Blackberry Q10 Update (MR1)

Since I wrote about the update to my LG Nexus-4 last week and this week there was also an update for my Blackberry Q10, I thought that I would write about it.

The update was ~150 MB in size. I didn't note down how long it took to apply this update since I started the update and then watched television but I would say that it is not as fast was the update process on the LG Nexus-4.

Before the update, from the Settings menu on my Q10, in the About menu with the Category OS screen being: Software Release 10.1.0.273 & OS Version: 10.1.0.1720, I applied the update. After the update, on the same screen, the values were: Software Release 10.1.0.4181 & OS Version 10.1.0.4633.

The update and some of the improvements are shown on Blackberry's official blog *HERE*.

Some people reported that after applying the update, the lost their SMS messages. For me, I didn't experience any issues with the upgrade except for the following:

1) When my Blackberry Q10 rebooted, I was prompted to re-enter my Gmail accounts. My Gmail account is set for 2-step authentication/verification and because I didn't have the application password with me that I had used, I decided to try using my main password. To my pleasant surprise, after entering my main password, I was prompted for the passcode generated from my phone's Google Authenticator program. After entering the passcode generated from Google Authenticator, my Blackberry Q10, I received a screen informing me that my Blackberry Q10 was now configured to access my primary Google account.

2) I use an instant messaging application called WhatsApp on my Blackberry Q10 and after the upgrade, all the names vanished from my WhatsApp contacts. The only thing that I could see was the picture of the contact from WhatsApp which main sending a message to a particular person very difficult unless I recognized the picture that they used. However, after ~2 days, the WhatsApp application returned back to normal where the names appeared on my WhatsApp application again.

The Google contacts seems to synchronize a lot better than previously where it seemed to be doing it randomly. I updated information regarding one of the contacts that I saved on my computer and probably within 30 minutes (this is what it is set to on my Blackberry Q10), this information was on my Q10.

The only other noticeable change after the update is the Blackberry calender instead of being black is now white. Personally this doesn't bother me as I didn't have a preference to either colour for the calendar but some people might prefer the black calendar background. I also noticed that e-mail on the Blackberry Q10 can now be configured based on an unlimited time period instead of the previous maximum of 30 days.

Since I only applied the update about 2 days ago, I didn't have a lot of chance to experiment/test everything but for me, I haven't noticed any degradation in terms of speed or battery life

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