Blackberry 9900 dropped calls, “Horrific experience”

Once the ruler of the smartphone world, Blackberry has rapidly become a joke in modern business. While share holders have dropped the value of the stock into the toilet, top execs have been thrown overboard and thousands of staff have followed. When all's said and done, the company's problems seem to stem from some very real issues with the products themselves. KitGuru suffers yet another dropped call, decides to do some research and realises that we are far, far from alone.

“Blackberry 9900 Bold: Tell your story” says the advert.

Tell it quickly, we say, you have no idea what will happen next.

Imagine you are in the middle of a very important call. It's so important that you make sure you have a full battery and strong signal before you begin. Two minutes into the call, disaster strikes. Which of the following would you consider the worst disaster:-

1. Your call quality becomes so unusable, the phone requires a reboot
2. The call is dropped completely
3. The call is dropped, but your phone immediately dials the person back – so you get their answerphone, because they are engaged talking to you
4. Your Blackberry drops the call, like a feather to the ground, and randomly redials someone else from your phone book

With the Blackberry Bold 9900, you get a chance to experience ALL of these ‘endings' to the story you're trying to tell. In some respects, it's very exciting not knowing (a) if your 9900 will make a call at all, (b) lose the call in some bizarre way or, perhaps most shocking, (c) actually allow you to complete the call normally.

So, encouraged by Blackberry's multi-million dollar advertising campaign, let's tell this story.

Put ‘Blackberry 9900 drops calls' into Google and you will get around 12,600 results – if you force the time line to ‘Only the last week'.

Open yourself up to new possibilities, by choosing ‘One Month' and you might hit 28,700 links.

Choose to see everything that Google can offer on the subject of ‘Blackberry 9900 Drops Calls' for the past year – and you could be heading past 100,000 results.

Do we think that this figure of 103,000 hits represents 103,000 individual users who have experienced a Blackberry Bold 9900 dropping calls, randomly re-dialling other people while you are on a call and generally making a nuisance of itself?   No. There will be some issues, some duplication and some links which are not relevant at all.

BUT: You can be sure that there are a LOT of people out there with the same issue. We know – because we experience it every day. One of our associates has already had their handset swapped by the phone company – with all of the software updated multiple times – and still their Blackberry Bold 9900 crashes out in a variety of ways each and every day.

Then there's battery life. Why-oh-why-oh-why did the doughnut-headed design team at Blackberry think that saving a millimetre or so on the depth of the card – at the expense of battery bulk – was a good idea?   While the original 9700 phones would chug along from morning to night, the fully charged Blackberry Bold 9900 batteries that we've experienced first hand, are normally gasping like a wheezing asthmatic by mid-afternoon.

We've actually accumulated a number of absolutely disastrous stories about products made by the chaps with the RIM jobs, but we're just not sure how much time to dedicate to telling them. One KitGuru associate described using the Blackberry Bold 9900 as an “Horrific experience” and they can't wait to switch to the iPhone 5 when it launches.

KitGuru says: It won't be the case that every Blackberry Bold 9900 will act like a demoniacally possessed handset, with a malevolent intelligence that's dedicated to making your life a disaster – but if you do have one of these ‘special' handsets, then you are most certainly being driven into the arms of Apple. Blackberry makes noises about wanted to focus on corporates – but if your phone can't maintain a phone call, then you certainly do not use it commercially.

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