The IT Nerd

I’m posting this in hopes that this will help someone else with this issue.

I recently got a brand new Blackberry Bold 9000 and so far it’s far faster than the Blackberry Curve 8310 that it replaced, plus the GPS feature works way better as well. But a few days after I got it the indicator light stopped working. The net result was that the light didn’t blink when I got an e-mail or when my Bluetooth headset was active. The latter wasn’t a big deal, but the former had me checking my Blackberry every 5 minutes to confirm that I hadn’t missed an e-mail. That was kind of annoying. I figured it was a hardware problem originally and decided to test my theory by running the hardware test mode. You can get into that mode by going into options and status and then typing the word “test” (without the quotes). This mode allows you to test the Blackberry to see if it has a hardware problem. The weird thing is that my Blackberry came up good. So I knew that I had some sort of software problem rather than a hardware problem. So I went about going through the Blackberry option to option to figure out what the issue was. The solution was found in the most unlikely place, the clock. The Blackberry Bold 9000 has a clock that becomes live when you plug it into AC power or to USB to charge. There’s an option that puts the clock into “bedside mode” and that disables the indicator light. However, when you exit the clock is stays in that mode which keeps the indicator light off. The fix is to go back into the clock and choose the option to “exit bedside mode.” This to me seems to be like a bug as in my mind, you should exit bedside mode when you exit the clock. Perhaps there’s a logical reason why this “feature” exists in this model of Blackberry. If that’s the case, I’d love to have someone from RIM tell me the logic behind this. Until then, I’ll file this under “bug.”

Agree? Disagree? Please post a comment and share your thoughts.

This entry was posted on March 28, 2010 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags BlackBerry, RIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.