BlackBerry Curve 8330 slow after Verizon pushed Bing
Feb 8, 2010 Cell Phones, Technology, Work
We recently just upgraded our BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to version 5 service pack 1. Shortly after that time our Curve users started complaining about how slow their devices were going. We knew the issue would not be application related as applications are not allowed to be installed on these phones. The only way to resolve the issue for a short period of time was to do a battery pull. Today while looking into the situation again I noticed that when on the main Applications screen the Bing icon would show/hide itself automatically without touching anything on the phone. The phone would take a long time to move the trackball and it was a challenge getting the right icon on the home screen due to this icon showing/hiding itself. After doing some poking around I found that there was a Bing service book that once deleted seems to resolve the issue. After talking with Verizon about this there they suggested that the service book get deleted and that there is no long term fix for this issue at this time. The tech support representative stated that there is a good chance that Verizon would just push the service book back out again.
How to delete Bing service book:
- Go to your main Applications screen by pressing the BlackBerry button next to the green answer button
- Find the Options menu. On the BB Dimension themes this icon is a small wrench. On the default Verizon screen it is a gray box with green, red and blue sliders.
- Select Advanced Options from the Options menu
- Select Service Book which is towards the bottom of this menu
- Then find the Bing VPL [BrowserConfig] service book. Press the BlackBerry button on the phone to bring up the menu and then select Delete.
This should resolve the phone speed issue along with removing the Bing icon from the main Applications screen until Verizon pushes that service book back out.
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Tags: Bing, BlackBerry, Verizon
March 16th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Exact same problem here. We primarily have 8830s and 9630s.
Deleting the Bing VPL service book appears to be the best fix. Couple of other things we have tried is hide the icon (still causes the berry to be very slow at times, like 30 seconds to respond to a pressed key) and just click the Bing icon and let it install what it wants to install.
One thing I should mention is that our devices were not slow and the Bing icon was not playing this hide and seek game before we upgraded to SP1 MR1. We upgraded from noSP MR2 to SP1 MR1 end of February and by then Verizon had already pushed the Bing icon to most of our berries.
Also the Bing icon does not play the hide-n-seek game on my personal berry that is not attached to any BES server. My personal blackberry (also a 8830) is not slow either.
I’ve called RIM a couple of times on this. Both times they maintained that they have had no reports of the Bing icon causing any problems or causing the berries to act slow.
They recommended looking at the following IT policies:
* page 37 – Enable WAP Config IT policy rule
* page 70 – Allow Application Download Services IT policy rule Page 198
* page 198 – Allow Other Browser Services IT policy rule
The second one looks promising but that would kill our ability to push apps as well.
Still looking for a better, centrally deployable solution than having to recall all 400 blackberries.
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:28 am
Welcome to round 2 of this problem. Verizon is apparently pushing VZNavigator now. We got that pushed to a bunch of 9630 devices.
At first glance it looks like as soon as one unlocks the screen, the blackberry has to communicate with Verizon for something. If the user is not in an area where he/she has coverage, that seems to freeze the blackberry until the blackberry can talk to Verizon. Users in the underground metro this morning had this problem. Took a couple of people around 10 minutes just to get to a usable screen after unlocking the blackberry.