While I'm not an owner of any UK carrier devices, a few of my close mates back home do have 9900s, and only one had an issue, however the issue was more due to his own stupidity and not software.
Ok that's great to hear! Really don't want mine to mess up on me especially as I'm going travelling for 4 months as of January.
Will you be roaming your sim when you are travelling?
Switching Sim Cards on the 9900 is a big mess. I'm not aware if this issue has been sorted out yet.
Once you pop in a new SIM it asks for your blackberry ID and password without which you cant access any menu on the 9900 except "Factory Wipe". If that new sim card is not pre provisioned for BIS then you are stuck as you have a sim card you cant access the internet with and you cant do nothing on your phone.
e.g I bought a pre-pay sim during one of my trips and to activate BIS i needed to Top-Up and also send a Short code activation SMS. How am i supposed to do that without being able to access at least the sms menu of the 9900.
Will you be roaming your sim when you are travelling?
I'll be using 2 phones, the 9900 (when I have it) simply for the use on wifi networks wherever I'm staying and checking mail/bbm/texts etc basically only using it for necessities and I'll be using my old sony ericsson on local phone networks to actually contact people and because its battery lasts a week on one charge even with moderate use so no worries there!
I have my 9900 with O2 UK and I really like it. It has had one error where I had to reinstall the OS but that's not a big deal for me to do and I regularly back it up so I did not lose any data.
I've had mine for 6-8 weeks on Vodafone (.540) and have no issues. The battery is not great, but you'll know that already. I can barely get through a day and I'm a light user. That being said, it is a great phone. The internet is fast, the calls are really clear, the screen is a smaller than I'd like, but it's a Blackberry!
Got a 9900 on Vodafone, upgraded to .540. No problems at all. Very happy with it, in fact. Far smoother experience than Android, which I was previously using. Battery seems fine to me. Day and ah half. I have it on mobile data/WiFi all day. Beyond this, no erratic/weird behaviour whatsoever.
