BBM 5.0

The leaked version of BBM 5.0 was released a few months ago, tons of BB users went straight for it, and after a day or two many hated it, some liked it, one or two loved it. I heard mostly hated comments about it and a lot of “I want my old BBM back.“

Links to downgrade back to the old BBM started emerging on blogs everywhere, people complained of how slow BBM 5.0 made their phones and how all their contacts were lost, and how they had to reboot their phone several times in the day. I took all this into consideration and I abstained myself from upgrading my BBM to 5.0….Until Monday of this week…
So, I heard the official BB release date for BBM 5.0 came out on 8/25/09, but I of course couldn’t wait another day, so I got mine on Monday.

• I searched and searched for the download link for the Curve 8900 (since every BB has their own special link).
• I eventually found one, the link worked at first, moving very slowly, then it failed to finish downloading.
• I tried again, it wouldn’t download, I rebooted my phone, I see my old BBM missing/gone.
• I panicked a bit, then I went at it again to try to download 5.0, this time it went all the way through. Smiles on my face! :-D
• I then rebooted the phone again just in case. I opened BBM 5.0 and it was a whole lot different! It is beautiful!

I think BBM 5.0 looks slightly different on different BB models. I haven’t seen what it looks like on the older models like 8320, 8310, 8330, the Pearl, etc… But on my 8900 and I’m sure on the Bold, Storm and Tour, the colors/graphics, layout, it all looks brilliant! That was of course the first thing I noticed.

I also did noticed that I had no contacts on my new BBM. I think there was an option to bring you contacts over at the beginning but I was skeptical to click on it, so I ignored it. Being that I didn’t have that many BBM contacts to begin with, I just readded most of them, no biggie.

Your contacts now have pictures, that’s great for those contacts that like to constantly change their display name.

You can send a Broadcast message to ALL of your contacts. I believe with the old BBM you couldn’t send broadcast messages to everyone.

Your BBM/BB now has a scannable Barcode. I was shocked to read this too. I’m like how da hell?! Sort of like the G1… You can scan another BB’s barcode and get their contact info sent to your phone.

How do you scan?!
There’s an option on BBM where you can add a contact and it says you can add by Pin number, scanning their barcode, etc… Once you select scan their barcode your camera turns on (you’ll see the flash light come on) and with the auto focus on your camera the phone will get a clear picture of the barcode on the other person’s phone. It is pretty neat! They should make this scanner work for products too, like the G1. But I think they getting there. :-)

You can also share locations with other of your BBM contacts using BBM 5.0 sort of like Google Latitude without the maps.

You can customize your status messages, like in AIM or BeeJive/Jivetalk.

There are some hidden “easter eggs” on the BBM 5.0, like country flags. I don’t know who found these by accident, but they pretty cool. You can get the codes from here or see below: (i.e.: for Jamaica type on your screen *jm*)