As a very late adopter of RIM’s Blackberry services, I was just settling down to get high on the proverbial “Crackberry”. Alas, this is not going to be and already, buyer’s remorse is already setting in.

It started out with the usual delay in getting the BIS service enabled on my ergonomically friendly albeit cheap Blackberry Curve 8520. It took calls to a personal friend in Nigeria’s Glo to hasten the process.

Secondly, the grass is definitely not greener elsewhere. Blackberry Internet services is just as slow as other Internet packages. The major reason I settled for the non-3G Blackberry 8520. 3G is almost non existent anyway.

At N2,800 ($18) per month, BIS full monthly subscription on Glo mobile network in Nigeria is still expensive. Unfortunately, the crippled variants of the BIS packages being offered by Glo just do not fit the bill for me. The N1400 ($9) per month “comonth-single email account” option is definitely not good enough.

But I guess the greatest spoiler is the Blackberry outage that took the best of 3 days to resolve. Expectedly, I was quick in putting all the blame on Glo’s doorstep. Glo was however also quick in dissociating itself with the text message it sent out to its subscribers;

Dear subscriber, RIM is presently experiencing some technical issues which affects all carriers in Europe, Middle East & Africa. This has led to temporary BlackBerry service disruption. Full services will be restored as soon as RIM resolves the issues.Glo!

So much for getting high on crackberry!

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.