Blackberry bold problems

M

martinc

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My contract has recently expired, and it was a toss up between an iPhone and a Blackberry Bold. In the end the Bold one my favour as I liked the idea of BIS with it's unlimited e-mail and web browsing. After seeing MTN's official statements about the release of the phone in late October, I started calling around MTN connect stores and consistently no one knew what I was talking about. Fortunately, a month later and I found a helpful soul at an MTN connect store close by. Another month later, after waiting patiently for the phone to arrive at stores, I was finally able to get my hands on a brand new Bold today.

The phone definitely has a wow factor, especially since it was my first "smartphone".

I must admit, I've only twice before set up BIS on Blackberry devices for friends, so I'm by no means an expert, but I couldn't get BIS working on the Bold. There's no BIS setup option, only a BES option. I've not been able to connect to the net since I have the phone (through any means).

About after an hour of playing around with it however, I casually shut it down, and started it up again. Since then I've been having the same "insert sim card" message haunting me and nothing I do seems to make it go away. I've tried other sim cards, and the card works fine in my old phone.

I'm taking the phone back tomorrow, to see if they can sort out the sim card error, and they'll also hopefully be able to advise on setting up email/web browsing.

In the meanwhile, as a complete novice Blackberry user, could you guys give me any advice on where to start to get email and web browsing working. I'd love to hear from anyone that had success in setting up web connectivity on a Bold.

Thanks guys,
m
 
Aren't you lucky! Some of us are having trouble finding stock. Why not try 1555 - the MTN corporate help desk, they seem to know a lot about Blackberry and were very helpful in clearing up some questions I had (but I think they're closed on weekends).
 
the best is to make sure the MTN BB helpdesk assists u in setting it up correctly. Its not a huge effort, just a couple of tweaks. Its been too long since I did my BB 8310, so i cant help u with specifics, but they will have all the setup info
 
OBF

Hi guys,

thank you for the replies.

In the end they swapped the phone out and it chalked it up to an OBF (Out of Box Failure).

I've dialed 1555 and are now speaking to the guys about loading the BIS service and setting it up.

So my advice to other Bold users is to not wait when they get that sim card error, go immediately to the branch you purchased it from, and have them swop it within 7 days.

Have a good weekend,
m
 
Living with the Bold

Hi guys,

it's been 3 weeks now since I've been living with my BB Bold.

The problem in setting up my BIS was that they had to migrate my contract from a Procall 120 to an Anytime 200 contract. See the thing is, I was due for an upgrade, but my contract actually only ran out in February. It took them until the end of my billing cycle to migrate me, with the necessary penalties for canceling early (about R150). After quite a few follow ups on 808 and 1555 I was finally migrated a week since I first got my phone. Apart from this problem, I'm very happy with MTN's service, and the contract price (R350, including BIS).

It's interesting I liked the phone even without BIS, because it's vivid screen and great keyboard. Watching video, listening to music and texting, was about the extent of it, but when they actually switched on BIS, I fell in love.

I easily set up email and web browsing. GPS worked easily, and I installed a few apps like gmail, google maps (bb's built in maps are better where I live), gtalk and live messenger.

I had some problems with it constantly going from EDGE to 3G, but I solved that by setting it to 3G only. I haven't had any of the major 4.6 OS problems that they mentioned, but my BB has switched off once after going up to 3G, and it has blinked/shown email indicators when there was none.

Also WAP isn't enabled by default, and maybe that's a good thing because you have to pay for streaming through it (as Youtube does). I just download the video through vuclip and then watch it offline.

Browsing the web is good, but it gets a little tiresome at times, and I find the column view to be the most helpful.

I still have lots to say about it, so if you want to ask any questions, please let me know. Oh and yes, I don't regret not getting the iPhone. I'm no a BB fan for life.

m
 
Wow, that's great Martin. I have a few questions:
What are your download limitations? i.e. how many megs can you download at one time on the device with your unlimited BIS service?
Have you tried using Opera Mini, that might help with your browser issues?
 
Limits

oronte said:
Wow, that's great Martin. I have a few questions:
What are your download limitations? i.e. how many megs can you download at one time on the device with your unlimited BIS service?
Have you tried using Opera Mini, that might help with your browser issues?
Click to expand...

Hi oronte,

the limit per file seems to be about 5 megs. I tried downloading an mp3 the other night that was just over 8 megs and I was told that the file is too large. There's been a hack in older OSes to get around it, but seems they patched it in 4.6.

The browser on the Bold is excellent, it has BB mode (which automatically renders mobile friendly pages if they exist), Firefox and IE mode. In the latter two modes pages render exactly as they would on a full sized computers screen, which means to you have zoom and scroll around to see the page as the Bold's screen is of course much smaller than a computer screen. So there's not real gripe, except that this is where a touch screen would have helped. My thumb starts hurting after a while ;) It has great javascript support, but page loading becomes significantly slower and also it doesn't have ajax support, which seems to be a bit of a problem on some sites.

Let me know if you'd like to know anything else.

m
 
I have had the bold now for almost 2 months, superb device, I've been using Blackberry for almost a year now and will never use any other phone. I spent 5 years wasting money on HTC's etc which are full of junk. Each time they bring out a new model there is a bunch of new features, a faster processor (which always seems to run slower than the previous one) and they never ever do any work to the radio on the phone.

The call quality on a BB is unsurpassed. If I stand at my back door with a BB and the latest HTC touch Diamond, the HTC has one bar signal strength and the BB 5 bars (full strength) .... does that not say something. BB is also the most intuitive interface ever, it's smart and extremely well thought out for those who want to get things done. The push email is also unsurpassed by anything else in the industry.
 
Hey, I just have a question. I purchased my Blackberry Bold from MTN about 2 months ago and my BIS is not activated yet. I dont have the functions that the other people have, who's BIS is connected, like BB maps. Did you also have this problem while you were without BIS?

Thanks
 
Call 808 or 1555 to activate BIS. Why have you waited so long without calling the service providor to get it activated?
 
It is important to note that when you use a Blackberry , it is nothing without a BES / BIS add-on / bolt-on / service to your contract and / or prepaid.

Without those add-ons it is just a normal GSM phone that can make and take calls and send and receive sms and so on.

If BIS / BES is not active , you will see the gsm / gprs / edge in small letters and when the services are active and the Data Services turned on on the handheld itself after the carrier (MTN/Vodacom) has activated said services on your sim (then GSM / GPRS / EDGE) appear in CAPS.

Also take note that once the services are active , to register the device using its IMEI and device PIN on ...

MTN -> http://mtn.blackberry.com/
Vodacom -> http://mobileemail.vodafonesa.co.za/

Registration on these sites are free and support is done by the carrier ie MTN & Vodacom who can logon to the back-end and fix your email settings if you break anything.

You can do 10 accounts on BIS plus a device email address ending in [email protected] and / or [email protected] and these addresses are associated with the device itself and you cannot download that email to a pc (in principle you can actually since its a normal IMAP account but the username and password is hidden from you and the whole point of it is to email-enable the actual handheld) and also one BES address where your company has a BES server on its network where you receive / send emails , create & delete & amend calendar entries , tasks , notes and encrypts communication between the BES server and the handheld along with a host of other features such as remote wipe if you lose the device and so on.

phoneJunky said:
Hey, I just have a question. I purchased my Blackberry Bold from MTN about 2 months ago and my BIS is not activated yet. I dont have the functions that the other people have, who's BIS is connected, like BB maps. Did you also have this problem while you were without BIS?

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Hey, thanks for the replies. My BIS is activated now and everything works. My BIS was suppose to be included in my package and it showed on my account but the people at the technical department said that there was no BIS on my account. They just reloaded it and now everything works fine.
 
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