If you follow me on twitter, you know I have been wishing for BlackBerry 6 to leak/release for my new Bold 9650 for quite some time, and have reminded all of you frequently. Then around 11:30 yesterday, @BBLeaks posts a teaser picture of the 9650 BB6 file. Along with every other 9650 user, I rejoiced. It leaked about four hours later, and I installed without regard for any bugs or negative consequences. I was thinking midway through installation that this might turn out like the first leak for OS 5.0. It was for the Storm and it was almost unusable! it was filled with bugs, and lag, and memory leaks like nothing we had ever seen before.

This time around, it isn’t half bad. So real quick I’ll go over what this OS is all about and give my overall impressions. Here are my Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Webkit! The Webkit browser is definitely in here and it is a lot better than before. Granted, the rumors are true, it is not blazing fast and maybe not even as fast as it is on the Torch 9800, but it is better than OS5.
• Hold-down-trackpad feature. On the Torch, if you hold your press on the screen, you get options; well RIM has solved the no-touch issue on the 9650 by allowing you to get those options by holding down the trackpad.
• Social Feeds. I’m a real big fan of the Social Feeds idea, and after figuring out how to get it, I love it (I’ll go over how to get it in the Cons)
• Battery life, at least for me, has been improved a lot over the 5.0.0.810 hybrid OS I used before this, which is good because I am constantly using it for social and work.

Cons:

• Social Feeds. Yeah I know I had it under Pros too, but the way to get Twitter and GTalk to work in it is to reinstall the app. It was kind of a pain, and did not even come with the install pre-checked.
• App Loader. In order to get certain key features on BB6, you had to make sure to check them in App Loader. Social Feeds, YouTube, Maps, and Media Sync were not checked for me when I did the install and had to go back and reinstall them.
• Lag. There is some lag when selecting certain things such as the notification bar. Though I have noticed that as the OS has been on my device longer and longer, the lag has gotten less and less.
• For some reason, due to the OS or not, Contact pictures in BlackBerry Messenger do not show up unless it is from another source (eg Facebook), I am still looking into a fix for this, but nothing as of yet.

Overall, this is a really solid OS and I enjoy it a lot. I think that by the time it releases officially, issues we face now will have been resolved completely. Keep in mind, this is the first leak of many I think we will see, and that means they will get better. The reinstalling of apps made me mad but with WiFi, it was not too hard. In addition, using app loader is just a habit everyone should get into. Like always, some people seem to be having more problems than others are, and it is all on a matter of preference. I enjoy having it and being a part of the BB6 experience. One more thing, I have tested the convenience key “problem” and I am able to access it easily, this on some forums seems to be a major bug, I think I didn’t get it because I didn’t shrink anything out (for once) just to see how everything rocked and rolled as it was meant to be.