So I have a wonderful BlackBerry 7290, right? A little 5 ounce (or whatever) piece of heaven.
Except when it doesn't work. First, my original one took to dropping calls after like 30 seconds or something. Sometimes it would last a whole 5 minutes. Email also took forever to send. Seemed like a failing radio to me, so I called T-Mobile and they agreed. I paid the additonal $15 in order to have it shipped out overnight, because this thing is my life.
This happened on Sunday, so it got shipped out on Monday, and I got it on Tuesday. I figured that I would just plug it in, tell the BlackBerry desktop software that this was my new device, and be on my merry way!
Not so fast! The first thing that happened was that the thing just froze the minute it got power. I figured that was a little weird, so I took the battery out and put it back in. It booted up fine that time. Then I connected it to my computer, and it told me that my e-mail account was currently configured for my old phone, would I like to update it for this new one? Sure.
I ztart getting all of my old e-mails populating on the phone, and figure that I'm good to go. Well, then it just reboots on me, and says "Device Error 373". So a couple more reboots later, I get it back up, only to find a "prefetch exception" on it.
Another reset, another DE373. Now I've had all I'm going to take of this thing (about 20-30 minutes in). So I call T-Mobile, and they tell me that I need to run an Application Loader on it (basically reinstall the operating system). So I try that, and it fails.
So they decided that they've exhausted their troubleshooting of this thing, and transfer me through to RIM. While waiting on hold, I attempt the application loader again. It appears to work, reboots, and then gives me a "Device Error 365" a few times. Give it a rest, bring it back up, and it seems to boot. But I don't have a SIM in there, so I take out the battery, put the SIM in , and turn it back on. Freezes during boot. Try again, eventually it comes up, except that it tells me "Device in cal mode, press S,T,A,R,T to continue". So I follow the directions, and type that. The device comes up. Then I start trying to use it, and it acts up in mysterious ways. I do research on the Internet on these errors (the giveaway was that the device PIN had changed to FFFFFFFF), and they seem to indicate that the device is defective and in requirement of replacement, so I called T-Mobile on another phone and told them that. They told me that the first represenative was correct in transferring me to RIM, as they may be able to resolve my issues. So I continue to wait.....and wait.....and wait some more.
Ater than 90 minutes on hold, I get through to someone, explain my problem, and then tell me that I need to speak to some other department. So they put me on hold for no more than about 10 minutes, tell me that they cannot get through to this other department, and said they'll put me in their queue. Fine, I assume that it can't be worse than the one I just got out of.
Oh, how wrong I am. So at about 3 1/2 hours into this ordeal, I call T-Mobile back again. I dunno what's going on, but I get directly to a human. Unfortuantely, said human was not in tech support. So they transferred me to this lady who was.
While she was extremely nice, she was not very technical, and I was getting ticked off by this point. They tell me that I don't have an e-mail account (they're right, I don't have an e-mail account with T-Mobile, I use a BES to get to my work e-mail). I try to explain that the PIN on my device got set to all f's. But I can't seem to get this throguh to her, the device is broken, and there's a BlackBerry knowledge base article on this exact problem, and the device needs to be RMA'ed. I finally decided that I'm getting off the phone with this lady who can't/won't help me.
About 20 minutes after I got off the phone with that lady (about 3 hours 40 minutes into this ordeal), someone from RIM got on the phone. By this time, I'm sure I wasn't the nicest person in the world, and I apologize to the poor person at RIM that I talked to. He was extremely helpful, and in about 10 seconds told me what I already knew, that the device needs to be replaced. Then he gets me back to T-Mobile, who is putting in the RMA order for the device.
So they read me the mumbo-jumbo that they have to in order to RMA the stuff, so I agree to it, and right after I do, tell them that they had better send me a new one, I'd had enough of this refurbished stuff. She told me that she had already submitted the RMA, and she couldn't.
Long story short, T-Mobile's and RIM's customer service both suck, but for entirely different reasons. So I'm going to write a letter of complaint to both of them. :-)
