I few weeks ago, I took the plunge and downloaded the newest OS leak at the time, 5.0.0.191, even though I knew it came with camera/video issues… (using it would almost instantly reboot the phone). Aside for this issue, I loved the OS’s speed and consistency. I even contemplated buying a separate camera with bluetooth just to compensate for the lack of one on my phone. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to wait long for a new OS that had a camera that worked.

Last week, OS 5.0.0.230 came out and I almost immediately uploaded it onto my phone. I hadn’t blogged about it yet because I wanted to make sure it was something I was going to keep.

So far, I love it.

Features:

  • A working camera – both the camera and the video recorder work and work extremely well. The lag when snapping pictures is significantly shorter. (There still is a little lag though, and taking motion pictures seems almost impossible without getting blur)
  • 3rd Party Themes work – previous OS 5.0’s had an issue with running themes that weren’t the default theme. When an email was received, there would be no notification sound.
  • Flick Scrolling – like every OS 5.0 after .141, flick scrolling is available on all apps, pages and sidebars. This means, kind of like the results page of Poynt (if you ever used it), if you flick the screen, the page will scroll up and down as if you, flicked a paper. Pretty cool to see.
  • Vibrate and Ring – There’s a setting to both vibrate and ring at the same time when the phone gets a call.
  • Tabbed Browsing is gone – not sure why but they got rid of this feature that was available for .141

Few other things…

More than a few certain apps still don’t work or have issues with 5.0 (like tweetgenius, yatca, twitterberry) and a few more do work but need certain workarounds (like good maps and opera mini), but in the last week, a lot of RIM apps came out with updates that work with 5.0 (like FaceBook, App World).

The only app I feel I miss is BBM 5.0 which a fix hasn’t been found for.

Download


I downloaded .230 from the above link. The installation process is a little different for this one than it has been for other leaks. For this one, the user has to copy these files into the 5.0.0.191 installation folder. (The folder can probably be found in C:\program files\common files\research in motion\shared\loader files\…)

A new version of the leak came out that doesn’t involve having to copy the files in the .191 folder. I talk about it here


Of course, before doing any changes to my phone, I backed up all the data using Desktop Manager.

I also wiped my phone before I installed.

The process took a few more steps but so far, it’s been well worth it.