[mikmooney]

I'm new to this site and relatively new to the smartphone world (this is my second), and while I'm happy with my Storm there are a few things that reallly irk me about this phone. As we all know, the Storm was marketed to the masses as this media machine but so far in my experieces it's not even close, specifically video. A buddy (who has an iPhone) and I were comparing video quality this past weekend. We both watched the exact same Alice in Chains music video from YouTube ane while his picture was crystal clear and flowed smoothly, mine was grainy as **** and choppy, almost to the point that it was unwatchable. Later that night with a different friend we decided to go see a movie. I suggested we use Poynt on my phone to watch trailers, read reviews, and look-up show times. His first comment to me while watching the trailer was "wow, that video is horrible, is that how it always is?" Finally, on my way back from work on the train last week I decided to watch an episode of Weeds I downloaded from Videos4Blackberry but ended up shutting it down 10 minutes in because the quality was so bad I felt like I was missing out on something. I suppose I never really understood how bad video was on the Storm until I spent some quality time with an iPhone but man I'm way jealous.
Next, I want to talk about the screen lock in a call. This isn't such a problem anymore since there are plenty of apps out there to fix the problem. My issue is how can RIM to be so dumb (even if this is their first touchscreen) to release a fully integrated touch screen phone without a native screen locking mechanism while in a call? It would seem to me that is something crucially important and I'm blown away that simple, but necessary item was overlooked. I know most of you will say "get TalkLock, StormLock, ScreenLock, etc. and stop whining. The fact is, I'm a fulltime student and have a fulltime job with a girlfriend; time is limited for me, I don't have endless hours to devote to downloading beta OS's and new apps that may or may not work. I downloaded TalkLock and that was buggy and drained my memory, I just paid $380 for my Storm, sorry I'm not ready to spend another $4 on an app that should be standard on a touchscreen phone, and I did finally settle on ScreenLock which works the best for my phone but still drains my memory.
Finally, I get to the OS. I got my storm in late December with .75 already loaded on there so thank god I never had to deal with the **** that was .65
The current OS isn't bad overall, it's mostly stable, just slow as molassas. A touted feature of the phone is virtually unusable (the camera), typing lag (especially for someone fast like me) is brutal, I've had a handful of random reboots, and Visual Voicemail still doesn't populate my messages in a timely manner. I'm reading on here that the builds are now into the .140's and Verizon has still rejected everything. I understand that Verizon wants to get the best OS before they release it but this is the same company that put a half-baked product on the shelves way early to benefit their bottom line with Christmas shopping and allowed it to run on a "joke" of an OS to put it nicely. Why don't they just release something like .99 or .109 which adresses some of the major flaws with .75, tides over the customers, and then RIM and Verizon can spend months developing the gold standard OS for release at a way later date. I know I'm ranting and raving but at least I'm in the right place!