BS Computer Engineering, MS Telecommunications, NJIT

Or perhaps its me who has been unlucky to sustain to such a cool looking device.  I have been using blackberry phone since 2006 and I didn’t experience anything negative that I can remember. Excellent phone for busy people. I use to love it when I had to use it for conference calls while I am driving (Well, its not really cool to be on a technical conference call while heading to work but I had experience those a lot).  One thing that i noted is i can easily carry out most of tasks with my right hand and dont need to get the help of both the hands to operate it. Its pretty convenient in a sense. For instance, If I happen to have one hand on steering while I am heading to work, I can still use my second hand to connect to a conference call. If that had to be a AT&T Tilt, Iphone or any other it probably wont be that easy and quick to carry out this task.

So yes that confirmed I like Blackberry’s. I have been lucky enough to get BB”s nearly at all jobs I had except when I was working at Performant Financial’s, the company policy was to give BB”s to management staff ! fair enough, I upgraded by AT&T phone line subscription with a Blackberry BOLD. so why BOLD ? Well, Advertisement really works and this one got me to it:

You must play this advert if you haven’t yet, its really cool specially the music they have it in the background. I paid like $399.00 ($100 was mail in rebate), therefore, the the phone came out to be costing like $299.00 ~ 300 bucks!  My wife gave me this as a Birthday present and I really loved it ! So just imagine, this is the first time, when I had to put out my money to buy a Blackberry. Sadingly enough, as you will see it wasn’t really a cool experience going forward….

So I thought its the best Blackberry I got, cuz its BOLD (like me ) and it looks elegant  - and it would be fun to communicate to my folks at work or my social contacts.  Its not quite true what I experienced. The speaker phone started driving nuts as it wasn’t loud and in couple of days of my use the voice got dimmed to a degree that I wasn’t able to hear people properly and shortly I started realizing that I can no more use my one hand to do all that cool stuff ! So what now? Well, call AT&T support and since I am a valued customer they would take care of me ! So the truth is AT&T tried to troubleshoot the phone – I had to go through the pain of “wiping the handheld”, AT&T tried pushing some updates but it didn’t really help. So finally, the end up sending me a replacement phone and that was the most these guys could have done. I was happy at least i would get a replacement phone that should technically be solving my problem. The shipment was done via FedEx and the phone reached to me within no time and for that I would appreciate good support from AT&T ( wish they could lower their rates too). Guess what happens now, within 2 days I received the new phone. As soon as it arrived, replaced the SIM and battery and YES it worked! Speaker phone was working fine as expected!  The next thing I did connected it to my Blackberry DESKTOP software, pushed all my contacts and media files and I am happy AT&T customer praying for them to sustain the market and fights critism done by Verizon! . Just because i touched this subject, I have to say that AT&T has a better customer support as oppose to Verizon’s.  I dont know why but it appears that they are to some degree better then Verizon! But anyways, It wasn’t to long (perhaps, a week) and now I started having the same problems again with the new replaced blackberry! Speaker phone died and I am left with the same hassle. Couldn’t do much, called AT&T went through the same SAGA – and they sent me a new phone again as replacement. Well to cut short, this happened like 3 times! Isn’t this hillarious ! The BOLD that I paid 300 bucks for got returned back to the depo 3 times. Damn! I am no more loving Black Berry’s but guess what its only BOLD that is the problem here? Who knows! All i know this is my first smart phone that I paid from my pocket got me annoyed. So the 4th time, I got this AT&T Tilt 2 phone from HTC. The customer rep made me realize that it was the best phone in the list and it should be solving the problems I am having!  I realized that the 4th time the problem was not directly related to speaker phone but Had reception issue and was directed primarily to AT&T towers which were not sending strong signals.  But then the history with BOLD wasn’t that great and to really solve the problem from Grass Roots, it was recommended to get a replacement with Tilt2. The reality is it was really the service 4th time as I was getting the same issues with Til2 as well. Therefore, I decided to keep the BB and send back the Tilt2. AT&T refunded me about $110 for bad service and have filed a case with engineering. Dont really know how effective that is going to be but I am starting to realize that the fortune BOLD brought with it wasn’t that great and my experience with AT&T has got damped greatly. I aim to try Google’s Nexus sometime soon and hopefully that would heal the wounds costing me $529 dollars. Thats quite a bit of money to heal wound caused by smartphones

Hopefully, this time it would be consistent attempt to populate my blog. life has become so busy that it barely leaves me with time to share what I have been currently doing. But I am pretty sure that going forward I will be able to give you insight to many technology related pointers and hints. Stay Tuned ! more to come shortly.