[brokenfruit]

So I've never used a blackberry. So far in my life, I've owned a motorola razr, some slide up sony erricson phone, and a samsung galaxy epic 4g.
I'm pretty used to android phones and I don't really like the iphones.
So, I plan on buying the blackberry bold 9930 cuz I want a change. I'm tired of touch screen typing and I'm tired of my phone lagging so terribly (kind of my fault for adding so many customizations and messing it up a bit.. ). And plus, I've always thought the blackberry is super pretty.
Anyway, I'm doing some research before I buy it cuz I'm gonna be bound to a two year contract. After some research, I've found out that there are a lot of reported cases of lagging, turning on and off on it's own, contact lists deleting on it's own, power button kind of slow to respond, battery life too short etc etc. And I've heard many say they had to go through 3 devices and they all worked really terribly.
So I'm just wondering what is the reality with this. Does this happen to most/ all people or is it just that the people with the defective devices are uploading more reviews out of anger?
Cuz I mean... I know all devices have some annoying defect or it gets slow, etc. Does this happen to most or all of you but they are just little things that you can oversee and still love the device? Cuz I have the samsung epic right now and it is seriously a piece or cr*p, but I still love it. It turns off all the time, it freezes (especially when I turn on the camera), It takes like 10 steps to check my texts, some of my texts dont even get through!, etc. But it's the perfect screen size and it has a slide out high quality physical keyboard. Etc.

So... can you guys tell me the REALITY of blackberries? So those of you that say you love it, is there absolutely no problem with it or is it that the problems seem minor that you can look past it?

[costas1966]

Assuming you're actually looking for some feedback, here's my take:

Legacy OS devices (Curve 9300, Torch 9800, 9810 9850, 9860, Bold 9790, 9900, 9930) and others....

- This OS is nearing the end of it's useful life span. I say this because it was designed to run on slower CPU units,
and although it has come a very long way, is quite stable, and has many useful apps....it will eventually run its course
and become history....kind of like iOS.

BB10...

- New OS...new hardware....new user interface and experience....a new way of doing things. Lots of apps out of the gate,
fast browser....quite stable for a new OS. You would be quite impressed with the end result. The nice thing is that this OS
has future capabilities and expansion...it should be around a while.

You'll have to remember that every OS and device has it's pro's and cons. Forums are rarely used by those who have no problems
with their units....some are user issues....some are manufacturer or OS issues...the point is, you will see some negative, or problem
threads here, as you will on the other sites.

I, personally love the product for the freedom I get in moving files, and media to and from the device without being controlled by the
Manufacturer and their OS. I like the fact that I can connect my devices through a micro-HDMI cable to my big screen...I LOVE the
ability to have expansion memory in the form of a micro-SD card for my files, that I can remove at any time and insert into another
device.

Emails are fast.....the physical keyboards are the best in the industry....the security is the best in the industry....and BBM...well, what
can I say about that....it rocks!

In the end....you will choose what works for you....but giving BB a shot is a strong recommendation.

Good Luck!

[Bluenoser63]

I had a 9900 and it was the best phone I ever had... until I got the Z10. Seriously, I never had any problems with the 9900 that you mentioned.

[Paintedeyes]

I love my 9900 but I also hate it haha. I have to reboot it daily and it has a bad memory leak. I like to think its due to the apps I have installed. I beta test a lot of apps. My dads 9900 seems to run real wewll and he barely uses any apps. Personally, I'm going to get the Z10 when it comes to the US. I've been using a keyboard BB since 2005 too! I also have an iPhone which I hate the typing experience but I hear such amazing reviews on the Z10 from personal friends. I would go for a BB10 phone, it will definitely perform better than os7 devices and last longer.

[mysticmeg]

I don't love my 9360 curve. In fact I don't love owning a blackberry no more. Finally going to get about �2000+ in my bank then will straightaway purchase meself a Galaxy S4 I say that is a purchase well thought of. I will never ever spend a single penny more after march on stupid blackberry phones. Although I have never rang into problems with blackberrys as I'm quite the professional when keeping my gadgets up to scratch and working productively... Sooo can't wait to leave this useless crappy platform!

Sent from my CrapBerry 9360 using Tapatalk

[nico2004]

So I've never used a blackberry. So far in my life, I've owned a motorola razr, some slide up sony erricson phone, and a samsung galaxy epic 4g.
I'm pretty used to android phones and I don't really like the iphones.
So, I plan on buying the blackberry bold 9930 cuz I want a change. I'm tired of touch screen typing and I'm tired of my phone lagging so terribly (kind of my fault for adding so many customizations and messing it up a bit.. ). And plus, I've always thought the blackberry is super pretty.
Anyway, I'm doing some research before I buy it cuz I'm gonna be bound to a two year contract. After some research, I've found out that there are a lot of reported cases of lagging, turning on and off on it's own, contact lists deleting on it's own, power button kind of slow to respond, battery life too short etc etc. And I've heard many say they had to go through 3 devices and they all worked really terribly.
So I'm just wondering what is the reality with this. Does this happen to most/ all people or is it just that the people with the defective devices are uploading more reviews out of anger?
Cuz I mean... I know all devices have some annoying defect or it gets slow, etc. Does this happen to most or all of you but they are just little things that you can oversee and still love the device? Cuz I have the samsung epic right now and it is seriously a piece or cr*p, but I still love it. It turns off all the time, it freezes (especially when I turn on the camera), It takes like 10 steps to check my texts, some of my texts dont even get through!, etc. But it's the perfect screen size and it has a slide out high quality physical keyboard. Etc.

So... can you guys tell me the REALITY of blackberries? So those of you that say you love it, is there absolutely no problem with it or is it that the problems seem minor that you can look past it?

Very simple the are the best smart phone out there period !!!

[SteveBB10]

The 9900 is a great device however because of BlackBerry 10 the os has reached pretty much the end of its life But it still is a great phone that will last you a lot long then 2 years

Sent from my BlackBerry 9900
Support your local paramedics...Run with scissors.

[OptimistBB]

Check out this thread...people talking about precisely this topic i.e. why they love the BB.
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...e-bb10-775650/

[Haig Assadourian]

A lot will depend on what you want the phone for. We are all looking for the perfect phone, but guess what? it does not exist! :-) Due to the nature of my work, I use email a lot, so my Bold 9900 is perfect. I also use this in combination with my Playbook for when I am travelling. However, for fun stuff, I would not recommend the B9900, as the screen is simply not big enough, and lets face it, there are better media phones out there. So for my personal stuff, I have an Android phone. Now with the coming of BB10, I am not sure if I will change my Android for a second BB touch only phone, but for work, I will NEVER give up a physical keyboard, and that only means one thing: BlackBerry! :-)

[dbmalloy]

I think to OP could ask the same question of any smartphone platform.... not so much an issue of what phone does or does not do....it is basically personal preference...I have a BB 9800 and Playbook combo.... ( phone and tablet ).... for me it does everything I want and then some... is it old and in soon to be orphaned.... yes .... does it sometimes crash and give me fits... yes.... but overall it is the best user experience I have had with any Platform.... to the point I have no plans to upgrade to BB10 in the forseeable future....went the Iphone root... did not work for me.... but for millions of others it is the best.....

[PALeafs67]

Physical keyboard on most of the BBs i have owned does it for me, but the 9900 keyboard is nice...

[looser12]

I have a 9930 for 6 months and it is really nice to have , it does email, text,and calls are great. i would not use it to watch tv or utube but everything else is great

[SuperionMaximus]

What I love about BlackBerry and what has kept me a BlackBerry user for many years is that it's like the best of both worlds. While it is a proprietary platform like iOS or Windows Phone, it's not as locked down as those systems. My BlackBerry will happily mount as a hard drive and let me drag and drop content on and off of it. It supports nearly any file format you can throw at it too. I don't want a phone that comes with a mandatory ball and chain like iTunes/iCloud.

I like that BlackBerry has always supported leading industry standards. Example. I don't want to have to invest in Airplay when 90% or the tech I've bought in the last half decade has DLNA support out of the box. If I rent a movie in BlackBerry world on my Z10, I can play it on my 55" Sony TV with a swipe and two taps no wires at all. But if my TV didn't already have DLNA support, my phone has a MicroHDMI port too.

With my Torch, a legacy BlackBerry 7.1 device like the Bold you are thinking of, I loved themes and customizations. You can really make it yours. This is not true of BlackBerry 10, you can't change anything but the wallpaper, and icon arrangement on it. You'll miss that highly customizable experience you had with Android a bit, but out of the box BlackBerry 10 is highly usable, fast, pretty and well thought out. But hopefully future versions allow a bit of customizations.

BlackBerry 7.1 has a better app catalog currently then BlackBerry 10, but that will change fast. Both Platforms have roughly the same app count, but because the older legacy OS has been around for years there's more quality apps there today. But don't expect that to last long. No one is going to focus development on a platform that is EOL even if it's going to have 10s of millions of users for the next couple years at least. If BlackBerry 10 outsells Windows Phone, then you will see an unstoppable flood of apps to the Platform as right now developers aren't committing until they know for sure the platform is the viable 3rd choice. It's all about the numbers. If BlackBerry 10 gets the customers it gets the apps. The cool thing though with BlackBerry 10 is that it runs Android apps and even if the app isn't in BlackBerry World you can side load the Android version and it will most likely function just fine. So if you really need a certain app, you can get it on you phone with BB 10. This might help BlackBerry 10 gain an edge over Windows Phone and lock in the 3rd spot on it's way to number 1.

The hardware is also nice. Whether you get the Bold 9930 or Z10, or wait for the Q10 (I would hold off for it if you like the Bold), you get really well made equipment. Plus, unlike an iPhone, BlackBerry prioritizes communication, so you get a really good PHONE. BlackBerrys don't drop calls as much, they hold on to the signal much better then an iPhone. BlackBerry Messenger stays up when everything else is gone. Despite what you may have heard about the BlackBerry NOC, it was the means of communication during Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy and has had less downtime in the last 14 years then iCloud/iMessage has had in the last 6 months. Of course the keyboard is in a league of it's own and nothing else comes close to the Bold 99X0. If you get the Bold, it was probably also made in North America. They do also have manufacturing out side of North America, but how many phones out there aside from BlackBerrys are even made in this hemisphere at all?

So, in summary. Whether BlackBerry 10 or legacy BBOS 7.1 - with BlackBerry you'll get a consistent, polished, reliable user experience with decades of heritage in making the best communications devices on the market The phones are as well made as anything on the market and yet you can still take out the battery and add more memory. You get NFC instead of scratches all over the back of your phone. Your phone will work with the things you already own without having to invest in proprietary accessories and docks. You are 100% in control of your content and where you get it from, how you can use it, and share it with other devices. BBM is in a league of it's own for reliability. It works when everything else doesn't. Nothing is 100% fail proof, but no one else can claim the reliability that BlackBerry has demonstrated for 14 years.

[robsteve]

Make sure you get the proper 9900/9930 for your network. Most places in the world use the 9900 and if you try to use a 9930 on a carrier that doesn't support it, you may have problems getting the BlackBerry services working.

[Jay Hopkins]

So I've never used a blackberry. So far in my life, I've owned a motorola razr, some slide up sony erricson phone, and a samsung galaxy epic 4g.
I'm pretty used to android phones and I don't really like the iphones.
So, I plan on buying the blackberry bold 9930 cuz I want a change. I'm tired of touch screen typing and I'm tired of my phone lagging so terribly (kind of my fault for adding so many customizations and messing it up a bit.. ). And plus, I've always thought the blackberry is super pretty.
Anyway, I'm doing some research before I buy it cuz I'm gonna be bound to a two year contract. After some research, I've found out that there are a lot of reported cases of lagging, turning on and off on it's own, contact lists deleting on it's own, power button kind of slow to respond, battery life too short etc etc. And I've heard many say they had to go through 3 devices and they all worked really terribly.
So I'm just wondering what is the reality with this. Does this happen to most/ all people or is it just that the people with the defective devices are uploading more reviews out of anger?
Cuz I mean... I know all devices have some annoying defect or it gets slow, etc. Does this happen to most or all of you but they are just little things that you can oversee and still love the device? Cuz I have the samsung epic right now and it is seriously a piece or cr*p, but I still love it. It turns off all the time, it freezes (especially when I turn on the camera), It takes like 10 steps to check my texts, some of my texts dont even get through!, etc. But it's the perfect screen size and it has a slide out high quality physical keyboard. Etc.

So... can you guys tell me the REALITY of blackberries? So those of you that say you love it, is there absolutely no problem with it or is it that the problems seem minor that you can look past it?

i can assure you. They dont suck. The reasons you see bad reviews, and lots of issues on this forum. Is because WE are blackberry experts. Noone comes to us when theres nothing wrong with their phone. People only come here to report when something breaks. In order to get advice. And crackberry.com being the largest blackberry website there is....we get all of the people looking for help :-)

However for every 200 "my phone broke" threads you see on here, there are 20,000 people who absolutely love theirs. Have no issues and find it to be the best bold to date. Hands down. I personally like it more than any Idevice or droid i've ever owned.

IMO Its a dang fine phone.

[1959gazza]

I don't love my 9360 curve. In fact I don't love owning a blackberry no more. Finally going to get about �2000+ in my bank then will straightaway purchase meself a Galaxy S4 I say that is a purchase well thought of. I will never ever spend a single penny more after march on stupid blackberry phones. Although I have never rang into problems with blackberrys as I'm quite the professional when keeping my gadgets up to scratch and working productively... Sooo can't wait to leave this useless crappy platform!



Sent from my CrapBerry 9360 using Tapatalk

Perhaps you could be more professional and learn how to write English.

[nnazery]

I've had an android, blackberry curve (the 8530/8520) kind and now have an iPhone 4s. I can give you a little review of each, pros and cons and which I like best.

For the android, it was okay at first and the app market was large but after a while the phone lagged a lot. It took forever for 3G to turn on or off when toggling it, and the more apps I had the worse the phone got. It force closed so many times, including stock apps like your gallery even though I barely had any pictures in there. The only pros were the apps and camera was okay.

For the blackberry curve, the only problem I had was the lag or little hour glass that comes when you download apps. When I wasn't downloading apps, it was completely fine. App World SUCKS compared to android and apple. Not only are there too few apps, the quality is bad and the apps cost so much (except the popular stuff, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp). I absolutely became obsessed with the keyboard, BBM and loved the little notification light. Oh, and the push service! Emails and texts were SO fast. iPhone and Android can NOT compare with Blackberry when it came to the speed (by the way all these phones were on the same cellular network).

For iPhone, the interface is pretty, it's easy to use, there are sooo many apps that are GREAT quality, and if you don't have an iPod, this works good for music. iPhone is a great phone to place with... Youtube, Netflix, games, music. The apps and the camera are about the only pros I have about it.

So to put everything together, it really depends on what you like to do. I honestly would go back to a blackberry if I could but I want the Bold 9900! The blackberry is just a great communication device. The BBM and keyboard is addicting, and the emails and texts fast. I'm not obssessed with any app except for twitter (which everyone has), so Blackberry would be great for me. I think you should ask yourself what you use your phone for and what you want. Also, you can look at their App World online to see what they have. If it shocks you, then you'll know maybe it's not for you. If you're not an app person, then it's a very good phone!

As for the problems, I don't think there's any kind of phone that is problem free but you have to also remember that all the people who have blackberry, love it and have no problems with don't write anything on the web about it. After 2 months, I had problems with my iphone And when I googled it, there were a TON of people who had the same problem, went though several phones, and they still had problems. It's the same with android. Also, I think the reason you hear so much bashing on blackberry is because people who are app lovers are buying blackberry (and become disappointed) or because they're just such HUGE fans of android or apple that they feel the need to bash on blackberry to prove their phones are great.

If you still feel that the 9900 is a phone you want to pursue, go for it! I'm sure you'll love it

[lcchick]

Two words... The keyboard.

It doesn't have the apps of android or iphone, but i personally don't care. I have an ipod touch for games and that junk, my blackberry is for texting,email, and phone calls. I do wish the Waze traffic/gps app worked but not enough to switch back to an android (and i abhor typing on my husbands iphone. If I knew a word stronger than 'abhor' i'd use it here)

Oh and also, I haven't had any of the problems you mentioned either. I got my BB used on gazelle.

[UKCatFan3]

Wife and I have had 9930 each for about a year and a half. We are both still on our original device. She had some issues with some of the keys not working in middle of keyboard, but found it to be a recent app caused it, how i dont know. Uninstalled app, kb works normal since. I was very worried when i first got phones after reading all the bricking threads on here, but no issues with ours.

We both use ours heavily for work and she much more for personal use. Having a physical keyboard when typing many emails and text msgs is a requirement for us. Bbm is the greatest, push email is incredible. Combo of touch screen and physical keyboard is what i always wanted when i had my older bb. Even with bb10 coming, i dont think much about getting rid of 9930. Only thing i wish it had was 4G LTE.

I dont care much about apps, and when i leave work i prefer to not touch my phone. I have bb travel, kayak, american airlines, weather channel, concur and flixster. Thats it. Wife goes crazy with facebook usage on hers.

Ok, saved best for last. Bridge. Cant see myself ever not having it.

I have only played with android and didnt like it. Have ipads and ipods (and will get iphone 4s for work soon), and cant stand typing and retyping on them. Blackberry is simple and reliable, not sexy and neurotic. Bb isnt for everybody, just like ios and android arent. Do your research, make an educated decision. I dont think u will ever hate a 9900/9930, but if apps are important and you use you phone 19 hours a day, you might want something else.

[Bonnie Bonzai]

I have both the 9900 & now the z10 love them both - can't imagine using another phone.

[EauRouge]

9900 was the best phone I ever had before the Z10. Maybe hold off until the Q10 comes out if you want a QWERTY? Then you can join in on all the BB10 fun!

[watervapr]

Why I chose a Bold 9930 over the iPhone 4 and other Androids (not in any particular order):

- You aren't holding the same phone as everyone else on the street.
- The LED blinking is extremely useful as a visual notification with the screen off and its capability can be expanded by Advanced OS&LED
- Solid build quality - no case needed for the 9930. Dropped on concrete from about six feet, just a scratch.
- Blackberries are made in Canada, by fairly-paid workers
- Email push system is superb.
- OS is fairly stable
- Keyboard = gold
- Compared to the 5" bricks that Samsung and LG are churning out these days, this phone is very compact, light, and easy to fit in your pocket, making one handed use a breeze
- Dedicated phone end/call keys
- Keyboard can be used for speed dial. Very powerful function that beats any touch-screen phone, period.
- Carbon fiber looking back

[bigdogweigand]

Why I went 9930 and strongly leaning towards a Q10:

* First & foremost...the keyboard is sweet
* The hardware and software are made by the same company, so no fingerpointing on issues (I'm looking at you Google and Motorola)
* Pocket-friendly
* Batterylife (for me) is excellent
* Personal Opinion: BlackBerry is still the only smartphone that is business-grade in-terms of security. Again, my opinion.

- Scott

[dphjeff]

I love the speed and short cuts on the Blackberry devices. The phones are easy to navigate and if you want to do something push the berry button and select what you want to do. I love my 9930.

[CarGuy1368]

I wouldn't get a 9900 since the Q10 is coming out in a few months. But, if you really need a new phone right now, I would get the 9900. Mine does have a few minor issues, but none are enough to make my phone unusable. The 9900 does well at what all BlackBerry phones are meant to do; communicate. In terms of build quality, it is truly amazing.

So, the final verdict I would recommend is to get the Q10. Patience is a great thing to have .