[trumptman]

Hello to all of you helpful folks out here in Crackberry-land. I'm somewhat new to the smartphone world and very new to Blackberry. A bit of history on myself, I've been a Verizon customer since 2001. My last phone with them was the LG Dare. I left two lines with them but recently ported my own number over to T-mobile to use with a jailbroken iPhone 2G/8gig.

The iPhone is very enjoyable to use around Wifi but being on EDGE most of the time isn't very enjoyable, especially when I am so used to the Verizon network. A few friends have recently gone the Droid route, but since I very much enjoy push mail from Yahoo, Audible.com, and not extending my Verizon contract, that wasn't a choice for me.

So one of the friends who upgraded handed over his Storm for me to play around with and so far I've done a decent job but still have some trouble understanding to me what is new terminology.

First about the phone and what I have on it. It is a Verizon Storm 9530 with 8Gig microSD ram card. It is running 5.0.0.328. I've installed the following apps on it:

Google Maps
Facebook
Opera 5 beta
Blackberry App World
Pandora
Audible.com
Pirates!

Application Memory Free Space - 14-16 megs
Device Memory - 879.2
Free Memory - 865

It appears lots of folks spend time managing their memory due to the multitasking nature of the Storm. The memory gets low and the phone gets sluggish, at least that is my understanding. I've tried closing all the apps when I am done using them but four or so tend to always stay open. BBMess, Phone, Home and Browser or something similar. I'm trying to remember to truly close everything when I don't want to leave it open in the background so what is typical for open apps?

I've noticed the phone has settings to tell it to power off and on at certain times. Yet I also notice a lot of talk about "battery pulls." From this it would appear that cycling and pulling the battery are not the same. Am I wrong in this understanding? I don't mind setting the phone to turn off at like 2 am and come back on at 4 am if it will help with memory issues.

For me at least, the 5.0 software has been very fast and enjoyable. I understand most folks are coming from an earlier background and also from the timeframe when Verizon locked down the GPS but from my perspective this is a decently enjoyable phone. It could cause me to port my number back if I can overcome a few kinks and understandings.

The Audible.com software is confusing to me. I've loaded quite a few movies on to the MicroSD card and also used Blackberry Manager for Mac to sync all my contacts, calendars, music, etc. It went very well. I cannot figure where to place downloaded audible files. I also do not know how to check the version of my Audible player and if there are any issues with 5.0. I tried listening to it on the external speaker just to try it out with a previously purchased book downloaded over the air and it appeared to keep freezing every five seconds or so.

The native browser appears to be very slow, horribly so at times. Part of the issue with the Iphone on EDGE is maximum downloads of only 15k per second if lucky. Here the browser sometimes appears to slow this phone on a very fast network down to the same rate. I tried OperaMini which was very fast most of the time but clearly feels non-native and as a beta, I worry about memory issues related to it. Are there any other alternatives I haven't found yet?

Just trying to get off on the right foot with this device so any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[hootyhoo]

I'll try to help with a couple of those. You have already discovered that there are 5 apps that cannot be closed. That is common among all BB's. As for battery pulls they are not the same as powering the device on and off. Pulling the battery is like rebooting your computer. On the BB it recaptures lost memory. I have found the 5. OS to be very stable. Most people who have memory leak issues are running third party themes and poorly designed third party apps. I haven't done a battery pull sinc loading the new OS over two weeks ago while some are forced to do them multiple times a day. In my opinion the s1 is a solid device. More memory would be great but knowing its limitations will allow for a more trouble free experience ith the s1.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com