RIM vs. AT&T; Bold vs. Thunder/Storm
We thought we’d give y’all an update on what we’ve been hearing so far. It’s been fairly well-documented that RIM isn’t too happy with AT&T for delaying the release of the Bold. It began with June, then to July, to August, to September — you get the point. But, there is a back-story here, so we are going to take a minute out to break it down for you guys.
First and foremost, according to what we have been told, AT&T approached RIM to build the BlackBerry Bold for them. RIM had zero plans of manufacturing a 3G device at the time. They reluctantly gave in to AT&T and started to manufacture the Bold. You can see their non-3G stance with the upcoming Kickstart, Javelin, etc. As it was put to us, “AT&T will not be accepting any non-3G phones on it’s network.” We’ve clearly seen this transition take place; we’re almost at the point of all 3G handset heaven, so this statement makes sense. The problem with the delays of the Bold is that RIM has the Thunder/Storm up their sleeves. We’ll get into that in a bit, but here’s a quick story on the Bold delays and why they happened.
To be fair, the delay with the BlackBerry Bold wasn’t really AT&T’s fault. Sure, they might have wanted to give Apple a little more shine or they might even have wanted to let their 90-day exclusive run out through the holidays to capture all those extra sales, but there were, and still are software issues. That’s evidenced by people that have bought the Bold already. Are they world-ending? No. But no one can oppose the fact that the Bold is the most un-BlackBerry-like device to come out of RIM in terms of stability and the OS. AT&T knew this. That’s why RIM would hand AT&T (and Rogers, too) “final final” builds of the OS. After a couple days, those were promptly sent back to RIM with “FAIL” written all over them. That continued for a very, very long time. Nonetheless, it came to the point where Rogers went ahead and released the device; it’s not 100%, and they, along with RIM, know that. (Does anyone remember how that RIM publicist assured the press that there were no delays with the Bold on AT&T and indirectly called us jerks?) But why the strained relationship with AT&T?
Well, you have AT&T basically demanding a 3G BlackBerry, RIM probably said, “eh, dudes, we’ve never done this before, you sure?” AT&T probably said, “Holla!” Then AT&T kept delaying the release of the Bold, and RIM sort of got pissed. They had the BlackBerry Thunder/Storm on the burner, but they held that way too close to the chest so AT&T didn’t find out about it. Why didn’t they want AT&T to find out about it? They were afraid AT&T would drop the Bold, the device they begged them to make, and want to run with the Thunder/Storm instead. You’ve got practically the entire world launching the Bold, except for the #1 BlackBerry carrier on the planet. Something doesn’t sit right with that. It might be AT&T’s quest for perfection on the device, it might be the fact that they make way more money on iPhone sales, or it could be a mix of both. RIM has increased the marketing budget with Verizon of the Thunder/Storm like we reported to you. Whether this was done to possibly makeup for lost time with the Bold in the U.S. or to spite AT&T still remains to be seen, yet we can’t help but think RIM is a getting a little kick out of it. One more tiny bit of info is BlackBerry Thunder/Storm pricing… we heard through various contacts it will sell for $199 with a 2-year agreement after in-store and MIRs. In any case, that’s our little back-story for the day regarding what happened with the Bold and the Thunder/Storm and an explanation why AT&T probably isn’t in Jim or Mike’s MY5.
It is not surprising to see that an AT&T Manager is not able to determine if the problems are from the service or phone. I know about 6 people with the Bold/Rogers. None of them have had a dropped call or OS problems and all of them are use it constantly. I have played with each Bold I can get my hands on and it is kills any Treo (including 800 & 755p) and older BB’s. Fact is AT&T is a very poor carrier and most likely will always be just that. Hopefully RIM learned a lesson and the Storm will find another carrier.
Maybe I am in the minority, but I chose the iPhone over BB, because it now uses ActiveSync. My last 2 employers did not pay for everyone to use BES, but fully supported ActiveSync. As for AT&T, they make me miss Sprint’s call reliability.
@ Mike
The Storm did find another carrier: Verizon. Isn’t it the 1st BB to released as a CDMA variant before a GSM one?
@ my two cents
Also, I’m trying to decide whether to switch from Verizon to AT&T or not to grab the Bold. I was going to go for the iPhone, but once you realize that it’s just a touchscreen… it loses its sexiness. Plus, this will be my first BB; I’ve played around w/ my friends’ (iPhones + BB’s) and I really think a physical keyboard is the way to go.
The JD Power ratings were disheartening. What good is a kick-ass phone is the network that supports it can’t handle its very awesomeness? I think my hate for the crippling of VZW phones my trump the faulty 3G network on AT&T
*typos galore
The JD Power ratings were disheartening. What good is a kick-ass phone WHEN … I think my hate for HOW VZW cripples their phones MIGHT trump … etc
didn’t want y’all to think I can’t speak English.
@jeff
“2) Everyone complains about at&t on here, but there is a reason that it is choosen by the majority of companies for business purposes. It works around the world if needed, they give good discounts, and they are very good business providers. If you have ever seen Verizon pitch to a business (we’re talking fortune 100 companies here) you would think they are a bunch of 5 year olds. At&t is very professional, and comes across much more put together than Verizon, giving a company much more confidence in at&t. at&t also uses GSM, the world standard. I can hop on a plane today and use my Berry 99% of the places I go. Say what you want about the 8800 World Edition for Verizon, but that’s one phone! What if I wanted a curve, pearl, or some other non-smart phone? What if I was in a country for a short period of time that didn’t neccesitate a prepaid local cell phone? These are all arguements as to why at&t has the business market cornered. Granted their customer service isn’t that great, but i hardly have problems so I rarely have to call them, so to me it is a nonissue. If Verizon got it’s act together with its business sales force, switched to a GSM standard, and gave better business discounts then it would be a force to take on at&t.”
______________________
Dude you don’t know what your talking about.
For one GSM is an older technology, why do you think when your phone rings you hear noise in your speakers (computer, TV, car), and we all have to turn our phones off in some places (it may mess with our systems) because of you GSM people. Why do you think AT&T ranked near the bottom of the last in JD Power year after year with T-mobile on call quality .
2. GSM isn’t a global standard man. It’s a european standard.
You ever been to Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, Korea, they all have CDMA networks…
Most american’s use CDMA, almost every US carrier is CDMA, besides AT&T, and T-mobile which both use CDMA technology in their 3G networks (WCDMA).
Is far as the business side, I don’t know how many customers Verizon has vs. AT&T because I don’t work for either company, but from what I seen in my line of work is that most house hold name companys use Verizon not AT&T, cingular blue, orange or whatever you want to call it.
does anyone know when the bold will be released to verizon?
does anyone know when the bold will be released on the verizon network?
@ Settingthemstraight08
According to Wikipedia GSM is 80-85% of the global market while CDMA is 10-15%. If true I think that would qualify GSM as a global, rather than only European, standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cellphone-subscribers-by-technology.svg
If you just put JEFF on that guys ass then that’s what I’m doing to att right now!!
He said, She said…who cares…as soon as all of us gadget addicts get the BOLD in our hot little hands we’ll be facing Waterloo or AT&T’s HQ like its meca and crying thank you…thank you..I didnt mean all those bad things I said about you…
Soooo when is the LTE RIM coming out? I heard…..
LOL
Interesting take on the situation – everything I’ve read has pegged the problem with getting the bold to work on AT&T’s network, but RIM is getting slamed while the bold has launched in dozens of markets. I’m a Verizon customer who’s contract just rolled over and had to decide if I wanted to waited an unknown amount of time to upgrade or go with what they have now. I went with the curve and am very happy with the device. I’ll probably pay full price to upgrade once this mess settles out. The solution to this problem is for the carriers to get away form the absurd two year contract. They don’t give enough of a discount to justify the 2 year term – seems like an average of $50 (come one $100+ monthly contracts for 2 years?!) Not to mention the phones aren’t really designed to be used everyday for this long – two years is an eternity with today’s rate of tech advances. I get a 20+% discount with verizon and I can add my car to my plan for $10 bucks a month so the phone is only a small piece of my decision to stick with my current carrier(despite their absolutely horrible “customer service”). At some point the carriers need to learn new phones are just a given for a certain percentage of their customers and design plans to accomodate us.
Taylor
I was replying to someone else. Besides, this isn’t about customer service. Verizon is lame with their idea of locking a phones capabilities. I’ve used all the providers, and Verizon is the worse when it comes with equipment. They don’t even get hot phones until the “hot” phones are old. Go waste your money on the dumb down version of the Thunder
RIM is not a hit with consumers? Their shares are up a lot recently because of… You guessed it… The consumer market. They are the number 1 seller of smart phones in North America. To imply that RIM is a dying company just means that you are ill-informed. Also, a lot of consumers get a bad taste in their mouth at the mere mention of an iPhone. Plus the fact that many people are not very fond of AT&T also.
Wolf (a.k.a. RIMM short seller) in sheep’s clothing (a.k.a. att manager). LMAO. Nice try and nice touch with the back-handed (Palm) compliment, but you guys are transparent.
If AT&T is so concerned with having high quality device why did they accept the 3G iPhone? C’mon BGR, your biases are showing again. They delayed it because of the iPhone PERIOD. Just accept it and stop denying it. Weather it was pressure from Apple or AT&T’s own decision that’s still the underlying motivation.
hold on a sec…RIM already made a 3G device, the DoCoMO 8707h, and other carriers 8707g that will work with the 2100 mhz frequency. They work fine in Japan and other countries that have a more developed 3G infrastructure. AT&T’s 3G network is new and has a lot of problem. You sure is not just another AT&T propaganda to put the blame on someone else.
People are just haters on RIM products because they themselves either haven’t learned how to use one or their favorite celebrity isn’t rocking one.
I use to be a long time user of the Blackjack and the BJ 2 and when I switched to Blackberry, there was no turning back. The Q, the Treos, and the iPhone got the boot. And I’m not gonna even get into the Sidekick. Bottom line, the Blackberrys 8xxxx series kills every other PDA phone out there with the Pearl being en exception. That phone was sub par to me.
I have a couple hundred verizon phones and 50 AT&T phone and one Sprint phone. Service is affected by location. ATT is better worle wide and in the south US. Verizon is better in the NE US. ATT has simm cards Verizon does not. That is the major difference. If you only have one phone it depends on where you live if you have hundreds ATT is easier to work with, swap phones, and has better customer service. When our contract is up we will probably switch the majority of phones to ATT. All of our Blackberry phones are AT&T. The bold with a key pad is the way we will go.
@ATT manager. The Bold works fine. There are some bugs but nothing major. You probably couldn’t make a phone call because it wasn’t provisioned properly by one of your ATT account or technical agents. The Bold works fine on all the networks its been released on so far, what’s the problem with ATT’s network?
Ummmm… I’m a little weirded out by this theory that RIM is the only one at fault here.
Do we all have such short memories of some MAJOR flaws in one 3G iPhone? Some MAJOR 3G issues (sounds like these are similar issues).
Of course we haven’t been told why each rendition was kicked back to RIM, but where was this outstanding quality control when evaluating the iPhone?
Or is this perhaps one of those circumstances of “well, it’s from Apple, it has to be perfect”?
In all defense to AT&T why would they release a phone that is not up to par. Yes they released the Iphone w/bugs and all but no one knows to what extent of the bold issues. I applaud AT&T for making RIM get it together because once this device get released consumers will blame AT&T not RIM for any issues. So we BB users need to kick RIM in the pants and have them get us a 3G BB. Honestly, I think RIM should have been working on a 3G BB years ago even before the 1st Iphone. It disappoints me that RIM let a new comer beat them to the punch on their turf. I’m waiting for the Bold but I want my device to be good.
Hi i have been reading news and updates on the Blackberry Bold for months now. Ive been waiting on this phone too. For those of you who complain on AT&T services, ive been AT&T customer for years now and i have never had a problem. I have a blackberry curve and never have had a problem I always have service. I went to a retreat for my sorority and me and other couple of AT&T users were the only girls with service. I do want to believe that AT&T is holding off on the bold because of issues with the network. I would not like a phone that i will have to be taking back the day after it has been bought.
And as true blackberry lover i know that a touchscreen phone is not even in the picture. Qwerty for life LMAO!
I switched to Att for my business and I hate them. They almost single handedly put my new business out of business with dropped calls. Its gonna be hard to tell my kids they cant go to college becuase Att allowed me to lose over 10 grand because of dropped calls over the first month of business. Thanks Att
learn how to write.
I have no idea what your saying
Loyal AT&T customer for 6+ years. I rarely/never get dropped calls and consistantly beat all other carriers on signal strength.
I was a Verizon FiOS/LAN Phone customer for 4 months and their customer service was beyond horrible… I had to call 8 different customer services phone numbers to get someone that knew what to do, and even then it took me 4 calls to get help. I am sure that the Wireless service is at least more concise, but I don’t trust Verizon with the experiences I’ve had. I am very happy with my BB Curve and will probably look at the new RIM devices as they are released.