[Robert_K]

Received an evaluation 9930 from Verizon today.

Upon testing against our current procedures to activate and secure a BlackBerry I've found 2 very major and inconvenient issues.

1. Once I activate the device on our BES it applies the IT policy associated with a user's group but will never reconcile a different policy no matter if the user is removed from a policy or if the policy is added at a user level. Doesn't matter how many times I pull the battery and resend the IT policy from the BES. Its stuck in the IT policy applied to it when it was activated. This issue alone will cause it not to be added to our deployment schedule.

2. Certificate Synchronization. RIM really didn't think this through at all. Desktop Manager 6.0 and 6.1 do not support certificate synchronization so RIM's KB article only offers the solution to downgrade to 5.0.1 to obtain this feature again. That would be great if only Desktop Manager 5.0.1 was compatible with the 9930 (which its not). There is a method I can use get around this but the procedure is much more complicated and I'm not even sure our cyber security team will allow us to do it.

RIM touts its such a great phone for business due to its security and enterprise minded features then completely fumbles the first nice BlackBerry they've put out in years.

[rambo47]

Nobody with such security concerns would even THINK about upgrading to the newest model released. In another month or two it might be worth reconsidering, but not now. This is why major corporations and government agencies stick with older models for so long.

[ZombieBerry]

Cert sync is again enabled with DM 7 Beta

+1 to Rambo, there is a reason my Workberry is an 8520. Though my company is rolling out the 9780s...

[the-economist]

Originally Posted by rambo47

Nobody with such security concerns would even THINK about upgrading to the newest model released.

Thinking about it is perfectly fine. OP works in gov. Deployment schedules in gov take for ever so by the time an account manager actually picks up a phone to place an order not only patches and updates would have been released by RIM to address the current issues but most likely a new model in the series would be out.

[juwaack68]

OP: What BES version do you have running?

[BB1877]

We had a pre-production unit from Verizon as well (the type with the Research In Motion stickers on the back).

In my testing, I found that the production units we received this week were MUCH improved in terms of software compared to the demo unit. While we're not as concerned with the security items you mentioned, user-interface items such as overlapping characters, sluggishness and other issues disappeared.

The 9930 is tremendously improved over the previous Bold. They've tamed the Homescreen Panels, the browser is improved, and the entire device including the camera is very snappy.