Rating: Ain’t our problem – speak to the operator, says RIM
Talk about failing to appreciate the Power of the Press. GoMobile News was stunned by RIM’s recent reaction to a request for information from the well-respected ‘Don’t Panic’ techie section in the UK’s Sunday Times. Did the struggling handset manufacturer answer the technical question? Nope. Instead it fobbed the newspaper journalist off. Now, Nokia might be ignoring our advice to start making Android handsets but it certainly responds to Press enquiries. We thought we’d detected a change in attitude @ RIM when the company under Thorsten Heins had invited some leading journalists and developers to briefings on RIM 10. But the Times incident raises parallels with the PR disaster which was the Network Operations Centre) outage in in Slough, UK.What was the problem which the Sunday Times was unable to resolve?
Well, a reader using Microsoft’s Outlook Express was getting the error message – “No sender — no message”, every time he tried to open an email sent from a BlackBerry smartphone.
What was RIM’s reaction? The newspaper says, “It told us it is best to report the problem to the mobile phone network the offending phone is registered to, and not to BlackBerry itself.”
Right. A handset manufacturer displaying complete ignorance of the fact that the Outlook Express user has no idea (in the UK) whatsoever of which network the offending BlackBerry was connected to. The complainer is receiving blank messages not sending them.
Perhaps, RIM thought that anyone still using Outlook Express isn’t a corporate user so can be safely ignored? Or that such an old application doesn’t merit a response?
Contrast that with Nokia which swiftly responded to our own enquiry about an old handset (the N73) even though it had stopped making that model a whileback. (See our previous story here).
GoMobile News had thought that RIM had finally ‘got it’ when at the beginning of May [2012], it started giving out prototype BlackBerry 10 handsets – Apha Dev – to developers at its BlackBerry World.
That enabled publications such as Techcrunch to review the next release of its OS. See here .
Given how comments from Thorsten Heins were widely construed as RIM quitting the consumer market (see our previous story here), the Canadian company is just crying out for Press training.
If you want to see the full Sunday Times story, it is here but you will need a subscription to the Times + service.
Incidentally, if any GoMobile News readers can replicate this problem please let us know.
You know, I’ve found that over at the Official Blackberry site Forums (not blackberryforums.com), the staff have been incredibly helpful. Post a problem on the forum and within 24 hours, if not 12, if not 6, if not 3, if not 1.5, if not 45 minutes, you’ll have your first response from a technical expert asking their own questions about the problem so they can try and resolve it. I would suggest posting a question there and seeing how long it takes for a response. You might be pleasantly surprised.