How operators are standing in BlackBerry's way

BlackBerry has a lot of hurdles to cross to stage a comeback but one in particular might be especially tough to overcome: the operators.

I recently started using the BlackBerry Z10 as my primary phone. Allow me to explain: I had been using an Android phone, the Motorola Atrix. After about a year, it became almost useless. I could make phone calls on it but little else. Email synched randomly, although almost never with my Outlook account. Sometimes I couldn't establish a data connection on the cellular network at all. It took ages to even open an app.

I'm too cheap to buy a new phone before my contract is up -- in June -- so I decided to switch to a BlackBerry Z10, a cast-off that a friend had given me.

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The process of getting started didn't bode well.

On my previous phone I'd been syncing contacts with AT&T's address book service so I could easily import them to a new phone. I checked the supported phones list on AT&T's site, where the Z10 is clearly listed.

However, it became pretty obvious the service isn't actually supported for the Z10. To get started, AT&T says to open the AT&T address book app on the phone. The app wasn't preloaded so I went to the BlackBerry store and searched. No luck.

So I called AT&T support and was given a URL to visit where I was told I could download the app directly. However, that URL displays a message saying that my browser isn't supported (it doesn't actually even render quite right -- see image to the right).

After talking to a manager, the customer support person I spoke with apologized and suggested I visit an AT&T store where they could manually transfer my contacts. She issued a $30 credit to my account for the trouble.

It's not the first time I've had to load contacts into a phone manually, so frankly it's not the end of the world to me. But it's a bad sign for BlackBerry, which will need operator support if it wants to be successful. We saw how important operators were for Microsoft, which struggled at the launch of Windows Phone when operators weren't pushing the phones in their stores.

Of course, operator support isn't the only issue facing BlackBerry. The other biggest one is lack of apps. The store is woefully incomplete even for someone like me who isn't a huge app user.

It's a shame, really, because it turns out I like the phone much more than I thought I would.

via Odienk News copy copy http://#