RIM's BlackBerry 8830: A Firmware Update Makes It Even More Groovy

Corporate IT departments have longstanding reputations of exhibiting such undesireable traits as masochism, control-freakism, arrogance, and rigidity. One need only look at Mordac, the ‘preventer of information services’ from the comic strip Dilbert, or at the hilarious characters from the British sitcom The IT Crowd (available Stateside via Netflix Watch Instantly, by the way), to encounter the common stereotypes.

I’m glad to say that my primary IT contact, Duane, doesn’t fit that undesirable mold. Granted, I don’t (for example) have administrator rights on my work-assigned laptop, which is why I do most of my work on personally owned hardware. But within the understandable limits of corporate computing policy, Duane provides excellent support, being always willing to devote whatever time and effort are needed to solve my problem of the moment.

As such, I was happily surprised to find out a few days ago that the company had finally approved v4.5.0.201 firmware upgrades to the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition phone I last wrote about in early April. The update from v4.2.2.196 ended up being a bit more complicated than originally envisioned. Word to the wise: don’t install the version of BlackBerry Desktop Manager that bundles Roxio’s Media Manager if you’ve already got Roxio software on your system. But earlier today, the deed was done.

I’m enjoying a new slew of applications that weren’t v4.2-compatible, such as Facebook, Google Voice, Pandora and Slacker. The integrated browser seems to be speedier and more robust than its predecessor (though it looks like it’s about to get even better), especially after I figured out I needed to put it in ‘Internet Browser’ mode (versus the ‘BlackBerry Browser’ default) in order to avoid obscure error messages. And it’ll be great to be able to expand beyond my current MicroSD card capacity limitations.

However, all this downloading has got me missing the speed of the integrated Wi-Fi connectivity option present in my iPhone and other handsets I’ve used over the past…oh…decade (ahem). And, as I grumbled about in mid-April, I remain patiently awaiting a decent Twitter client to show up. I’m still using TwitterBerry, which is stable but (unlike, say, Tweetie for Macs and the iPhone/iPod touch) doesn’t concurrently handle multiple Twitter accounts. And SocialScope, for example, is still in private beta (and no, I couldn’t seem to snag an invite). Any suggestions, fellow CrackBerry addicts?