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Old 04-03-2010, 01:16 PM   #1
FlynnT
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Default Blackberry my first smartphone..disappointed

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When I decided to dump my simple cell phone and Palm Pilot and look for a smartphone, I thought that the Blackberry Curve was a good option, so I bought mine from Virgin Mobile.

However, when I look for add-ons from Virgin, they have a seperate section for Blackberry which has fewer options and cost MUCH more!

I note that RIM shares just took a beating, and that over 50% of Blackberry owners were recommend something other than Blackberry to their friends.

I guess you can add me to that list. I'm on the lookout for a different phone. If there are any Curve users here that know of a good alternative (I'm in Canada) I would appreciate a point in the right direction.
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Old 04-03-2010, 01:31 PM   #2
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Originally Posted by FlynnT View Post
When I decided to dump my simple cell phone and Palm Pilot and look for a smartphone, I thought that the Blackberry Curve was a good option, so I bought mine from Virgin Mobile.

However, when I look for add-ons from Virgin, they have a seperate section for Blackberry which has fewer options and cost MUCH more!

I note that RIM shares just took a beating, and that over 50% of Blackberry owners were recommend something other than Blackberry to their friends.

I guess you can add me to that list. I'm on the lookout for a different phone. If there are any Curve users here that know of a good alternative (I'm in Canada) I would appreciate a point in the right direction.
Why dont you google for apps for the phone. You dont have to get them from virgin...

If you just want to rant, theres a forum for that too
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Old 04-03-2010, 01:44 PM   #3
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You made a bad choice. As Ringer says, if you want to blow off steam, we got a forum for that. If you want some help, we can do that. If you want to whine, you are in the wrong place.

It does pay to research before you buy.
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Old 04-03-2010, 10:19 PM   #4
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Agree - If you have some specific functions or apps you are looking for post that instead. Tell everyone what you are looking for and what you need your Blackberry to do?

There are tons of free apps that can make your BlackBerry customized to fit your needs.


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Old 04-06-2010, 12:11 AM   #5
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I totally agree. I bought my BB Curve about 20 days back and till date it stands nowhere near the palm or any other even normal phones. Now like the other replies say. Lets get down to specifics and see if anyone has solutions. First it doesnt do even basic things properly.

The build of the phone is CHEAP. You can see the keyboard and lcd light leaking thru other areas/gaps of the body. Right from the plastic used etc seems to be very cheap. The to do a reset, everytime we have to pull open the battery backplate and take the battery out and wait for 30 seconds.

The phone takes 5 minutes to reboot. Happy waiting.

The menus are sluggish. And yes ive checked the memory and memory cleaner and also done battery pulls. 18 mb is free. It cant even play back its ringtones in one sequence. If you scroll too quick thru the ring tones it will get stuck. A phone which slows down is a big NO. As it can let you down at the right moment.

It is the most unreliable in syncing with a computer. In Palm etc you might find duplicate entries etc only if youve done something wrong. With BB, happy cleaning, Every 4 days or 5 days i find it has duplicated records. Or created something out of order in the data. Which i will have to manually correct. Palm has such a straightforward way of syncing. This will open multiple windows and ask mutiple questions during every sync. In palm if you changed a record on the phone that wud replace the rec on the pc and vice versa. Only if you changed both inadvertently then youd find an alert which lets you choose which version of the record youd like to keep.

The BB has limited phone record entries and cant be customised. Nobody can have more than 2 work numbers. Its a new found law from RIM. And instead they gave you 2 home numbers. How many people have 2 lan phones at home. Instead 4 work numbers and 1 home would ahve been much more logical. Again the BB touts will say they know a lot of people with 2 home numbers. Use your own judgement. Try emailing BB with a doubt. There is no service or support. Even if there is you wont get an answer.

Its so funny even the shortcuts from home screen to access applications dont work in totality. About 5 of them dont work on my phone. For example the key press to get into sms never works.

Search functions are so slow. Palm and other normal phones are blazingly fast. Given they have the same physical memory.

Documents to go and pdf to go hardly run well. A pdf file will will just be blank for 70 secs before the text starts appearing on the screen. Then you can scroll thru that page. When you hit the next page. Youll have to wait for another 70 to 80 secs for the next page to load. Try reading a document like that. You will just give up in frustration. And DTG makes you pay extra for this feature. A fact they will never tell you when you buy the phone. The DTG that comes with the phone is a handicapped version with no features other than to just view and do some very basic editing to your excel sheets etc. Anything else they ask you to pay. Whereas the palm etc comes with all this preloaded and free with full functionality. I tried to search for a word in an excel sheet and it just went on a hike. No response, It doesnt show you if its searching or stuck. You dont know whats happening. After waiting for 3 minutes i realised its hung. So i did a battery pull and tried afresh. Same result no matter what you try to search on the excel sheet. Kudos Dataviz. I have now found you simply cannot search for anything on a sheet with about 1500 rows/records of data. Again for those who will defend saying its too large a file. My palm used to open and search for records on the same sheet and report the results in about 10 - 15 seconds. A resonable wait.

There is no sms threaded veiw like in palm. Its a dumb way of showing your sms when you open it it shows it as a thread. Come out of that sms and you can see the entire list of sms you sent to the same person. NOT a true threaded view like a chat. But i also did a lot of r&d before buying. I reasearched a lot and was told and say ads say that sms comes in threaded view. Thats false.

The only positives in this phone are its small size and good looks. My palm treo is a little larger. And not exactly a pocketable phone. But it did everything well and promptly. And ive never ever seen it slow down. Thats ridiculous for a phone to do. Phones can make a big difference in business, personal and emergency situations. Try relying on a BB curve.

Why did i leave palm then. They stopped making treos. Their current phones on their site all show phones which are available thru some service/ carrier provider. What happened to the simple unlocked basic phones which you bought and then went to whichever service network you wanted ? I really dont know. Before Palm was just palm. They made devices. And you used them with your service providers. But now everything seems to be a tie-up. The phones are advertised on palms site for just 40$ etc and only with some carrier tie-up. Hence my breakup with Palm. Also the phones they came out with after the TREO series were all sorta fun looking phones. Not the professional look that BB offers.

But theres a difference between finesse and features. And id rather compromise finesse and have better features than vice versa.

There are several other negatives about the BB curve that im discovering everyday. So its not exactly a joyful experience for buying this phone. And the nearly 50$ additional ive paid so far for other softwares.

Please note that all these experiences are only about my BB curve 8310 model. I dont know if the javelin and other models with their higher memory are performing better. but my comparision with palm was apples to apples because palm treo 650 has just 32 mb rom which is lower than the BB. But yet it performs far better. This is very disappointing.

Lets see what solutions we can get to these problems. I dont mind spending more money. Lets see if anyone can suggest something. Maybe even guarantee that these functions work better on the BB Javelin. Ill buy that. But whats the guarantee. That might turn out to be equally handicapped.

100% i will not recommend a BB to any friend or foe for that matter. Its the worst sluggish and badly built phone ive ever seen. In fact its just approx 20-30 days since i bought my phone yet im just waiting and searching if some other phone is there with better thought out features. In fact if palm comes back with a pure gsm handheld with no carrier tie-ups and just having the treos functions in a slimmer form factor. Ill just jump ship even right away.

Regarding buying a ton of applications to do what the BB is basically supposed to do, i should inform you, that palm and other phones have fantastic software thats "completely" free. No strings. And with real tiny memory footprints. And most of them you can install and run from the sd card. Try doing that on a BB. I dont think it allows you to install and run apps from the mediacard. For example. NOAH PRO. An excellent dictionary software with more number of words than the paid dictionaries you have to buy for the BB. The icing on the cake is that it runs from the sd card. Only the icon is shown on your home screen. The dictionary and its database etc are installed on card and run from there. And now i have to pay 40$ for a dictionary half as good. And for all you know it will choke n stutter on the BB.

Last edited by plainman007; 04-06-2010 at 12:22 AM..
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Old 04-06-2010, 06:18 AM   #6
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If you only bought it 20 days ago, then take it back and get your money back and get something that is better suit for you. Clearly, BlackBerry isn't the correct device for you. It's not for everyone.
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Old 04-06-2010, 06:39 AM   #7
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Ditto. There are better devices for you, as you say, on and on and on. You, too, made a bad choice. Go correct it.
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Old 04-06-2010, 08:14 AM   #8
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Too late. I cant return it. have bought a lot of software. And have to live with it. I share my disappointment with the original poster. What better phone can i go for. The best suited was palm. And theyve completely started only giving out locked tie-up deals. For someone across the globe from the USA has no choice using those options.

But i made a bad choice, Yes i totally agree. If i could just reverse the effort ive been putting on getting help from this forum and others and doing the workarounds to get this phone working. Now its like i swum half way thru and swimming back is going to be more trouble. If any of you know of a slim and pocketable palm unit thats brand new and for sale even if it means importing it im game. Meanwhile ill have to live with this. Its like a bad marriage where it feels better to share the pain with someone, like counselling. LOL.

Saying its not for everyone makes it sound niche. But i understand its the otherway around. There are probably exceptional phones. BBs are for people who dont mind using a BB for what it is.

Last edited by plainman007; 04-06-2010 at 08:29 AM..
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Old 04-06-2010, 08:27 AM   #9
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I don't know what to tell you. I would expect many of your problems are self-inflected, or you expect too much, but, hey, what it boils down to is those are your expectations. I can see nobody is going to change your mind. Sorry you have to live with your mistake longer than you want to, but that's life.
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Old 04-06-2010, 09:33 AM   #10
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Yes i can understand that your committed to defending the phone since youve used it for a long time. The tendency is to fiercely defend the phone. . Its not a mistake. Several things are cleverly marketed for example that you can natively open and read pdfs and excel etc. Then you find out you have to buy it extra. Im sorry that we have to differ in opinion. But it looks like your an ardent follower of BBs.

How do you defend a phone which cant playback its own ringtones is good. And in what way is that self-inflicted. A phone that takes ages to reboot while phones with half the ram can boot in a jiffy. A media player, they dare to call it that. Which says playlists but cannot play a list of videos on its own. And people say its not for everyone. Yeah the BB is for people who have a lot of time to wait. I wonder how for every disablility the phone has, a few say its not for you. The way they keep repeating that in agressive self defence while they have nothing to say about the actual problems makes it look like theyre with the RIM team.

Like the OP says, no matter what you say, probably half the BB users are recommending other phones. But your right if what you mean is that my problems are self inflicted, BY BUYING A BLACKBERRY i have self-inflicted this. Your right ! No wonder they hardly sell any phones here. The entire tollfree number is one guy sitting in his house, I heard a radio and children crying in the background while he read out his canned answers. Most of which were proved wrong on this very forum.

Last edited by plainman007; 04-06-2010 at 10:04 AM..
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Old 04-06-2010, 09:53 AM   #11
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Quote:
probably half the BB users are recommending other phones.
Source?

You've had nothing but problems since you got your BB. 93 posts and all problems. Return it. Get away from it. It doesn't work for you. Obviously. Get an iPhone.

All my ringtones play back. My 9700 boots fine. Sell it and get out.

Hardly sell any phones here. Right.
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Old 04-06-2010, 09:54 AM   #12
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No. I'm just going on my experience and what seems to me to be the experience of the vast majority of users. And I hate to see people whine and complain about what really amounts to their mistake. That's it in a nutshell. And I'm trully sorry you are stuck with it.
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Old 04-06-2010, 10:22 AM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by plainman007 View Post
Like the OP says, no matter what you say, probably half the BB users are recommending other phones. But your right if what you mean is that my problems are self inflicted, BY BUYING A BLACKBERRY i have self-inflicted this. Your right ! No wonder they hardly sell any phones here. The entire tollfree number is one guy sitting in his house, I heard a radio and children crying in the background while he read out his canned answers. Most of which were proved wrong on this very forum.
I know that I, as well as others, have assisted you since you came to this forum. You are used to the Palm platform and have the expectations of the BlackBerry to work just like your Palm. I believe that's your main issue. The BlackBerry is not like a Palm, not like an iPhone, not like a Windows Mobile device, or like an Android based device. It is a BlackBerry. As you've noticed it is very different than any other device. And as many others have stated, it is not for everyone.

Your issues are not self inflicted because you purchased a BlackBerry, they're self inflicted because you didn't research the device and it's capabilities to see if it suits your needs prior to purchasing a BlackBerry.

I am not sure where you're located. Your carrier says Vodafone, which could be Australia, Netherlands, etc. But to say they don't sell many devices is absurd. Look at RIM's global figures. You saying that their call center is one guy in his house is laughable as well.

It is obvious you were happier with your Palm device than you are with your BlackBerry, and having seen your 90+ posts of issues, the device isn't for you. I understand that you are trying to make the device suit your needs, but you shouldn't have to force it to happen. For me, the BB does what I need. It pushes email to me, notifies me when it is received, alerts me of my appointments, etc. If it didn't work for me, I would be with another device. I have tried the Palm Pre (for about a week) and it didn't work for me, so I am still with the BlackBerry because it does what I need it to do.

You should still have a few days to go back to your previous device or find another device that better suits your needs.
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Old 04-06-2010, 11:22 AM   #14
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Wirelessly posted (L'neuf trois)

FYI plainman007, you don't always need to do a battery pull to reset the device. ALT+CAPs+DEL works just the same for most battery pulled required issues.

This is real handy if you have a case for your device.

Last edited by Trimix; 04-06-2010 at 11:23 AM..
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Old 04-06-2010, 04:04 PM   #15
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I came from an iPhone (stolen so I bailed on AT&T) and, although the iPhone is a bit more elegant, I like my 8530. So much so that I'm not sure I won't buy a higher end BB at the end of this contract! I've found the 5.x software interface to be pretty straightforward and have found apps for most everything I did on my iPhone so I'm happy.
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Old 04-06-2010, 11:22 PM   #16
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Thanks Trimix, That should come in handy.

JS > Yes im feeling awful. But i honestly feel there a few issues that RIM needs to solve. Like for example when i have a recurring appointment. I have one for every month to remind me to pay a particular bill. Say this month when the recurring calender item occurs. I decide to push it to the next day. But without affecting or changing the dates or anything else for the same reccurence for the rest of the months in the year. I do so in outllook or on my BB making sure i change only this OCCURENCE. After a sync you will find the one which i pushed a day + the original stays back in its position. Its things like this which are very irritating. In most other phones if u moved the appointment saying dont touch other occurences then it wont leave back a shadow of the reccurence for that month. Now these things are anomalies that defeat the purpose of even having a device like this. Do you face the same issue ?

Last edited by plainman007; 04-06-2010 at 11:34 PM..
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Old 04-06-2010, 11:58 PM   #17
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In my country there is no return, warranty, nothing. I bought it on ebay and it cant be returned. I already had it exchanged since the first one came with an azerty keyboard. And ive bought a few softwares etc amounting to a higher cost, only to find out they dont run as smooth as expected. Just on a curious note. Do the Javelins etc have better performance owing to the higher ram/rom space ?
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Old 04-07-2010, 11:38 AM   #18
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Quote:
Originally Posted by plainman007 View Post
In my country there is no return, warranty, nothing. I bought it on ebay and it cant be returned. I already had it exchanged since the first one came with an azerty keyboard. And ive bought a few softwares etc amounting to a higher cost, only to find out they dont run as smooth as expected. Just on a curious note. Do the Javelins etc have better performance owing to the higher ram/rom space ?
There is returns and warranties. Manufacturer warranties.

Of course since its from EBAY you cant return it.
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Old 04-07-2010, 12:23 PM   #19
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Wirelessly posted (L'neuf trois)

I think the newer devices have better performance mainly because of the improved processors.
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Old 04-07-2010, 01:00 PM   #20
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He didn't research before he bought the device to see if it suited his needs or did what he needs a device to do.
However, he did enough research on BB stats like "negative" info regarding shares taking a hit, sales are down and people wanting to leave. LoL

Either a troll, their on someones payroll, or this is an extremely negative person
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