The Truth About the Blackberry 8700 - The Blacker the ‘Berry…
…the fewer the options.
I spent about six months with a RIM BlackBerry phone/pager and barely lived to tell the tale. This is my story.
- Archaic ringtones. No MP3 support — This is a harsh awakening if you’re migrating from a Nokia, as I was.
- No syncing with OS X machines, without purchasing buggy, third-party shareware
- Connection Amnesia - Frequently, the Blackberry will put itself into a state where it can’t make data connections. the clue to this state is that the service indicator changes from “EDGE” to “edge”. Because, you know, that’s really intuitive. The way to kick it out of this state? Remove the battery and the SIM card for ten seconds. What, you had something better to do while driving? Tough.
- No MMS Support - Although a Blackberry can display Jpegs, and can receive attachments, the Blackberry CAN’T display MMSs (picture messages)
- Horribly Confusing TCP/IP Stack Setup - Third party apps
requires a certain TCP/IP configuration on the Blackberry. That’s all I can tell you about it, because that’s as much as I know about it. I’ve tried unsuccessfully to configure it, using proxy settings from the Blackberry Hacks book, instructions from Cingular’s website, and various instructions from Google-ing. To this day, I am unable to configure TCP/IP on my device, and so cannot run: Opera Mini, SSH, AIM, or anything else. The only apps that run, for some reason, are the Google apps like GTalk and Google Maps for Blackberry. Go Google! - Unclear Separation of Email Accounts - While I like that the Blackberry makes an effort to let you slice and dice your email different ways, RIM only offers two email inboxes (primary and secondary) and a merged view that consists of the primary email account plus everything else. There’s no default folder (accessible from the main screen) for JUST your primary account.
- Ridiculously bad HTML email support. I’m told that some people don’t have this problem, so maybe this is AT&T/Cingular/SBC’s fault.
- Loud, Frequent “Call Failed” Indicator - Unlike my previous GSM phones which auto-redial or fail silently when a call can’t be made, the Blackberry will blast three BLEEEEEAAT sounds at MAX_VOLUME if, Insh’allah, your call can’t be made. You know. Just because.
- Shitty Power Management - This is one of the weirdest gaffes. If your cell phone should unexpectedly run out of juice while you’re talking, you plug in the charger, and then call ther person back. This is a fairly standard paradigm, at least in my world of advanced cell-phone technology. Not with the blessed Blackberry. The power management on the Blackberry is SO BAD that when plugged in, it still runs off the battery, i.e. trying to dial the phone will result in “Insufficient Power for Radio Use” errors for at least five minutes while the battery slowly charges up again. How is this possible? It’s plugged into a wall, for god’s sake.
- Instant, Accidental 911 Calls — When the keypad is locked (you *do* lock your keypad, right?), the only functions that are available, triggered from the biggest, most easily pressed button on the Blackberry (the side click-wheel), are UNLOCK and EMERGENCY CALL.
WTF? The only two things I *dont* want to do accidentally when my keypad is locked are unlock it or make emergency calls. THAT’S THE POINT OF LOCKING YOUR KEYPAD. Who was the ad-wizard behind this “feature”?
- No cameraphone. (this one hurts the most)
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I agree with this gentleman right here. The browser stinks (compared to a sidekick at least). It either compresses the page all funky or uses some mobile phone version of the site that looks like it was made for a one inch screen. There is no shortcut for browser forward/back that I know of. Having no camera stinks, but I didn’t mind since this phone is all business and was supposed to have superior browser and browsing speed. The same goes for not having an MP3 player.
I fail to see the superiority of this phone over a sidekick except for the fact that at least 12 year old kids aren’t running around with 8700’s. I encountered massive third party data problems and the lady @ t-mobil had me reset my phone including all 500 numbers I had stored on the phone (sim only holds 250).I tried to use the desktop manager to bypass the OTA downloads and somehow my beloved theme and game got erased (how did they even get there). I still can’t download AIM or any other messenger, even directly from tmobil or Blackberry.
The keylock is easily breached on accident, and this is not a good thing with an exposed keypad. You can be calling your girlfriend on speed dial in your pocket on accident, and unknowingly be badmouthing her at the same time.
Most all of the default settings are confusing. Too many to list. You have to click on messages and other things twice to open them. This sounds miniscule, but when you text thousands of times a month, it sucks.
Everything in general is way too complicated for the normal phone user. Even if a business man/woman could benifit from all these features, they wouldn’t likely dedicate the time and effort since its only a loseable phone. By the time they learned to use the phones complicated features, a new 2015 blackberry 9800L would Have already come out, rendering the 2007 8700g obsolete.lol. Anyway, I know every new phone seems foreign and backwards when we first learn to use it. The blackberry 8700 is just too complicated. I will play with it some more, but if I can’t get the IT clearance to download AIM, games, and themes, I’m ebayin this thing and getting a cruddy sidekick LX. It may not be the most mature phone around, but it has everything I need and is easy to use.