SOME Telstra customers have been forced to hold off their purchasing decisions while the telco and Research in Motion solve technical problems with the new 3G BlackBerry Bold.
Telstra has been touting its smartphone credentials by claiming to be the first telco in Australia to make the Bold available to enterprise and government users.
Some units were distributed to a select few on August 18, with Telstra Business Group managing director Deena Shiff saying the product offered "unprecedented functionality and performance".
"The Bold combines everything business people love about the traditional BlackBerry email experience, with great graphics, streaming video, a sharp display and the ability to download, view and edit documents in a matter of seconds," Ms Shiff said.
Recycling giant Visy, one of Telstra's BlackBerry corporate clients, was not on the telco's early adopter list as it wants to wait for the bugs to be ironed out before making any replacement decisions.
According to Visy infrastructure manager Michael Krull, the company was keen to test the new Bold and submitted a request to its corporate provider.
Visy has about 600 pre-Bold BlackBerrys in its corporate stable. "We asked Telstra for some BlackBerry Bold units to trial but apparently there are some bugs.
"They asked us to wait for the next release of the firmware. Telstra didn't go into detail but we've been asked to wait until September," Mr Krull said.
Telstra said the Bold itself was not buggy and other customers had been happy to use the Bold.
"RIM is developing a software upgrade to optimise media streaming on the device," Telstra spokesman Peter Taylor said.
"This free firmware upgrade is around the corner and a handful of customers have chosen to wait for this before rolling out the new BlackBerry Bold to their teams.
"At this stage, a few thousand devices have been distributed to selected customers, who are aware of the forthcoming software upgrade," Mr Taylor said.
The Bold's other features were working well, he said.
"On Monday last week, Telstra became the first Australian carrier to start distributing the BlackBerry Bold to selected business customers as part of an early seeding program.
"All the services our customers are used to on their BlackBerry, such as email, phone and web browsing are performing well," Mr Taylor said.
RIM, Bold's manufacturer, says there's nothing wrong with the Bold. "The BlackBerry Bold has not experienced any issues with bugs at all. All four local carriers will be launching the product, Telstra and Optus both currently have the product available in the marketplace," a RIM Australia spokesperson said.
"It's very common for different carriers and networks to have specific requirements for software. Handset manufacturers then tailor software specifically for a network or a carrier."
Telstra will have to stave off competition from Optus, which began selling the Bold at its retail outlets last Monday as well.
So far, Optus has not had any negative feedback about the Bold.
An Optus spokeswoman said: "We've been selling the Bold to enterprise, small and medium businesses and consumers since August 18, two days earlier than planned, and we've had no issues at all."
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