My company issue cell phone

I am not going to tell you the type of phone I have. I 'm sure some people will be able to figure it out.
I hate my new cell phone. I have been using a company issue cell phone since 1997. I do NOT have a personal cell phone.
We started with a Nextel phone, which back in the day (the late 90's) the performance was a bit spotty, but GREATLY improved over the next couple of years. My company bought over 300 phones for our employees (btw, I'm in the CATV industry) so they could call in or talk to others with the awesome direct connect that Nextel offered. All was nice.

Eventually I was upgraded to a Blackberry on the Nextel system, and all was even nicer than nice, I could get my email (filtered through the easy to set up blackberry webpage) and I was happy. I get anywhere from 600-1000 emails a day, only what was required (about 15% of those) made it to my Blackberry, and that was what I needed to stay on top of my job. If my battery started going bad on the Blackberry, I just replaced it with a new one. Piece of cake. Phone lasted at least 1 1/2 days on one charge, never ran out of battery power. My new phone is sealed, no battery replacement allowed.

Fast forward to 2009. Some boneheaded salesperson gave my boss a new phone for a trial, and he thought it was awesome, so now we switched to a new phone. Its a different provider, and we won't get into that, but Verizon sucks in my area, and I was now forced to put an access point in my house connected to my broadband connection to have phone service at my house. I do not live in a rural area, and I can't get an answer from Verizon why my signal sucks.With Nextel I had full bars, but that is just the first problem I encountered with this new phone. Now I'm paying more electricity (no matter how small it is) so my cell phone works at home.

Now for my second problem:
If I use my new state of the art touchscreen cellphone on wi-fi at my house (or anyone's house,) the wi-fi for the rest of the house stops functioning. This has happened at 14 different houses that I have visited so far, and a couple of my friends will not allow my to bring this thing into their house any longer, including my wife.

Now for the third problem:
Battery life is abysmal. I NEED to charge it in my car or it dies. Now this is interesting: I have tried charging this thing in at least 7 (there are probably more) vehicles, with the charger supplied with the phone, and in each vehicle, the FM reception goes away! I get nothing but fuzz. Disconnecting the phone from the charger, and my fm reception comes back.

Now, on to email:
What a joke. On my blackberry, I could set up filters to allow what I needed to get though (most are from my monitoring system, I maintain a docisis modem system for a decent sized MSO). Well, with this new phone, I am unable to filter messages, so all of my messages come though. That isn't that terrible part, but what is the terrible part is that to delete old messages, you must delete them one at a time. Now granted, you may be able to delete up to 4 at a time on a screen. Try to do that when you have 600 messages to delete every morning. On my blackberry, I could click messages, and click delete prior and it would delete everything from yesterday out. 2 clicks instead of 500 clicks. Awesome, what a way to start my day!

Oh yeah, I have a java enabled 'status page' for work that I wrote that at a glance will show me the overall status of all the cable modems I maintain. Guess what, this new fruity phone I have does not allow java!
I have tried to vent this to my boss, but he is infatuated with this thing, and he won't hear it, so I had to vent somewhere, and the rant section here seems like a good place.
Can anyone guess what kind of phone I'm stuck with? I think I left enough hints.

snrRog

reply to post by snrRog


so i take it you love your IPhone. My girlfriend had one when we started dating. I let her play with my Android phone and she's never went back to Icrap.

I guess it didn't take long to figure that out! I really cannot fathom the infatuation with this phone. It is an Iphone4. I also have a problem with 'the cloud'. Why does all of my information have to be stored where I have no control of it? I tried to shut off 'the cloud' on my phone, and my email stopped working. I'm really tempted to jailbreak the thing so I at least have some control over it, but not sure how my company would deal with that.
There are just too many things that I have no control over that actually make it uncomfortable for me to carry.

snrRog

Originally posted by snrRog
I guess it didn't take long to figure that out! I really cannot fathom the infatuation with this phone. It is an Iphone4. I also have a problem with 'the cloud'. Why does all of my information have to be stored where I have no control of it? I tried to shut off 'the cloud' on my phone, and my email stopped working. I'm really tempted to jailbreak the thing so I at least have some control over it, but not sure how my company would deal with that.
There are just too many things that I have no control over that actually make it uncomfortable for me to carry.

snrRog

edit on 6/30/2012 by snrRog because: (no reason given)

As soon as you said "Battery is sealed, no replacing" and "fruity phone" then it was pretty obvious.

I've had an iPhone since they came out and yes, it has its problems, but all phones do. I had an HTC Pure before my current iPhone and after my previous iPhone had died (which was my doing, dropped into water by accident), I was so mad at the HTC phone by the time I got my new iPhone that I took it out into the desert and used it for target practice. Haha, now it sits on my desk with a few bullet holes in it.

Idk why your boss ever thought it would be a good "work" phone though... I have the same problem with email, and not running flash & java is a pain in the ass, but it's not "mission critical" for me to do so. I take it 'jailbreaking' your phone is not an option?

reply to post by ArrowsNV


I'm not sure how the boss would take to jailbreaking. I'd probably have to do it on the sly. I know its quite easy to do it now, with the one-click method, and have read a bit about it. I have a feeling I will probably do it one of those days where the thing really ticks me off. :-)

I was told to use 'Imap' for the email. What a joke that is. I lost several very important emails by doing so.
I really do believe anymore that jailbreaking is my only option, just need to get the courage up to potentially trash my phone.

Does anyone have any jailbreaking tips?

snrRog

Originally posted by snrRog
reply to post by ArrowsNV

 

I'm not sure how the boss would take to jailbreaking. I'd probably have to do it on the sly. I know its quite easy to do it now, with the one-click method, and have read a bit about it. I have a feeling I will probably do it one of those days where the thing really ticks me off. :-)

I was told to use 'Imap' for the email. What a joke that is. I lost several very important emails by doing so.
I really do believe anymore that jailbreaking is my only option, just need to get the courage up to potentially trash my phone.

Does anyone have any jailbreaking tips?

snrRog

edit on 6/30/2012 by snrRog because: (no reason given)

I haven't jailbroken my phone recently, so I'm not 100% sure on the process these days. But I had done it with my other two older model iPhones and found it was pretty easy.

If I were you, I would bring the issue of the whole "phone making your life almost a living hell" up with your boss and see if he/she would mind you jailbreaking it. I don't see why it would be a problem (unless your boss is the type of person that would suck Apples you-kno-what if corporations had genitalia ).

And I have always been able to reinstall iOS after having the phone jailbroken, so I'm guessing you'd have to be pretty tech-retarded to brick the thing...

Originally posted by snrRog


Does anyone have any jailbreaking tips?

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