For what it's worth, we had a BB regional sales rep...
...at our store meeting this morning.
To listen to him, every problem with the Storm is Verizon's fault for pushing it out the door too early. While I will concede that we pushed it early, all the blame doesn't reside with us.
I asked him if RIM had ever heard of a 512MB Flash ROM. I also asked him if Verizon spec'd out an OS that stored applications in an inadequate 128MB Flash rather than the 1GB hard memory. He went into some spiel about data compression and how BB cuts the file sizes by 30%.
I don't know about you, but when I do the math, it just doesn't work out.
512MB = 4x128MB
Somehow that doesn't equate to 30% in file size reduction. Maybe it's just me?
He also said we should refer Pearl owners to our customer care for the 4.5 issue that doesn't put the preloaded pics on during software update. I told him it was a carrier wide issue and that our customer care couldn't do anything about a file they either didn't include or forgot to build a subroutine to add.
The only semi-useful information I got from him is that out of the 10 OS builds Verizon was given the debugging/testing process has narrowed it to 3. There is no information about when the final selection would be made. If he knew, he wasn't saying. I can't say I blame him as that would cost him his job.
He also started rambling about how no browser supports Flash because it was designed for Desktops, not Handhelds, but a friend of his said that he was using AJAX to make convert, and that's what Skyfire did on WinMo devices.
Of course I pointed out to him that AJAX is a cripting language that can do a lot of things, but video conversion, especially on a handheld, would be too memory intensive and requires the scripts be run client side.
Anyway, the short of it is, no real news on a new OS.