Verizon BlackBerry Storm Return Rate
Here’s the skinny on this situation… We had heard various return rates on the Verizon BlackBerry Storm from three (actually four, but we’ll discount the last one) extremely credible sources of ours. These ranged from 35-50% in some markets/regions. That is an absurdly high figure, folks. While we trust our sources, we wanted to continue to dig until we wrote up a post on it here. We let a publication quote us on that, because that is what we had heard. No harm, no foul. But we weren’t going to post on it here until we had 100% confirmed it.
Verizon Wireless hit us up and here’s what a Verizon Wireless official had to say: “The Storm has the lowest return rate of any of our PDAs and at this point in its life cycle, it has the lowest return rate of any PDA we currently sell.”
We’ll let you guys do all the talking. Own a Storm? Happy with it? Returned it? Know friends that are happy/returned theirs? Hit us up so we can get some good feedback and your thoughts on this.
Funny you say that, as I am in management in a VZW Communications store.
I have an Omnia as my concession (business) line, and I’ve NEVER been so frustrated as I am with the Samsung when composing a SMS.
I just bought the Storm this past Friday, and really like it so far-especially in retrospect-after typing on the Omnia.
Omnia; great browser, decent phone. NIGHTMARE to text or compose e-mail on. Where the higher reviews come from for the Samsung are beyond me. WAY beyond me.
No comparison.
Just my $0.02
Good one…..BILL.
it took me 3 minutes of toying wit it on display to see that id return it so i avoided it totally and left it be. POS
Just got the Storm. Bit of a learning curve required with navigation, and especially with typing, but once I got over that initial frustration which took about a day or two, I now realize how sweet, intelligent and intuitive this device is. I’m keeping mine and fingers crossed it’s as stable and durable as all previous BB I’ve owned.
I have one, going on 3 weeks, i love it, sometimes it is slow but i have been a blackberry user for 5 years and just like 90% of this phone. Will not return
I had 9 employess who have Storms. Now i have 7 who have storms, one who went back to his blackberry 8830 world, and the last one were either returning his storm and getting another one, or he is getting a pearl. ( he thinks the storm is to large of a phone?!?!?!?!)
This is a real true story from a 37 year old sales executive. I had the curve liked it okay but traded up to the Storm. I loved the first one. I went in to the VZW box for an upgrade. My screen sat above the 4 borders on the phone a little bit BTW that is all that was wrong and I didn’t see it as an issue. The service tech said that it was a bad phone and had to swap me out. 20 minutes and done. The next moring I tinkered with my brand new storm at work and realized it did not recognize my touch in the lower left in portrait or landscape. I called the CS line and they swapped me out to a new one next day air via fed ex. That seemed fine and when i got it I proceeded to activate it. Activation done then I realized the left side of the screen barely depressed and did not click. None of the stickers were off so I took the two on the screen off and tried again. NO IMPROVEMENT. I called again that morning after returning number 2 at my warehouse small package department. No big deal they provided the postage and return yadda yadda. I asked if there was a way I could go back to the curve at this point. The answer was yes but they would not credit me anything for the difference. Something about the system not allowing them. They then told me my phone could be swapped for any phone. I like the look of the touch pro but the reviews stink. As I am telling the CSR what i needed in a phone she let me speak to two associates that made suggestions to me. One had a VX6800 and the other the touch pro. They told me the good and the bad of the phones they used. I decided on the VX6800. Not as pretty as the touch and no blackberry but it is older and is proven the reviews are better on this than anything else except the dare and the omnia. The omnia has a terrible keyboard set up to type on. I do a ton of text and email so it was not an option. I liked BB first attempt at the touch screen but it is not ready IMHO. It is nice, fast, sleek, and again IMO a true business MANS phone. It was black, big, shiney, heavy and you could press the screen. Not as dainty as the Omnia. I will miss it but I will wait until the 3rd or 4th version come out. I am lucky to know WM interface but I will admit it is no BB. Buy if you need a sleek trendy new BB, do not buy without first playing with the one you get first. I love BB and always will but this one was not for me and I couldn’t keep trading. BTW I received a belt pouch, car charger, and 8gb mSD card in my 8600 box. Thanks VZW your CSR are far better than t-mo or AT&T, which I have used, and sued each and won.
I was given one as a xmas gift and had so many problems with it locking up and missing calls it went back a week later. I found it interesting on all four trips to the verizon store, most of the people who were there for tech support were carrying frowns and BB storms.
I decided to get past the learning curve and make sure I wasn’t just jumping the gun on my BB Storm. I kept it for three weeks, becoming less happy the whole time.
It would lock up, it was slow and was very difficult to type on. I have big fingers and pushing the screen down made it very hard to not hit two or more keys at a time.
Too bad, since the sound is good and the screen is beautiful. (My unit leaked light all around the screen, but Verizon said they’d replace it with one that actually fit.)
I returned it and went back to my EnV. It is easy to type on.
Wow, RIM has a Vista on their hands. Guess it goes Bold (XP) and skip Storm (Vista) and whatever they have coming next (Windows 7).
I almost returned it. I’ve had it for over a month now and really like it. I believe there are 2 problems: 1. overhyped initial release and 2. one week learning curve. Also, the documentation does not do it justice. I found most of the shortcuts on BB forums. Sad. There are many “gestures” that are very useful but undocumented. The browser could be better but its not bad. WiFi would also have been a nice addition.
Does the Storm have Flash? Can you view videos say from youtube and other similar sites on the storm?
Used Treo’s for many years beforehand. Had this for less then 24 hours before returning it. Locked up numerous times. Screen would rotate unexpectedly. Random keyboard type would pop up requiring the need to know 3 types of keyboard entry. No Imap built in?!?!?!?!? Free imap download was designed for earlier blackberries, so it only used 1/2 of the screen. And the worst part about it was that 99% of the blackberry software that’s out there is designed for blackberries that have thumbwheels. No thumbwheel on the storm makes all that software a huge pain to use, and they only use less then half of the screen, because they all expect a real keyboard, so the storm has to take up most of the screen with an emulated one. Over time with native apps that should improve, but not on my dime.
I work at valiant musician management group and my boss got some of the top agents blackberry storms for free because we license music to verizon vcast service.
after a week of use, we all started complaining about how awkward it was to use.
my boss (Donovan A McCloud) wanted us to try it out for a month to get a hang of it, then give him a report.
even though this phone was free for us; none of us want to have anything to do with this phone because it has completely jumped the gun when comparing it to other blackberry devices that we are used to.
this phone is not for the corporate environment!
Spacing of the keys is too tight. Should be able to turn press to click off by substituting highlight function for clicking. Not as intuitive as other phones. Locked down blue tooth.
Other then that it’s a great phone.
I love the phone, but had to return it yesterday because the screen is going out. It is under my year warranty, so I hope the new phone I get will not give me the same problem. I am definitely sold on BB.
I bought the Storm in Feb 2009.
within a week The Verizon Office called me personally asking what I thought of my storm. They said people have had issues and wanted to know what I thought of it.
I told them It had all the features I wanted, many which the iphone doesnt even have or are better (better sound and movie resolution).
BUT
I HATE IT! and I’m gonna return it tommorow.
When asked why I told them it was practically unusable. I handed it to many friends asking them to simply enter their contact info, 15 minutes later they are cussing at it. I pulled up Google and asked friends to simpy search on any word. YUK they say.
why?
2 reasons:
1.) Its terribly hard to type, it doesnt follow your finger like it’s supposed to, and the press in screen is N O T intuitive.
2.)The whole GUI is not intuitive either, really, should you have to scroll and peck 3 times with your finger to pull up the keyboard.
No! There should be a keyboard key on the unit for heavens sake, or at least a standard on screen button for that.
Enough said,
I returned it to the verizon store here in Michigan along with the other two people that were standing in line with me were doing LOL.
The Verizon employee told me that their particular store was getting 2 out of every 3 back ever since it debuted.
Hopefully it gets redesigned.
I’d give it another chance.
Two of my friends have a Storm and they BOTH hate it. One is going to try and return his to Verizon today. Both of them constantly miss calls because their Storm simply DOESN’T RING. The only solution is pulling the battery, but how many times can they do that each day, just to make sure their phone rings? Also, they’ve found that when they power-cycle the Storm, the radio doesn’t automatically start, meaning they’re unable to receive calls unless they manually turn the radio on. Software / OS version .75 is a MESS. Don’t but a Storm until RIM releases several upgrades!
I just turned my storm back in and replaced it with a curve. All storms in my company are being returned as the touch screen interface is just terrible – sluggish, buggy, non-responsive, etc. Try taking a picture and you have a 2 to 3 second lag between pushing the button and the shutter click. It is just an awful phone and everyone I have met with one is wanting to return theirs. I’m one of the lucky ones who only had to put up with this terrible thing for a few weeks.
I originally had the treo 700wx loved it then went to a HTC PPC6800. Loved the touch screen on both and the keyboards. Graduated to the bb pearl and hated the tiny size and suretype keyboard and the memory issues. traded up for the curve to solve some of those problems and suceeded. I still have a curve for my work phone. Purchased the storm for my personal phone. thought is would be a nice marriage of the two concepts, touch screen and bb. was decently appeased but not wowed. the freezing up and screens not responding very quickly is frusterating. But i have accepted these issues and am enjoying the phone but i am glad to have my curve to fall back on while my storm is reloading after i have to reboot it.
The problem w/ the BBS is that it uses touch in the sense of navigation and not data entry. Also, its not a true “multi-touch” screen its just a “touch screen”. What do I mean? On the iPhone if you put one, or two, or five fingers down its going to register all five fingers and just register which of the five hit the screen first.
Whereas, w/ the BBS it will only register the one finger that touched the screen first, and pressed down on the screen. This is a problem because it makes it very difficult to type on because you have to make sure that the “one button screen” is reset before you enter in another character. This also slows down your typing rate, and just makes it a pain to type on.
Ultimately, that is the major thing wrong w/ the BBS. The lack of Wifi is a killer to me. As far as other issues on the BBS, like the lagging, and glitching issues, and format issues. All those can be fixed w/ new software updates. But the screen is whats going to kill all of that. Can’t have flawed hardware…
My friend has a BBS and she lies and says she loves it (because I have the iPhone) but she is always using my phone.
The Blackberry Storm is a P. O. S. Software app’s are unreliable, tech support is awful; performance is sluggish; horizontal to vertical switching is inconsistent at best. Do yourself a favor – stay away and find some thing else.
I purchased a Storm along with two friends. We all returned the phones for other BlackBerry’s. The screen is beautiful but the CPU slows way down for unexplained reasons and data entry is so difficult that many times my texts and emails only confused those receiving them. Maybe V2.0 will be better. Too bad.
I took mine back today. It repeatedly dropped calls where my other Verizon phones have full signal. It ran sluggish and the screen locked up. Tilt sensor sometimes didn’t register and turn the screen. I didn’t like having to manually shut down each app to preserve memory. I couldn’t sync it wirelessly to my Mac. Overall, I need a phone, 1st and foremost. This didn’t function well as a phone. My cheek frequently navigated me through menus while talking and/or activated the speaker phone or flash key. Sorry Storm lovers, I was terribly dissappointed with this BB.
I’m on my 4th BB storm. IT SUCK!!!
wow, hate the storm, I’m about to get my third replacement. they’ve been good about fedexing the replacements over night and pretty easy to transfer data. but wow, what a pain and I don’t think I can be turning around. I tried to play hard ball and request the blackberyy tour but they said no and thank you. so I said ok send me the third replacement. the second phone the click screen didn’t work on lower left corner. the first phone kept locking up on me. anyways, they should stand by their product and if not happy give you a refund.