It’s no secret that I’ve never been a big fan of Verizon, but it’s the cell provider that my employer uses, and since they pay for my cell phone, I don’t really have much choice.

It’s also no big secret that I am a die hard BlackBerry fan (until there is something that has equivalent functionality, including a user changable battery – I’m looking directly at you iPhone).

So naturally when I started working for this employer I got a Motorola Q from Verizon as my work phone (Verizon didn’t have much in the way of modern BlackBerries at that point in time). Ugh, huge mistake, I’ve learned my lesson there, and will never stray from the BlackBerry goodness again. At least until next time something equally attractive comes along.

Well thankfully by the time I became fed up with my Motorola Q’s inabilty to open an email without choking like the star of the latest Max Hardcore movie, they had just introduced the BlackBerry 8830.

So I sucked it up and after several replacement Q’s had the same issues, I told my boss that the Q just wasn’t cutting it, and I needed to upgrade to a BlackBerry. The first few days with the new BlackBerry were pure bliss after enduring six months of pure torture at the hands of the previously mentioned under performing Motorola Q.

Then I had lunch with a friend that had just bought a BlackBerry 8820 from AT&T (basically the same phone with a slightly different feature set). During lunch his phone rang, and I was absolutely floored by the volume of his ringer! It was so loud! I suddenly realized that my BlackBerry 8830′s ringer  sounded positively weak in comparison. As it turns out, this is a common problem with the Verizon 8830 (note to Verizon: learn from Dell’s mistakes, and quit screwing with the firmware of the phones you sell).

Also turns out the Motorola Q that was having issues was not the phone’s fault, I ran into someone with one from Sprint, and it worked just fine.

Well it’s been my experience in the past with Dell hardware that is malfunctioning that like 90% of the time flashing the problem device with the actual manufacturer’s firmware resolves the issue. Ok, mission defined, let’s flash the firmware on the BlackBerry 8830 with  some standard RIM firmware and see what happens.

It turns out that RIM does not have “standard” firmware for their devices. They instead redirect you to download the latest BlackBerry OS from your device manufacturer! Bummer.

Flash forward 6 months to last week (yeah I just pulled off a flash forward and a flashback at the same time, I RULE!). I am once again having lunch with the previously mentioned 8820 owning friend, when he shows me the latest BalckBerry 4.5OS on his 8820. Then he proceeds to tell me that AT&T wasn’t quick enough with the BlackBerry OS upgrades, so he’s figured out how to find generic OS updates and apply them. SCORE!!!

Well not so much, as it turns out. Apparently the 8830 is only carried by Verizon and Sprint, and there is not an updated OS for it available yet. However some quick google searching turns up beta OS forums.

Now, normally I would never, but since there is a release for the 8820, and the 8830 is not THAT different, the beta is probably extremely close to the RTM version. Just one catch, it will void my warranty with Verizon.

But, seeing as there are compelling reasons to update (louder ringer reported on Verizon phones, html email, and the ability to open Office documents attached to email without a BlackBerry Enterprise Server), I took the plunge.

A couple hours and some torrent downloading later, I have the 4.5 OS running on my Blackberry, and guess what? The ringer is LOUD!!! Finally I can hear my phone ringing without it being right next to me.

And I must say, while slightly slower than the previous 4.2 OS (which I am going to chalk up to it being a beta OS), the improvements are really nice.

For me, losing the Verizon warranty is totally worth it. And I guess technically if I ever have an issue with the phone, I can always revert back to the original 4.2 OS before calling Verizon support.