I upgraded the firmware on my Blackberry 8100 to the "latest", which as of now is 4.5.0.124. This is always scary, since there's a long period that the Blackberry goes through while booting the firmware for the first time where you start to wonder if you've bricked it. My strategy this time was to start the upgrade and then leave the room for an hour.
Good news: it isn't bricked.
So having done that, I played around with the Bluetooth connectivity between it and my Vista laptop… and discovered that no, you still can't do anything useful with it through Bluetooth. The phone will act as a "modem" (ie some sort of wireless network devices) but you can't sync it, or access the files on it, or anything like that. Further research suggests that the problem is that the Vista drivers to do stuff like that are not available yet.
On the plus side, the phone now claims a couple more bluetooth services exported, including music source… so if I ever get that bluetooth head unit I've been wanting for the last two years I will be able to play music from the Blackberry to it.
I'm not sure I like the new mail reading interface -- having two lines for each message means I can't pack the messages in per screen that the old firmware did. It's all about information density, baby...
That said, HTML mail reading is pretty good. Once you turn the auto-image-download off so that you don't blow your data plan, that is.
And the web viewer is better, or at least it is nicer to look at. I don't like pushing an arrow head around the screen with the trackball though. But it works, so it is OK so far.
Image viewing is much faster, and the media player is better too.
So maybe now I need to find myself some nice themes for it…
