Bluetooth disease: prevention is the only cure

[hubermania]

Wife had the Bluetooth die on her 2nd Flip. She's had this one less than a year. Meanwhile the Bluetooth on my own Flip stayed strong through two years of ownership and still works on the occasions I switch back to my old phone. The only obvious difference between my and wife's use of phone is that she leaves/left Bluetooth on all the time, and used it only occasionally.

Switch off the Bluetooth radio when you're not using it. Otherwise it'll wear out and die an early death.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[ESN]

Mine use to shut off automatically when I turned off my Bluetooth headset.

[RedGreenBlue]

While keeping Bluetooth (or any other service you're not using) off is doubtless good advice, I kept the Bluetooth off almost all of the time in my three 8220s, but it died in each of them anyway (over a total of less than 20 months for the three phones). I didn't/don't even use the phones every day, so I kept them entirely off most of the time. It's my view that if you have one of the phones with defective Bluetooth circuitry, there's nothing you can do to save it short of never turning it on—and then what's the point? (And who knows if even that will work? Possibly it's the mere act of opening and closing the phone that breaks a connection in the vulnerable 8220s. We certainly haven't seen anything from RIM that sheds much light on the problem, so we are all reduced to speculation.)

[bassmig]

I had a similar issue with mine (bluetooth diying). I only turned it one when I used it (whic was incredibly rare) but once they ran the hndsfree legislation I started trying to use it and it was really hit or miss...well mostly miss. It still worked on occasion (seemed to occasinally turn on when the battery was low and the radio turned off by itself). but towards the end even that was rarely working. Both displays on the phone were staring to have more and more dead pixels and 2 weeks ago I dropped it from my pocket and it died competely. I was merely trying to live out my contract to switch providers. I can't say I really miss it all that much, it dropped a lot of calls and was relatively slow. it did win me quite a few things off the radio though, it was great for speed dialing the contest line. I now have a borrowed storm until my contract is done and I'm probably going to switch camps unless BB comes out with a pretty amazing device in the next 8 or so months. I am very partial to anything at this point, however it's looking like I'm probably looking at a Galaxy SII or an iPhone. But again the next year might have some interesting competition to those devices...time will tell.