Hi all - I thought I would just post my situation in case it can help others. I have an 8900 unlocked onto AT&T on a BES.

First, battery life. It was just terrible. I admittedly am an extreme blackberry user, but it was seriously unacceptable. I tried upgrading OS, tried the hybrid OS, made sure things weren't running in the background, etc. etc. I think I have found the culprit: a custom theme I was running. I am not sure why this is; it is not a complex theme, and plenty of other people wrote comments complimenting the author. All I can say is that is the variable that has made a day-and-night difference for me.

Second, a weird issue that seems to be common with the Storm. My blackberry would boot up, say "media card inserted," and then lock on a T-Mobile splash screen. I could get out of this by holding the red phone button as if I were turning the unit off; but at that point my messages and browser (and facebook, and perhaps others I didn't notice) icons would be gone and the corresponding shortcut keys would not work (you could get to the browser and messages by using the convenience key app-switcher though). I tried everything, wiped it repeatedly with different restored configurations, gradually added apps, booted without the media card, etc. I am still nervous it will come back, but this problem also went away with the custom theme. It should be noted that some Storm users with this problem associated it with using wallpaper stored on a media card; this was not the case for me.

I feel bad putting the blame on the custom theme, but that is what did it for me. Having said that, it clearly did not do it to everyone so it must have something to do with some other aspect of my setup.

Wirelessly posted (Wohoo! I'm mobile!)

I dunno about the themes, yes they can cause a issue since it's a beta builder but I have been runing my bDroid theme on it since I first started developing it (2-3 weeks ago) and I haven't seen any difference or problem. I haven't run the stock theme to see what the battery life is on it using the stock theme.

Which theme is it that you were running?

Unfortunately I experienced the same problem and rectified the issue with the same resolution. After getting through the boot process described above, I also did everything described above and then thought I would change the theme back to the default theme, presto, it worked!!!

After successfully booting up, I was able to change back to my preferred customized theme with no issues so far. However, its only been 3 hours...

It might be worth mentioning that this issue occurred to me after OS upgrades with .168 and .174.

Good luck...

I totally agree. I went back to stock themes and battery life is better. MUCH.