[mickwilson]

Hi all,

First post on this forum - I just wanted to get some overall feeling for the new 9900.

I bought one of these for a collegue about ten days ago SIM free from a BBY distributor in the UK. The phone fired up fine and I enterprise activated it for our BES system. Activation work right away, but after a while the handset stopped getting email, BBY tech support eventually solved this. My collegue then reported he was getting a lot of dropped calls and no service problems on the phone - other BBY users travelling with him had no issues. After running lots of diagnostics on the phone we found the follwing:
1) When handset was lying flat on the desk signal strength was -71dB
2) When held in the hand (ie attempting to make a call) signal strength dropped to -95dB
3) Attempting to make a call when you had full signal when lying flast was ok, but at 1/2 signal or worse when lying flat then the call success was marginal. This "fault" was rock solid.

I checked the OS build on the handset and it was the current one available.

So another call to BBY tech support, and after doing the same tests with them we had the same result, they refuted that there was any issue with signal strength or signal quality with the new 9900 and said it was a faulty handset.

A lot of messing on the phone about managed to get us a new 9900 from the distributor (well done Avenir UK) delivered to my collegue last Saturday morning before he left for Singapore. I got the handset BES activated for him and off he went to Asia.
I got a call last night to say the new handset was doing exactly the same thing as the old one - DOHHHH!

Has anyone else seen this problem, and if so know of a fix?

Regards,

Mick

[stevew]

You know - I'm thinking it has to do with the damn metal bezel around the edge of the unit. Wanna bet that if you use a protective case that problem goes away? Metal conducts / blocks signal and probably lowers the effective radiated output from the phone's radios; all three of them. Why don't you tell your user to install a case that completely isolates their hand from the bezel or have they already got one on there? Something tells me no...but please report back here to let everyone know! If I'm right, you're good to go!

EDIT: I just removed my case and put the phone flat on a glass desk. Here are the results tested consistently over 3 minutes.

1) NO CASE - Status shows -77dbm - not touching the phone
2) NO CASE - Status shows -86dbm - with my hand touching the phone on three sides.
3) WITH CASE - Status shows -77dbm - not touching the phone
4) WITH CASE - Status shows -77dbm - with my hand touching the phone on three sides.

The phone sat in the exact same place through each test. It's not exactly scientific, but you can see what happens here. WiFi produces similar results.

Bottom line - this phone has to be isolated from the body touching the metal bezel IMO. I think given even weaker signal, the results would skew even worse resulting in lost/dropped calls.

[mickwilson]

Thanks Steve - I'll ask him to give it a go.
He bought himself a new 9900 handset in Singapore, so I'll get a more "scientific" comparison of the two phones when he gets back.

Regards,

Mick