Etisalat upgrade ‘kills’ BlackBerrys in UAE

BlackBerry customers in the UAE are furious after a software upgrade issued by Etisalat yesterday significantly reduced the battery life of their devices.

“The problem came up when they sent a new batch to enhance the performance but instead they have killed all blackberry batteries by activating a process inside the phone which empties the battery in less than an hour if not charged,” complained a frustrated BlackBerry customer in the country who wished to remain anonymous.

“All our company employees who installed this batch file has been affected. They claim they are working on it, and the time frame to send a fix is said to be 7 days,” our source added.

Another Etisalat help centre agent gave a completely different response - advising affected customers to charge their device for three hours and then remove the battery without switching the device off. Once kept aside for five minutes, the battery should then be placed back into the device and left to power on automatically.

There’s no word yet on whether this is an effective solution or if Etisalat intends to eventually send out a fix for the faulty upgrade.

Both Etisalat and RIM were not available for comment at the time of writing.