Published in Mobiles

Storm OS downgrade causes shortage?

by on24 November 2008

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Could be why Verizon seems to not have enough stock

We have received word of shortages of Blackberry Storms since the launch, and we were pretty much under the impression from our sources that Verizon had gone to great lengths to make sure that the enthusiasm for the launch would not be spoiled by inventory shortages.

Now it seems that although the word was that the Storm would be shipping with version 4.7.0.82 of the BlackBerry OS, the Storms that we are seeing now are running 4.7.0.65 instead, which is clearly an older version of the OS.

Moles are now suggesting to us that Storm boxes and yellow dotted stickers are being used to identify the fact that Storms have been downgraded successfully to the 4.7.0.65 version of the OS. Apparently, according to the moles, Verizon is downgrading Storms to an older version because of a last minute bug and it was necessary to re-flash the Storms so as not to miss the launch date.

All of this re-flashing has caused an inventory shortage issue on the availability of Storm units. You can only unbox and re-flash so many Storm units in a day. However, it is expected that Verizon will be able to get back on track with enough Storm units in the next couple of days, as they do have inventory, it is just running the wrong version of the OS.

We suspect that we will see a quick upgrade to address the bug or glitch fix in the next couple of weeks or so, and it will be a version numbered higher than 4.7.0.82. For the moment, we suggest that if you are going to get a Storm from Verizon you might want to make sure that it is running 4.7.0.65 before you leave the store. While we don’t know what the issue is, we do know that they would not be downgrading to an older version if it wasn’t a major snafu that could cause a serious problem.
Last modified on 24 November 2008
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