Blackberrys

[down_home]

Just received new Blackberry.
They have dual antennas, which is supposed to help with range.
Is this the case or do if you sometimes need to go through a wifi nearby?
There is wife everywhere including places where there is no Verizon.
Everyone with smart phones can be contacted via internet????

[SCVJeff]

Let me be clear that i have been a Blackberry user coming up on 15 years now and it used to be an indispensable tool. That is no longer the case.... We have had the IT folks look at them, they gave up and turned it over to ATT and what i think is BB factory support and all they end up doing is replacing phones.... Hundreds of them! They tried to 'get with it' and compete with the iphone and android markets and ruined what used to be a pretty robust product because they tried to make it cool and did nothing but introduce nonstop bugs. There was a span of at least a years worth of updayes that couldnt even be flashed, they had to replace the phones, hundreds more of them! Sorry but you will never convince me that this nothing but a sinking ship.

Final footnote: Sitting in budget meetings today my BB was on the conf room table at least 2' from me and it woke up and dialed my voice mail with no one anywhere near it. Thats a first for me but its a common problem company wide. Whoever thought that BB contract was a good thing has hopefully been fired, but either way we now have iPhone on the request list and people will be bailing as their term is up, including me. All I want is something that works and not flail around trying to get a simple screen up and not have it completely changed with each update attempt. Thats not an unreasonable request I think.

[rwbradley]

SCVJeff wrote:

owenssailor wrote:
My Blackberry has been completely stable. Any apps I have wanted are available. Most of the advertised 10 000 apps for Apples are useless.

its well over 500,000 but whos counting..

Either way what used to be an amazingly useful business tool is nothing more than a constant headache of locking up, corrupting or completely erasing address books, randomly waking up and calling people, freezing to the point of a cold battery out reboot, and endlessly swiping unresponsive screens trying to get it where you want it. Its gone from a productivity tool to one of the biggest wastes of time we have in the company. I wish it wernt so but thems the facts. And i run nothing but the base factory apps. Cant imagine what it would do if required to think.

It'll be dead soon I'm sure

I think that is the appeal of Apple and Android... half million (or more) useless apps 🙂

BTW SVCJeff, what you are describing sounds more like a hardware issue. I would get your IT staff looking at that. I have never seen any blackberry or any other OS that unstable and I have managed many hundreds of Blackberry's over the years.
In reality the smart phone market has matured so much recently that you will find the hardware specs, features etc. are nearly identical from brand to brand. The only real difference these days is the look and feel of the OS. Most people are so hung up on the logo on the back of their phone that they don't realize the difference between the best and worst players is so small. I think we can agree to disagree on this one. Really the best phone is what works for you. However when testing new phones I try to keep and open mind and am constantly surprised by the brilliance each of the 4 brands put into their new OS's and features

[SCVJeff]

owenssailor wrote:
My Blackberry has been completely stable. Any apps I have wanted are available. Most of the advertised 10 000 apps for Apples are useless.

its well over 500,000 but whos counting..

Either way what used to be an amazingly useful business tool is nothing more than a constant headache of locking up, corrupting or completely erasing address books, randomly waking up and calling people, freezing to the point of a cold battery out reboot, and endlessly swiping unresponsive screens trying to get it where you want it. Its gone from a productivity tool to one of the biggest wastes of time we have in the company. I wish it wernt so but thems the facts. And i run nothing but the base factory apps. Cant imagine what it would do if required to think.

It'll be dead soon I'm sure

[owenssailor]

My Blackberry has been completely stable. Any apps I have wanted are available. Most of the advertised 10 000 apps for Apples are useless.

[SCVJeff]

Stable and robust? Are we talking about the same equipment? I see them lock up in the middle of phone calls, wake up and dial random people from the address book over and over.. At least three different models and MANY DIFFERENT users. I have seen them completely wipe out Outlook address books, the ridiclous swiping that has to occur to get up a window is out of control, and the list goes on. Once upon a time this really was the most robust OS out there, but when the touchscreens started appearing about 4 years ago that all changed. It was like a new engineering team that had never bothered to use their own product and was designing the UI for the first time. There is not one single person in my company that likes or wants to keep their current BB, including me after 15 years. They did this to themselves....

[fla-gypsy]

I used a BB for years and at the time they were tops in the smart phone field. Bad marketing decisions, lack of apps and failing to keep up has pretty much killed them off.

[rwbradley]

LTE and WIFI N need two antennas to get the fastest speeds, they use 2x2 MIMO which basically means they take the signal from two sources and combine it to be twice as big.
As for the BB, as SCVJEff said, their hardware is hard to compete with, but I disagree, the OS is still to this day the most stable and robust one on the market. However the reason BB failed has little to do with what they did but more to do with what they didn't do. End users just decided about 5 years ago that the most important factor in buying a cell phone was if it had a logo of a half eaten apple on the back of it and not and now that half eaten apple is starting to fall out of favor. Who knows, with anything in tech, when BB releases their Android phone maybe you will see a 2nd renaissance... but probably not. Keep an open mind, BB and MS phones lack only one thing, apps, which is very very important to most end users. The fact that their hardware and OS runs circles around Apple and Android means nothing compared to the fact that on Apple you can pay a dollar for the iFart app.

[SCVJeff]

Antennas can only do so much. What they really do is semi-eliminate nulls when the phone is sitting on a table or on your belt.

As far as the Blackberry... Sorry about that. They have not only been going downhill the last several years because they can't keep up with iPhone and Android develipment, but the quality of the equipment and robustness of the OS are tanking as well. Its BY FAR the worst "smartphone I have ever seen. The ONLY reason I have one is that some idiot at the company signed a deal and we were forced to take them. Unless you HAVE to have a BB for work, consider something else.

[Dick_A]

Moved from Tech Issues forum.