Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Bold crashing!

I've been catching the Blackberry Bold crashing more and more often. It'll freeze up, the screen will blank, the LED will be on red and solid, and after a bit, it'll reboot. It does all this silently, so I can't know it's happening unless it's visible when it happens. When I catch it rebooting, I feel like I'm catching a puppy peeing on the carpet. Since it takes only a couple of minutes to reboot, it would be easy to miss. Then again, it does sit in my sight 10 hours every weekday, and I can't think of more than one time it crashed at work. The crashes have only interrupted me twice, and still seem rather infrequent, but it's just annoying somehow to know it might be happening when I'm not looking. I looked up some info on the problem, but I can't think of any commonality between the crashes I was able to see. Though they definitely happen more often when I'm not interacting with the phone. I'm running most recent firmware 4.6.0.167 on AT&T.

Another annoyance is AT&T's constant bobbing and weaving between networks. It seems to adversely affect performance. I can set the blackberry down on the table, completely untouched, and watch it switch from 3 bars on "EDGE" with blackberry support to 1 bar on 3G to 5 bars (lowercase) "edge" with blackberry to 3g <-lower case "G" with a cherry on top. The constant network switching is ridiculous and annoying. Particularly when different services mean different abilities, and I have no interest in memorizing every possible configuration and the data speed, email connectivity, phone MMS, and VM availability for each possibility.

A few more notes; the bedside mode doesn't seem to brighten up on radio communication. Must have been some weirdness. But if you're waiting for the screen to dim under the lamp on your nightstand, you'll be waiting forever. It only dims when the lights are out. The light sensor adjusts the brightness for the ambient light level. So when you're outside, it's bright, when you're inside, it doesn't have to be as bright. Also, there DOES appear to be an icon that should appear relating to the program that is causing the LED to blink. If nothing shows up, it's probably stuck. By the way, the LED getting stuck hasn't happened in quite some time.

Still; the blackberry bold is working out pretty well. Data is available, browsing is versatile on funky websites (though still slow), and the phone (the part of the phone I use the least) hasn't let me down yet. But then; the bold would have to murder my parents and eat my dog to be worse than my previous phone, so maybe I'm a bit more willing to put up with small nagging issues.

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