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.

Sure, it looks great, takes very good pictures, and has an amazing display.. but my Tour is becoming increasingly unstable and laggy. Both of these situations have a simple fix – reboot – which sadly takes 7+ minutes on the device. Yeah – SEVEN minutes – sometimes creeping up to TEN. Its absolutely unbelievable, considering how “powerful” it is supposed to be – lots of memory and a fast processor – yet it can’t load its own OS nearly as fast as Blackberries with much lesser stats? Huh? My old Pearl (see the earliest posts) could out-boot the Tour by 5 minutes, easily.

Stability wise, its great, as long as I don’t use any 3rd party apps. The latest version of Facebook has a nice bug that literally reboots the device when I exit the app. What? I guess we’ll call that “memory cleaning” or something. Ridic. Running Google Maps works quite well.. as long as you have alot of time. My lovely Tour has a little hourglass problem.. where nearly everytime I try to USE Gmaps, it loads quickly, then hangs for a solid 30 seconds. The phone is completely unusable during this period. And it likely will repeat this behavior several times during the Gmaps session.

Signal quality is abysmal. I am still dropping out of 1XEV constantly, down to 1X, and sometimes losing signal altogether. Its not Verizon’s issue, as I’ve mentioned before – its this goddamn phone. Kim’s old Curve is still a champ at holding a signal. Fortunately this signal crap does not drop too many calls.. but it still does now and then – though not as many as the good old iPhone.

It’s been said, since this phone came out, that the new “OS5.0″ would be coming out “soon”. 5 months later, its still not out, thanks to Verizon.. however there are some leaks out there. I hope I hope I hope the new OS will fix the issues I list above.. namely the booting and signal quality issues. I suspect any “fresh install” of an OS will fix some of the instabilities .. much like any device. I am not banking on the new OS to come out anytime soon, however – nor do I really expect it to actually fix the issues. I am almost certain, in fact – especially since the Tour2 is coming out (with features like Wifi, trackpad and a truthfully faster processor). If the Tour(1) were so great – would there be any need to build a better version of it immediately after release? Nope.

So.. as I sort of suspected some time ago.. the Tour is simply my “right now” phone. Thinking about day-to-day frustration, it is still less (but not much less!) infuriating than my iPhone experience- probably because the camera is relatively awesome, and it still does a great job at email.

Now that Motorola released the Droid, and  Google has its Nexus One out (soon to be on Verizon).. I’m starting to get more interested in Android – but I am going to wait it out a bit longer.

My GPS craps out. Alot. So much that nearly every time I want to use it (for awesome apps like GPSlogger), I have to reboot the phone to get the GPS chip to wake up. Not cool. It takes ages to reboot, too – like 7 minutes or more. My old Pearl did it in half the time..

Further GPS crap – even when it is working.. it occasionally reports INSANE data. You can see it in action in these images.. two are from a round of golf I logged, where I apparently broke the sound barrier, and another is from a run – where I broke 80mph on foot. Right.

To ice this cake, the signal reception has issues as well. I can be sitting on the couch here and watch the signal drop from full 1XEV to no bars, to just 1X (which I think is like ATT Edge vs 3G).. then lose data connectivity altogether.. then it bounces right back. Meanwhile, Kim’s Curve, also on VZW, right next to my phone, maintains a strong signal consistently.  WTF, RIM?

So this Tour is over – going to swap for a new one at the VZW store. And apparently, the newer “batches” of Tours are much better built, so say other folks on the internets. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. We’ll see. So far I am not happy – at all – about these shortcomings.

Update.. timed a reboot: 6.5 minutes before it was “awake” and then almost another minute before it was useable. and… it is on 1X vs 1XEV – unreal. I’ve had enough of this. And today’s lesson for CDMA networks:
1X: Connected to the cellular network on 1xRTT as well as connected to RIM’s servers
1XEV: Connected to the cellular network on EVDO as well as connected to RIM’s servers

So compared to GSM, 1X is like EDGE, 1XEV is like 3G.