The Blackberry Bold. Not.

Unspun, ever a sucker for gadgets, drooled over the sleek new Blackberry Bold and finally, on a trip to Hong Kong, decided to junk my Treo for the new phone. (HK sells the Bold much cheaper than Indonesia, at about Rp6 juta, while the ging rate here is Rp8.5 juta, but with exchange rates yoyoing who knows where the deal’s at anymore?)

The phone feels great and is a joy to play with except for two flaws:

1. It freezes every now and then. Pain in the ass but still liveable.

2. It’s a bitch to synch with the Mac using PocketMac. Its not better with the alternativem MissingSynch either.This is a major pain in the ass and something that is not acceptable from a putative purveyor of high end phones.

Unspun‘s been obsessed over the past two days trying to get Pocketmac to work but its been more erractic than a FPI member on alcohol. It would work sometimes, at other times it wouldn’t. Still other times it works partially, to the point that Unspun does not know what’s in his contacts database and what’s not anymore. There are duplications and triplications of addresses and even after deletion they come back like a bad rerun of the Terminator. Each time Unspun synchs he gets the message:

[04:48:49.402] An unexpected error has occurred: Bad device record set.  Check that the OID values are unique across records.

An unexpected error has occurred: Bad device record set.  Check that the OID values are unique across records.

Ever resourceful, Unspun resorted to the Blackberry Support Forums for advice and guidance but it looks like this problem has been around for months and nobody at RIM, the makers of Blackberry, or PocketMac the makers of a series of sunching products for the Mac and PC, have fixed it or even bothered to get with the conversation.

So you ask yourself how is it that a manufacturer that prides itself on selling high end phones an go about ignoring the plight of its customers so easily? This is what happened at Palm and other strong brands who lost their way, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

One indication of whether RIM is listening is to see if they respond to this posting with a comment. if they are not, then they are sleeping and its time to go for other products.