Blackberry Bold 9700 running BB OS 6.x

When I purchased my Blackberry Bold 9700, it came with BB OS 5.x. I've been using BB OS 6.x on my Blackberry Bold 9700 for approximately 1 year after Research in Motion released it for the Blackberry Bold 9700.

My personal impressions of BB OS 6.x is that it is nice but I don't recommend it for the Bold 9700. If you have a choice between keeping your Bold 9700 running OS 5 or running it on OS 6, my personal feeling is that you should run it on OS 5.

OS 6 is a memory hog and with the limited amount of memory on the Bold 9700, after installing OS 6 on it, I can only install ~15 applications onto it whereas when my Bold 9700 was running OS 5, I had double the amount of applications without any major problems (or warning messages about running low on memory). OS 6 also seems to be optimized for a touchscreen which the Bold 9700 doesn't have. In my opinion, it is easier to navigate using a touchscreen with OS 6 (I've tested it with one of the touchscreen Blackberry devices and find OS 6 to be quite good on it).

My primary problem with OS 6 on my Bold 9700 is the amount of memory that it requires (which doesn't leave a lot of room for other applications). There is also an incompatibility between the current version of SlingPlayer for the Blackberry and OS 6 (according to Sling Media's website, it is compatible with OS 5 only). It is still possible to run SlingPlayer on my Bold 9700 running OS 6 but it is somewhat unstable. At times it will run and other times without any indications on what the problem is, it won't run. Even doing a battery pull at this point won't cause the program to run again.

It is possible to revert back to OS 5 after upgrading to OS 6. I haven't done so mainly because of the time involved in doing OS installs on the Blackberry (it can take a few hours).

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