I havent seen anything on this before but I came across something interesting. I know if we mail an animated gif to the BB, it wont be animated when you open the file.

I was poking around with gmail on the blackberry, I was looking at an attachment in my sent email. I opened the attachement and it was animated, then I saved the attachment to my BB. After going into the picture folder, I opened the same gif and it was animated still. I even saved it as my standby screen and was animated (only for about 3 sec's though). But viewing it from the picture folder, it stayed animated for a while.

Edit:

To clarify, this was using the browser/gmail

Actually, I have sent animated to my bb by email ever since I got my 7290 a year and a half ago and they have always played. Cannot add theme as themes though and they only play once when used as backgrounds. I'll admit this hasn't been discussed much but there was at least one thread that did, a long time ago.

Additionally, under Browser Option/General Properties, you can set the number of animations.

Hope this helps
Rcbjr

Ditto on all counts, have always been able to do this even from the original OS 4.0.

Weird, they never played out for me if I emailed them before. This has been the only time I've had them animated on the BB.