I had a blackberry today that would not receive mail from the BES server but could send. It could also send and receive PIN messages but not mail. To get the mail working I deleted the phone from the system and sent an activation request. I then obtained the password from outlook’s email and entered it into the enterprise activation window on the blackberry – this hung and never completed. I then followed the Cingular instructions on how how to complete Enterprise Activation on a RIM BlackBerry. Details in the extended entry in case the Cingular site goes offline.

These blackberrys are a piece of junk. We’ve had the 8703e now for about 4 weeks and the service from the device has been getting worse and worse. Several times I’ve lost the ability to get any data access – attempting to use the internet just gives me a lack of service access. What I have found is that removing the battery for about 30 seconds usually gives me data access back again.
Text messages have been delayed 12 or more hours, which is not acceptable for business use as that is how we get paged about urgent or high priority tickets.
Thursday the phone was not accepting most incoming calls, with calls going to voicemail and I’d then get an sms message telling me that a message had been left even though the phone was not actually ringing. However, I know the phone did ring at least once as I asked one of the callers to ring me back to verify whether it had got switched to silent mode (but the phone rang as expected).
Yesterday I was getting data service refused when trying to access the internet from the laptop using the blackberry as a tethered modem the fact that it says refused almost sounds like I *could* have data access but Sprint have decided not to let me have it.
Twice the phone has switched off the radio overnight – the first time it happened I realised when I picked the phone up in the morning and assumed it had happened because the battery had warned me it was running out of power the previous night – I thought it had turned the radio off to save battery life. However the second time it happened the battery warning had not occurred and the phone was on charge overnight. I didn’t check that the radio was on in the morning so I had about 5 hours of blissful quietness when it didn’t ring or send me text messages in the morning….but when I realised and turned the radio back on – that all changed!

As far as the phone is concerned, the lack of a voice recorder and voice dialing makes it almost impossible to use whilst on the road as it is not possible to call any of my clients whilst driving. The previous Motorola phone had voice activated dialing so I would only have to press the bluetooth earpiece and then state who I wanted to call. With the blackberry I first have to punch in the security code, scroll to access the address book and then scroll through the address book to select the person I want to call, this is just not practical whilst driving.
I miss the voice recorder on the previous phone as I used to use that to leave memo’s for myself or time stamps of arriving and leaving at customers so that I could easily fill in my timesheet at a later date by retrieving the messages.
To sum it all up, this device was meant to make my business life easier, instead it has just been unreliable and is a piece of junk.

Yesterday a replacement blackberry was given to us by Sprint to use instead as they think mine was faulty. Funny thing is that the new one can’t even get provisioned to join the Sprint data network. It also doesn’t have the dst patch on (and I can’t install it until I get data access). Apparently I have to wait one more hour until the voodoo they did at Sprint Customer Service (877-654-9111) takes affect and then I have to try and provision the phone again.