My travails with Blackberry

Two handsets in my house conked off quickly, never to function again

Let me confess, I was a big Blackberry fan -– till few weeks ago. In fact, I liked the handset and its messaging service so much, that I bought one more as a gift to my wife.

The messaging service was good and I could connect with my friends all over the world on a real-time basis. I was little perplexed when I noticed that the next generation of colleagues were throwing away their Blackberry phones and instead going for other handsets.

I was quite satisfied with the phone till one day, the handset decided to go to sleep and got switched on by itself again. And once it switched on, the clock sign continued for hours. My daughters immediately diagnosed the problem and asked me to remove the battery and put it on again. There was also a bit of free advice from my daughter:  “Move on. It’s over.”

So I sent the first Blackberry to a service centre and never bothered to take it back. I asked my wife to lend me her Blackberry for few days till I bought a new handset. I was surprised when my wife gave me the phone very happily: “Please keep it. You deserve it.” I understood the pun only after the second Blackberry also started acting strange.

This handset just went to sleep and never woke up again. It was not even a year old. I sent it to a service centre in Fort, Mumbai and I was asked to come back after 10 days. Looks like even the service staff were losing hope on the handset.

Soon I found out that a lot of colleagues and friends are just waiting for their Blackberrys to die on its own so that they can move on to some other handset and service.  There are free messaging services around and Blackberry has completely lost the plot. The company has launched a very highly-priced handset and it would be interesting to see what will be its sales record versus Samsung and Apple.  

Indian consumers are extremely value-for-money conscious. If they find that any product has cheated them once, then they make sure that product is dead forever. There are plenty of examples where consumers have shunned products which have failed to meet the expectations based on the money they paid. The word of mouth publicity can make or break a product.

Blackberry is already fighting a losing battle across the world. If the company wants to come back into the game in India, then the quality of its products has to be good.

Or else, like me, others will also use it like a paperweight.