Anyone else thinking Verizon is procrastinating it's release of OS 4.5 because it intends to move directly from 4.3 to 4.6 (or higher) so it can launch enhanced services across all it's BB platforms simultaneously? Perhaps at the same time they release the Storm?

No.

No!
They will probably release 4.5 when everyone else releases 4.6.

I would guess they would release it shortly after the Storm is released.

At least you guys have an official release of 4.5 (from another carrier).

Us 8830 users don't have any official 4.5 love

I know it's probably been asked before, but does anyone know why? It's not even to OS 4.3 yet. Still 4.2 and change.

Agreed

Yeah, it seems odd that the 8830 is only current device (AFAIK) that hasn't had an official 4.5 release on *any* carrier. So maybe:

1) There's some long-standing issue that's keeping it from being approved by any major carriers right now (maybe something with the CDMA/GSM roaming system?) that beta users haven't found or consider a minor inconvenience (e.g., speaker blast?)

or

2) All the major carriers that have 8830s are also future Storm carriers (e.g., Verizon) and are holding off so the new/improved features of 4.5 don't water down the Storm hype. OR the major carriers w/ 8830 have enough pull with RIM to get them to hold back 4.5 until the Storm is released, even for carriers who aren't going to have the Storm.

or

3) They're waiting for an official roll-out of a 4.5 device to train staff, etc to support the new device OS before the floodgates open to the consumer

or

4) There's few enough 8830 users (e.g., compared to 8330 users) that it's just low-priority

Pure speculation. I'm so bored with waiting for an official release.

In one of the leaked Verizon documents on one of the blog sites, I think it was the storm training document, it showed the storm, curve, pearl, and 8830. Only the 8830 was not listed as being HTML e-mail capable. The storm said it was and the curve and pearl said they were with an asterisk. The asterisk was "with 4.5 upgrade". The 8830 had no such asterisk.

And I'm an 8830 user.