Quote:
Originally Posted by vito032
OK i haven't been on the forum for a little bit and i notice that there are two new OS
.231 and .250 I'm now running .206 is it worth upgrading to either i seen good and bad things about both. and it seams like alot of people keep going back to .206 is it worth the time to download either one and which one is better and why? Or just wait
Thanks
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@vito032 - I've had each of these loaded on my 8900, and also tried 5.0.0.100 for a while before going back to 4.6.1.250. Overall, I've found the three you mentioned to be virtually indistinguishable. As I recall, the differences that I noticed were subtle differences in things like keyboard responsiveness, how long it took to return control to me after I did a "delete prior" in my messages view, and battery life.
Battery life seems to be a tricky issue with these releases. In general, we have no hard information about the way the OS does things that might affect battery life. For the most part, executing program instructions in the CPU shouldn't make a measurable difference, and I'm guessing the only issues that would impact battery life might be the way a certain build makes use of the radio and GPS, which definitely DO make use of battery power.
I *think* I've seen some differences in battery life under certain conditions. For example, if I leave a program running in the background (e.g., Maratick, a donation-ware list manager), and consult it every few minutes, my battery seems to drain quite quickly. This could be due to any number of functions on the Blackberry that I'm not aware of, including the code that puts it to "sleep" and wakes it up, possible differences in the use of GPS or radio when the phone is in or out of the holster, etc.
In general, software companies (and in this case, we can think of RIM as a software publisher) put out new releases and builds either to introduce new features or fix bugs. Generally speaking, although not 100% of the time, later builds of the same software version have fewer bugs.
I tend to use the latest release available of a given version, and I'm generally happy working that way. On the other hand, as Midnightdraven pointed out, if it works for you, there's really no imperative to upgrade for its own sake -- unless you enjoy it as some of us do.