Blackberry Curve Series Phone - BB Curve 8520 after a year plus of ownership. Poor Product and Service from Blackberry India.

My first mobile phone was a Philips phone in 1998 which were followed through the years by many phones from Nokia, Sony Ericson, LG, Samsung and then around 1.5 year back a Blackberry. Blackberry usage experience has been good but the handset itself is a bad experience in terms of reliability and usable life. Never seen a phone or its parts falling apart the way this Blackberry handset did.

Blackberry was out of compulsion to access corporate emails and I settled for the modest BB Curve 8520 which was purchased through the service provider Airtel. The phone felt robust in hand had a good keyboard, dedicated music buttons, rubberized grip around the phone, couple of buttons which can be customized and had decent features and easy to use.

After around 8 months of use the rubber parts on the body started feeling rough and grainy and I thought this is regular wear and tear. After few months I started seeing few cracks on it and eventually over next few months there were more of these. After a year or so the rubber material buttons started cracking and one fine day when I tried to press a button on side to turn on the data connection there was no button. The button (which is actually just part of the molded rubber part of the body) had just cracked and fallen some where. Over next week one by one all the buttons even the ones rarely used and rubber around the buttons had just vanished.

To my surprise in my office when I looked at BB curve phones used by others many of them had faced same problem and any one having a phone for more than a year typically had buttons on their phone missing. Many even had the buttons on top (three music/mute buttons) missing. Problem with missing button, you can not control volume and many other features of the phone and also water and dust can easily go inside and phone looks ugly.

See 2 buttons of right side gone and upper volume button in process of cracking and next one shows button gone.Left side one button also gone missing.

And now the Blackberry Service in India. 

When I called service center in Bangalore I was told body etc are not covered specially when it is one year old and out of warranty. I posted a message to BB India through twitter and then said they can look into it. I also posted few pictures for them to look at and informed the fact that it is not only me and many other users who have problem and it is a design issue with the kind of material and button design being used in the Curve series of phones. BB India informed that their service partner Redington will get in touch and fix problem for me.

Redington after few followups informed me they will cosmetic upgrade (change the body) on my phone in coming days but after few days informed that phone is not sold through their channel and they can not do any thing about it and will tell BB India the same. On reminding BB again they mentioned contact the service provider. They communicate through Twitter direct message and never have really looked into the issue seriously. Curve has been one of the best sellers for Blackberry but so many users have this problem due to bad design and poor choice of material. They continue to sell Curve series of phones with this design and even the newly launched model Curve 9220 uses similar rubberized button design.