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.
Friend of mine got it, exchanged it twice bc it wouldn’t work right and finally returned for good. Should have delayed it till it was ready.
Work in the industry as sales…
Storm is one of the most-returned phones I’ve seen in the last year. We get about 20 in per week, and every week I’m sending 6-8 back from returns (we don’t sell open box)
It’s a great phone, but not for everyone. I really doubt the ‘lowest return rate’ statement from verizon as marketing doing their job and playing with numbers.
Perhaps the lowest straight-up-returned phone.. but the exchange rate because people think they are defective is HIGH for a phone.
I received my Storm the Tuesday after the Friday launch via courier and like the phone. I don’t love it, but I am also not going to return the device. This is my first Blackberry device and I was VERY discourgaged/upset with how the phone from an email management perspective.
I can not for the life of me figure out how/why Blackberry (BIS) does not support IMAP folder synchronization for personal email, which is ridiculous!!! The phone will also not support two separate BES accounts, where I could leverage push/true synchronization (email only) on my personal email account. Therefore, I find myself regularly deleting email on my device after it has been deleted/moved from the Inbox from my computer – not the high tech way to manage email!!!
Otherwise, I think the phone works VERY well from a voice perspective and the data downstream/upstream works quite well. The updated the phone with the second firmware and it works much better, but could use some more tweaking.
I am also anxious for more applications to be written for the Storm, both in regards to previously written Apps developed for previous generations, WinMo devices and/or those that work well on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform.
I see this as a strong 1st generation BB device, but BB has to address their rudementary handling of personal email for all of their devices!!!
Had this since lauch and no problems whatsoever. Browser is great, phone is clear, used in lanscape position the keyboard is great. What’s the fuss???
Sure, if you count all the VerizonTrolls posting here.
I’ve owned it for about 3 weeks and have returned it for exchange once because of dust getting under the glass display.
I think even by BG standards from all the posts, people are pretty happy with their storms! I have one and yes you have to use it for 2 or 3 days to get past the learning curve and then it’s a love affair. Love mine and will not be returning!.. FYI talked to the Best Buy mobile manager which I know pretty well and she said the return rate was high the first two days after release, but the people who actually took the time to learn the device have come in and actually love it. She also said returns have come from people who didn’t take the time to upgrade to .75! Her solution was to simply tell the customer they did not have the new software and actually started updating the phones for the customers in Store and sent them back out the door and people are not returning. Makes me wonder how many people would still be running windows 3.1 if it was up to them to upgrade software lol…
What self respecting person is on verizon anyways?
I’m surprised how many people love the Storm. I received my the Saturday after launch and had problems with it from minute one, but they were hardware related (the send button didn’t work without extreme force) and not because of interface.
Verizon took two weeks, replaced my phone, and the second one has a problem with the screen. Fortunately, they’ve extended out my right to return until February without me even asking, and they’re going to be sending me a third unit. I’m wondering how many people are having similar experiences with the hardware… and then I wonder if I’m going to like the interface.
fuckin hate it!!! returned two of them now im done with this bullshit!
I own it and I love it. Return it? You couldn’t pry it from my cold dead hands.
I work in a retail store and I’d say we sell probably 12-14 a day and take back 1 or 2 a day. A lot of people are just getting caught up in the hype.
Are they counting returns for like-items in this figure?? I’ve had my exchanged a couple times for the screen click issue…but not flat-out returned. I actually love the phone. I just wish RIM’s quality control was a whole lot better. Their QA is worse than Motorola’s.
I used to work for Vodafone, I left towards the end of the second week that the Storm went on sale in the UK.
I had heard from 2 separate sources internally that the Storm return rate was causing concern – it was already worryingly high. One of my colleagues put the return rate “at around 25%”. The other said it was “looking like the N95 all over again.” (the first gen. Nokia N95 is generally considered to be a disaster by most opcos because it was rushed to market and suffered high return rates asa result).
I returned mine as if I were putting out a fire, I hate when devices like these are released without it being thoroughly going through a real test, the battery life sucked, the screen clicking got messed up, and it was way to glitchy for me, So I went back to att and bought a bold. Now I am happier than a pic in Sh*t!!
returned mine after 1 week and the beta release of the first update.
jumped shit to att and the iphone!
I bought one and had to wait a few days for Fedex to deliver it, so excited.
Activated it and gave it a full half days test drive before I returned it. I had to fight the buggers to give me full refund credit towards a Curve.
They wanted to charge me 35 bucks restocking. Well that didn’t happen. Got a Curve and love it. Did you know that it has a keyboard.
That piece of crap touchpad keyboard is stupid, doesn’t work, the scroll finger thing didn’t work. Hated the Storm.
I Tweeted all about it through the whole process. @Linkmoneydotorg
Why did he call it a “PDA”? Why not call it a smartphone?
Are there any other BBs in the PDA category or is it a segment of only one, cause then, the spokesperson would be right no matter what the return rate is/was.
Oh, I don’t know about the rate, but during the two hour fight that I had for full credit, two other customers came in to return their Storms too.
The Storm is great. If you don’t love it you most likely have the attention span of a monkey and gave up after five minutes.
The phone is great. Bugs rarely creep up. I have surprisingly gotten used to the Suretype keyboard in the portrait mode. Qwerty is great too. I think I’ll go DL some pr0n now.
I have had mine since day one. I came from a long line of Palm Treos, which I liked and hated. Liked the interface, hated lossing memory cards that would pop pout and loose pictures.
The Storm is not as strong as the palm os for ease of use but that is its weakest point. I got used to the keyboard screen after awhile. Some minor things still screwed up and not functioning properly like. Auto On and Auto Off, it turns itself off ok but never turns back on. LOL
Overall I love the device from my viewpoint as it does so much more and will only get better with future patches.
Some of the posts have eluded to this. To be fair, BGR, can you post return rates for some of the other highly anticipated phones ? This is really hard since you might not have that data, but it’s not fair to associate return rates with success unless you look at other return rates.
I have the Storm and am very pleased with it. With any first-gen product, there will be issues. Are there quirks? Yes. Is it something that can be fixed with OS updates? Of course. So even though VZW might have dropped the ball with the launch, its still a blackberry … and can only get better.
Bought my storm on the Launch date and I love it. There are a few issues with the OS but they are being addressed. My wife bought the iphone at launch and she had infinitely more problems with her phone than I have had with mine. This is a blackberry, so it does everything I need in a PDA and has great multimedia features also. The camera is subpar IMO, but that’s my only gripe with the storm. There is a learning curve with this phone and I think many just gave up too soon. Give me the click screen anyday over a touch screen.
Thing sucked. Sent mine back the other day, back to the iPhone.