Installed it yesterday and it's working very well. Findings:

1. Much faster.
2. Accelerometer works better on "heavy" pages (i.e. browser pages)
3. When the phone is LOCKED, you have to press a BUTTON (not the screen)

One other note - I lowered the touchscreen settings to:

Tap Interval = 400
Hover Period = 800
Swipe Sensitivity = 5

This seems to have improved things a bit based on how we use the Storm.

What model BB do you own?

I recently upgraded as well. Big difference from .75 to .85. Much quicker and responsive. Camera still needs some work. 9530

Although I agree a few things need tweaking, i think .85 is a major improvement

/agree

.85 is a major improvement, still has bugs, but is overall better in my opinion.

Still debating whether or not to try this beta on my VZW. I'm 50/50. Anyone on VZW want to try and convice me one way or another? I have no problem with backing up first and wiping then re-installing .75 if there is a problem. One thing, I am about to fly to Europe on the 5th for about 2 months, so after that, whatever I have I'm stuck with until I can get my service books resent, right?
EDIT-What I mean is, if my home network is VZW, even though I've enabled all my global features, it wouldn't be smart to upgrade firmware in Europe would it?

i would wait for the official verizon release. i installed 85 and it seemed like a good build but i get lockups every now and then. its not stable to run, stick to 75 for now.

FWIW, I installed .85 3 days ago. I was having issues with random resets with .75 that seemed to be related to BT syncing with my '09 Expedition with Sync (i know there are some great cracks here about the MS Sync product, so be nice).

After upgrading to .85 I have not had a reset since. Overall for me at least .85 is a step up. Device is more responsive.

Other than the out of the box apps on the unit I have Worldmate, Google Maps and VVM installed so I am not taxing the 9530 much.

I upgraded to .85 from .75 this morning, and I'm not thrilled. It's ok. It generally seems pretty snappy, but have experienced some random lag. I think only being able to unlock the phone via the unlock button if you locked with it is really stupid & annoying. I get what they are trying to accomplish - people being able to lock it and not have things get pressed in their pockets - but I just don't like it. Looks like there is a pretty good memory leak (likely the source of the problems people have been seeing after 2-3 days without a reboot). I've used the device very lightly today, and have gone from 41mb free to 32mb free in about 6 hours.

I personally don't think that this version should make it to official release. I'm contemplating rolling back to .75, but want to give .85 a fair chance with a couple days of heavy use

I should point out that I have very few apps installed - only non-standard apps are Google Maps, Facebook, YouTube, Opera Mini, TalkLock, and AOL IM.

I'm wondering why the heck I only have 12MB-13MB in free memory - I have very little stored on the device.

I found .85 a little glitchy ...The transition from vertical to horizontal was slow...I mean slow and the screen would get buggy,also I experienced frequent lag......after I went back to .83 ,Much better.....But thats just me.

I have found .85 to be very reliable and stable, I have noticed a little memory leak and have had it fail to unlock (got stuck in what appeared to be a loop) That only happened once though, overall I am very happy.

Could memory leak be due to testing? I know that doesn't make a lot of sense, but upon reboot (battery pull) the device went back up to 45MB free (from the 12-13 mentioned above, and even down to 9MB).

From what I understand the blackberry does not flush program memory untill it needs to. So as you use apps more program data gets stored in a "cumulative" fashion. When the memory gets low, a memory manager kicks in and frees up memory as necessary. It looks like a leak but I think the idea may be is to keep data in memory for re-use. If this wre true and you reboot then run an app for the first time, the next time I expect it should load more quickly. When you pull the battery you force program data to be flushed. I don't know enough to say as whether this is program data or program code being buffered for the future. I watched my memory go to 8M and without doing much it jumped back up to 12M. I am on load .85.

I see no reason why you could not or should not either update while in Europe or push service books while in Europe. There are thousands of BB users in Europe. The internet really doesn't care where you are. Have a nice trip. BTW: >85 seems to be an improvement on .75

I could believe this as I have seen this activity on one or two occasions. I will look into thte architecture documentation and see if it says anything about this. 73

Although it may be glitchy at times, it is definitely an improvement.

I just rolled back to .75 from .85... The keyboard seemed laggier in .85 and I just can't deal with the new way that the lock works - it's very annoying.

85 is a lot better than 75. If your debating the download..... Do it

I upgraded from .75 to .85 recently... anyone else having an issue with the battery draining a little faster than before? with .75 I used to be able to use it pretty much 8 hours and still have a little juice, but the last few days after about 3 hours of use my battery was at 20%. I also noticed that just carrying it around in my holster for a few hours seemed to have a more noticeable decrease in battery power.