Blackberry Link Useless to Sync with Blackberry Classic
After a lot of experimentation and aggravation, I finally got Blackberry Link to sync calendar and contacts without crashing. Some of it had to do with disabling Blackberry Blend, which for some reason was locking Outlook’s PST messagestore (it shouldn’t have been touching Outlook at all). I went back to Link because a program I bought to replace it, Akrutosync, wasn’t working, either. But now it turns out Blackberry Link is still too broken to use for any kind of synchronization.
The contacts section is synchronizing records, but it’s partially broken. It synced all but one contact, per the contact count. No way to find out which contact(s) weren’t sync’d. And Link is also forcing users to accept every person’s “title” (from Outlook) in the email displays names whether they want it or not. That overrides the email display names were already set in Outlook. Other than bringing in phone numbers and email addresses, this is useless for writing emails on the device.
The calendar sync, however, is very badly broken. Blackberry Link calendar sync puts in every recurring event with no end date. I was trying to dial in to a conference call with my boss and I had a steady stream of calendar alerts popping up for meetings that were held 10 years ago or older. There’s no way to turn off those alerts, since the Blackberry Classic forces them on even if you don’t have that calendar selected. Only way to turn off those alerts is to delete the account that created the calendar. And that also deletes a sync’d contacts folder, if you enabled it with Link. Takes half a day to a full day to establish a working contacts sync relationship, so experimenting with Link calendar sync pretty much effectively kills both sync functions, since it’s not worth the trouble.
The “synced media” functions are also non-functional. Link won’t read any of the media types it’s supposed to be sync’ing. “Music,” “Pictures,” and “Documents” are dead. Trying to work with “Videos” crashes Link.
I can’t see how a supposedly professional software planning and production operation could have “accidently” allowed these many critical failures in what was advertised (and priced as) a premium product. These showstoppers make the Blackberry Link calendar sync totally useless, except for device backups. And I haven’t seen the restore function work yet. We may be making regular backups, only to find later, in the event of a device failure, that we may lose all our data and have toss the device and the software in the garbage after all.