Verizon Rolling Out BlackBerry Storm Update Tomorrow Night (Updated)

Verizon will be rolling out a new BlackBerry Storm firmware update ahead of the Storm 2 launch starting Sunday night at 6PM EST, which will add highly requested features such as “a faster, more accurate and natural text input experience, word completion, a virtual QWERTY keyboard in portrait view and enhanced sensitivity when editing, copying and pasting.”

The update will also add the ability to “enable Auto Correction as opposed to Word Completion in landscape view.” presumably to speed up typing in landscape mode. The complete changelog will also be available tomorrow night shortly after the update release.

Update: The update will not be delivered over the air as with past updates, instead being delivered via RIM’s Desktop Manager application for Windows and recently launched for Mac OS X.  Hit Read More for the recently surfaced changelog, which now lists availability at 10PM EST instead of 6PM.

BlackBerry Storm – MR3 (5.0) Software Release
OEM: RIM
Model: 9530

Software Version: 5.0.0 Release 508(OS 4.2.0.128 / Applications 5.0.0.328)
Approval Date: 10/22/09

Available through the following methods:

Over The Air Software Loading (OTASL): NOT AVAILABLE for this upgrade.

Desktop Manager Software Loading: Customers will have access any time after
10/25 10PM Eastern time.

Web Based Software Loading (WebSL): Customers will have access any time
after 10/25 10PM Eastern time.

A software update to help enhance the performance on your BlackBerry ®
StormTM smartphone is now available. From your computer go to
www.verizonwireless.com/storm, select “Software Download” and follow the
on-screen instructions. Thank you, Verizon Wireless

New software has been approved for the RIM Blackberry Storm (9530), and will
be available effective 10/25/2009 at 7 PM PST for customers. Communication
will be provided to customers via a “Pin Message” to their device stating:

Symptoms Resolved:

Significant improvements in rotation detection and screen painting have been introduced in this software.

Device displayed a white bar at the bottom of the screen after a rotation event.

When setting a custom SMS tone for a single contact, this tone may playback unexpectedly for SMS’ received from other contacts.

When swiping down the virtual keyboard in an MMS message the send and save draft icons did not appear as expected.

When viewing an SMS there was no simple way to call the current user. Now the user can select the number from the Callback Number field or from the message body and call that number from the pop up menu.

The delete prior function has the unwanted side-effect of triggering the compose email screen.

The user cannot configure their profile settings to increase the number of alerts when being notified of an event such as incoming SMS or email.

Previous software versions did not allow the user to increase the count of notifications (i.e. Beep 5 times when when I get an email and beep 3 times when I get an sms). In this software, this is now allowed with counts from 1-10.

When trying to set a home screen background of a certain resolution (more specifically a resolution matching either the width or the height of the native resolution of the LCD) it may have appeared as a black screen.

When trying to edit/create a folder, the virtual keyboard did not render to allow the user to enter the names of said folders.

Intermittently, when streaming a video while doing a handover to 2G on a 3G network the video would stop playing.

If you paused a video recording and then resumed, the icon state may not have reflected the current recording state.

After recoding a video of a certain size (7M) the saved video may be corrupted and unplayable.

During manual network selection, the radio buttons associated with the networks did not render as expected.

When moving out of coverage your device display for no coverage may have been inconsistent.

During voice calls, your device may have reset on a rare occasion.

After viewing and accepting the End User Licensing Agreement of the App World application the application doesn’t startup (fixes introduced in the latest version of App World).

On some rare occasions, the device may reset on its own during a voice call or while idle.

During an MTP side load of 16GB of music, the device would leak memory and stop the transfer at ~75%.

During device full boot-up, the progress bar skips from 0% complete to ~66% complete instead of showing a gradual progression (Note: from 66% to 100% it does show a gradual progression).