to a page that has an address bar to type into, a search box that you can select google, wikepedia, dictionary.com and T-Mobile as the search providers, a bookmarks sections, and your recent history. I really dig this feature. Previosly you were always taken to a bookmarks page (which is still accessible) but this new page seems to have more functionality quickly accesible. Once you actually goto a web page, blackberry changed how the browser works. It actually seems to be much faster and more responsive. Previously, when scrolling down, the web page would scroll down and the phone would "link-hop". Meaning each link would be highlighted and you could croll to each link. You could also view the web page in destop view in which the page would displayed as it normally would and a mouse would appear and you scoll in any direction and click on a link. The 3rd way to view a page was page overview in which you could quickly scroll to the end of a page. Now the phen does not link hop anymore. You are always presented with a mouse icon. When the mose gets to the bottom of a page, the page scrolls down and vice versa. I suspect the increase in browser speed is due to the removal of link hopping. The phone does not need to analyse each page. Page overview mode has been reoved as well but it seems I am ab le to get to the bottom of pages much more quickly now. 

Thats all for now. Peace.