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.

As far as the memory is concerned, I did find that not going into google maps, gmail or cacheberry seemed to keep my available memory free so I’ll be running more tests to see which application is leaking memory. I do now have 10mb free on the device (but that is probably because I have an empty cacheberry database at the moment)

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 .