Why I returned my 9900 for a refund
The aim of this post is to provide my opinion on the Blackberry Bold 9900, why it didn't work for me and hopefully help someone else looking at this product make a decision one way or the other on purchasing a 9900.
I ran down to Best Buy on launch day and got my Bold 9900. I ran it with a Class 10, 32GB microSD card and a Rogers Canada SIM card. In my area we've got HSPA+ and I'm usually connected to wifi at work and home. My Blackberry uses a BES at work and a BIS for my personal e-mail accounts. I purchased my phone outright for $619CND and then spent $8 unlocking it.
Pros
- Design and build of the device is amazing. It feels like one single piece. The metal rim just melts into the rubber back in such a way that there is no way to get a finger nail or anything into the seam. You can't feel it at all. It's like one solid piece. The size and weight are perfect.
- Keyboard. Just amazing.
- Screen was very sharp, clear and had great colours.
- The new CPU makes BBOS snappy and responsive. I only saw slow down when installing Apps from App World. Other then that it had no problem keeping up with me. I sometimes have long SMS threads or BBMs still open and there would be a delay loading them up on my old 9800. This delay is gone in the 9900. The Twitter App also was much much faster.
Cons
- The camera. Fixed focus makes this camera worthless if you're taking close pictures. In my day to day work I find I'm constantly taking pictures of serial numbers and labels off hardware and that's not possible with the Bold 9900's camera. I also noticed in general the pictures taken on the 9900 were more fuzzy then the ones off my 9800. The 9900 takes a picture in less then a second which is nice but if it's not a good pictures does that really matter?
- WiFi Hotspot. It was supposed to be there. It's one of the reasons I bought the phone. It isn't there. It might never be there. Currently there is only a rumour based on a leaked Bell document that MAYBE there will be an OS update down the road to enable the WiFi Hotspot feature.
- Blackberry OS7 runs smoothly and has a fast boot but to me it felt like a rushed, unfinished OS that wasn't needed. RIM needed a reason to cut off their customers who had just bought a new phone less then a year ago from getting the newest OS. Changing the version number from 6.1 to 7 did the trick. I ran across a few small problems with OS7 in my week using it.
When using my e-mail (BES and BIS) if I had messages set to threaded and then started deleting them off the device there would be 2-3 random e-mails that wouldn't disappear after being deleted and any attempt to delete them again would fail. If I switched from threaded to single message view they'd disappear and then I could switch back to threaded mode until it happened again... and again. The "Enhanced Gmail Plug-in" was missing/didn't show up after adding my Gmail via the BIS. This prevented me from having threaded Gmail e-mails and non-threaded BES e-mails. Something I can do on my Torch 9800.
When trying to use the touch screen to change ring profiles I found I was constantly missing the small little ring profile button. I've got normal sized fingers so I think the icon was just a tad to small.
When using the browser I found page formatting to be just bizarre. Some pages the fonts would be ridiculously small and others it'd be huge! The double-tap to reformat a page worked as expected but did nothing for the sites with tiny fonts. I can still read it but I feel the Torch 9800 did a better job with the double-tap to reformat.
- The Podcast App.... buggy. See: http://forums.crackberry.com/native-...gs-os7-637926/ for most of it. I also found two more bugs, new podcasts didn't auto-download or notify that they were available and at one point I started listening to a podcast I accidentally click the camera button and when I went back to the podcast app it had marked all podcasts in a subscription (20ish) as played and there is no way to mark them as unplayed. I reported these bugs to RIM and they told me I should be talking to my carrier about it so the carrier can submit the bugs. I've got better things to do with my time then try to convince someone from Rogers I'm dealing with a bug and resetting my device won't fix it. Since switching back to my 9800 the Podcast App is working perfectly. Since it's a native App this is what contributes to my thought that OS7 was rushed out buggy and incomplete.
Circumstantial / Nit picks
- I was using OS 7.0.0.296 and it seemed the battery life was worse then my old Torch 9800. The morning of the day I ended up returning my 9900 I swapped to OS 7.0.0.300 and the battery seemed to be doing better. I think there known issues with .296 having bad battery life. Either way I still had 50% charge at the end of a day.
- When I swapped my SIM from my 9800 to my 9900 BBM didn't properly automatically update my PIN. I had to send everyone my new PIN and some of my friends ended up with double contacts for me. When i swapped from my 9900 back to my 9800 it worked properly in that everyone's contacts on BBM automatically updated my PIN and no one had to re-add me or deal with a duplicate.
- 7 OS releases and I still can't access IMAP folders. I know this has been talked about a lot and I knew buying the phone this wouldn't be possible but I'm putting it down anyway. It's 2011 and I want to access my e-mail folders.
The bottom line for me is that this phone does not feel like it's worth $619 and should have been what I bought last year instead of my 9800. I could sit around and wait for OS updates to resolve some or all of the problems above. I used to be ok with waiting but not anymore. RIM hasn't committed to any kind of new Mobile OS release schedule and getting new OS's is still carrier dependent unlike the Playbook. When I buy something I want it to be a finished product. I understand nothing is perfect and patching is needed but this device does not feel finished to me. Not for $619 and no amount of software patching will fix the camera for me.
Again my intent with this post isn't to start a flame war but to simply state my opinion on the 9900 and hope that someone finds my experience useful.