Five things to know about the BB Storm 4.7.0.78 upgrade

What to bear in mind when updating your smartphone

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5 December 2008 12:50 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Five things you'll want to know about the new Storm OS update.

1. Vodafone UK has said that the UK BlackBerry Storm firmware update and how-to guide for installation is expected on Friday, with an Over The Air (OTA) offering available sometime during the week commencing 8 December. You can go ahead and download the software update on Vodafone.de, which is available now, as it's multilingual and will work with UK Storm devices.

2. You'll need a PC with the BlackBerry Desktop Manager to install it at the moment. There isn't any way it will work for Mac users unless you've got Vista or XP installed via Boot Camp or Parallels. The whole process will take around 30 minutes (if you haven't got the Desktop Manager its a 81MB download and the update is a further 103MB) and is fully automated. It will temporarily wipe all the data off your handset before reinstalling it at the end of the process.

3. It won't reinstall data from third-party apps like TwitterBerry and Facebook. It will also mean you will be required to punch in your username and passwords for various apps. Interestingly, it will tell you to have to re-setup email, however this doesn't appear to be the case. Emails are unaffected, as are contacts, but it's best to backup just in case.

4. Improvements to the software sees the accelerometer now actually rotating when you want it to, saving you from having to shake the device in an attempt to spur it into action. The touch interface also seems to have been improved, but that still doesn't make the full landscape QWERTY keyboard any faster to type with. It will improve your typing speed for the SureType keyboard. Those superfast typesters will be pleased it keeps up with you now.

5. A new Wireless Upgrade button now appears in the Options menu. It's a tool that lets you manually "check for upgrades" if you can't be bothered to wait for the pushes from RIM and Vodafone in the future.