Well, 5.0 installed in under an hour – and another hour later I had all of my apps and restored .. running the latest and greatest! I must say, RIM slipped some really nice improvements in – and it certainly runs much better than 4.7. I’m very pleased. The phone is not crashing anymore, seems to be holding its RAM better, and is definitely more responsive.

Some of the niceties -

• loads thumbnails faster
• improved camera software – can enable ‘macro’ mode, and have many options for sending (sizes)
• shows Upload progress when sending photos via email
• overall look and feel is much cleaner, smoother. almost.. modern!
• threaded SMS (not that i care, I use Google Voice for free SMS if needed)
• nice new ‘boot’ screen status bar

Not so great:

• my signal is still garbage
• reboots are still excessively slow
• when phone wakes up from ‘idle’, there is a strange black screen, pause, then it ‘wakes up’.
• Gmaps totally hangs the phone still.. seems to be a Google issue now though

Overall I am much happier with the phone. It is stable, which is quite comforting.  It still has the god awful long boot time – which isnt a big deal anymore since the phone has stopped rebooting itself – and the signal is still very ‘flighty’ – as I sit on the couch I can watch it go from full 1XEV down to no bars on 1X.. and back again. Running Google Maps is still painful – I am thinking now that it has to do with the Latitude feature – but very irritating when it hangs the phone with a ’stop watch’ icon.. making the whole thing unusable.