Why I hate BlackBerry

So I bought new BlackBerry 8900 on AT&T. I was happily using my Sony Ericsson w810i from last 2 years and I was very satisfied with it. But I finished two years with AT&T and it was a time to upgrade my phone. Today its been around 60 days I am using this blackberry and here are my thoughts about it.

1. No call record function

Every phone that I had in past had the call record function, even very basic phones. It is very helpful when you want to record your phone call. Lets say you are driving and you want to note down a number that your friend is speaking from the other hand. You just hit the record button and your call gets recorded. You replay the recording when you want to use that. Very simple and powerful.

But blackberry don’t have this. They even restricted their API so other developers can’t create an app for that either. So I am just waiting for RIM to realize that this is a necessary function.

2. Trackball problems

I liked the track ball for first few days. But after around a month the trackball started developing problems. It will scroll up, right and left, but scrolling down was a problem. It was getting stuck and every time I had to try 2-3 times to make it scroll. I called up AT&T and they said they can only replace with refurbished phone and not with a new one. So now I am stuck with faulty phone with an option to replace with refurbished one that I doubt, will have the same problem.

3. Can not mute the camera

There is an annoying ‘capture’ sound every time I take the picture and there is no way to mute it. The closest you can do is call your voicemail and take picture while the call is still on. This is the work around. And you know why RIM hard-coded this to Blackberry? Because they think this will prevent you from taking candid pictures. Son of a gun.

4. Alarm did not go off that morning

I have setup the alarm to go off at 7.45 AM every morning. I was up at around 7.30 by myself that morning. I was just lying on bed waiting for the alarm to go off so I can get up from bed. But alarm never went off. I checked the time on BlackBerry, it was 7.50AM. I checked all the alarm setting, all profile setting but all of it was configured as it should be. I googled it and many other people had the same problem. I am really really upset after this incidence. Atleast the simplest apps like alarm clock should work properly on this business class device.

I will keep updating this post for my experiences/adventures  with this device. Comment on this post if you had any such experience with your BlackBerry.

(Update 09/17/09)

5. No auto keyboard lock..!! (really)

Can you believe this? This 21st century business class smart phone has no auto keyboard lock function. You have to manually lock your keyboard every time after you use it. And if you forgot to do it, remember it has a trackball and it sticks out from the phone, so it will for sure do something weird when its in your pocket. But fortunately, some developer thought about this and created an app to auto-lock BB keyboard. (Thanks to RIM for making this API available, otherwise they will lock this one too for security reasons.) But seriously, do you expect your smart phone to lack basic functionality like this?

Tagged as: 8900, Blackberry, crackberry, iphone, RIM, Why I hate Blackberry