Blackberry update…

It’s been about 3 weeks since I got my Blackberry. Overall, I’m quite happy (see my earlier post), but there is one thing that really annoys me — the GPS! A little bit of googling and a trip to the forums at crackberry.com will convince you of the weirdness that’s out there. There are OS issues. There are application issues. There are carrier issues…gee, how hard can it be to make it work? The carriers seem intent on figuring out how to incrementally monetize use of GPS. Here is one place where the monoline strategy that Apple used with the iPhone & AT&T does make sense; it means that they can offer a more consistent user experience on functions like this.

I think that I’ve more or less figured out how to make my GPS work with the BlackBerry maps app — if the GPS lock is taking too long, pop the battery, but wait long enough to drain the capacitors before reinserting the battery. This hard reset seems to improve things dramatically, but you should not have to do that! Must be some really buggy code in there. There does not, from what I’ve seen, seem to be any consistency about which “point release” of the 4.5 OS that you are running and the impact on this. Oh well, the other apps work well, and it makes a great phone…

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