[Mark Rejhon]

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Originally Posted by ifonline

And now there's a new problem... after a period of time (or possibly after reaching a certain length with the chat session) the chat freezes and I can no longer respond to the chat. I have to end the chat and start a new one.

Same here. It's a problem afflicting faster-than-usual thumbtyping that can also rapid-type smiley faces. It seems to happen more often when I'm typing very fast (at 70 words per minute on my BlackBerry) and sometimes while inserting emoticons manually by typing several emoticon characters too, and then scrolling back to edit text between emoticon icons, rapid-fire editing of all sorts. Then it starts to mess up there... My opinion is that I think that RIM needs a public beta level between the RIM internal QC, and the broad deployment. Like Apple's developer program -- Apple often releases beta operating systems. The BlackBerry audience is big enough that this is becoming necessary... [/FONT]

[FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif]I have installed OS 5 and am glad to see its speed improvements. There are a number of glitches, but at 5.0.0.238 they are tolerable that I won't revert to OS 4.6. Main complaint is the bugs with threaded SMS. But I like the threading in SMS, it is a wonderful improvement and turns SMS into an instant messenger, and works great with iPhone users who use threaded SMS -- they are all highlighted as new messages, even if they're already read -- and texting is buggy from phone numbers embedded in emails and webpages But other than these bugs, OS5 is extremely stable. Everything is so much faster than OS4, even BlackBerry Browser is much more usable and runs more AJAX pages better, including streaming HTML chat sites with realtime streaming HTML text (such as Sprint Captioned Telephone, which I use, because I am deaf). It's a good interim until a WebKit browser becomes available (unless it's already using a WebKit based one now). Camera and video is much better, with the translucent overlay, and much faster thumbnails-browsing (especially on a high-performace premium MicroSD card). [/FONT]

[FONT=verdana, geneva, lucida, 'lucida grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif]I just WISH RIM would standardize on the letters "i" and "o" for zoom in/zoom out in all photo apps and web browser apps, because I really really really want to zoom in/out more easily in a more consistent manner in all BlackBerry applications. iPhone has pinch-zoom, but the very least RIM could do is to standardize zoom hotkeys "i" == "Zoom In" and "o" == "Zoom Out" ... Which has always been the case for the web browser but RIM does not consistently implement these in all applications that use zooming features, only some of them. And they actually removed these zoom hotkeys from one of the apps![/FONT]