Orange may drop Bold as RIM battles handset complaints

MOST READ
LATEST NEWS

Compare broadband and
mobile phone deals at Top10.com

EVENTS

4G World 2010 October 18 - 21, Chicago

4GWE Conference, Oct 4-6, Los Angeles

The Location Business Summit USA, 14-15 September, Crowne Plaza, San Jose

Advertize your telecoms job

JOBS

Mobile Industry & Technology Journalist - freelance

HOT TOPICS

Orange may drop Bold as RIM battles handset complaints

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 6 January, 2009

READ MORE: Orange | RIM | Handset

Like Palm, RIM needs to make a big splash with its business/consumer smartphones this year, in order to maintain some presence in the market against the big names. It appeared to have done the right thing with the launch of two impressive looking smartphones, Bold and Storm, both taking the vendor into 3G and the full mobile web experience. But both are reported as having major software problems, and Orange is thought to be dropping the Bold permanently from its portfolio in Europe, after battling with bugs since October.

Although neither Orange nor RIM have confirmed the problems, industry sources say that return rates for the Bold are far higher than the norm, with dropped calls and poor reception the major complaints. And there is even speculation that Vodafone is having serious issues with the Storm, one of its flagship launches of the 2008 holiday season, which it co-designed with RIM. Most of these rumors have been heard Stateside, and are largely confined, unlike the Bold stories, to small numbers of commentators and twitters (UK comedian Steven Fry attracted unwelcome attention for the Storm recently by criticizing it on a twitter site). However, they are building up a negative image of the Storm, even if most of the blips are connected to the Verizon version of the phone, which runs on the CDMA network and has quite different software to the Vodafone Europe implementation. The main frustrations appear to be with slow execution of various smartphone tasks.

The Orange issue is even more serious for RIM, especially if it loses a major carrier deal in the European territories where it has fought hard to gain more presence. In October, Ornage UK pulled the Bold temporarily, citing software problems, but was thought to have fixed these with a series of patches. The main complaints focused on connection issues, of the type that AT&T also experienced while testing the Bold for its HSPA system last fall. The Orange hitches are more concerning, because the French-owned cellco has a more advanced and well tuned network than AT&T's, implying that the issues lie in the handset itself - and so could turn up in other countries too. The Bold currently is on sale in 20 markets.