BlackBerry 10 Charging Foibles

Posted: February 4, 2014 | Categories: BlackBerry

If you've been reading around here you should know that I love BlackBerry, but BlackBerry 10 is really starting to annoy me. For all of BlackBerry's focus on quality and design, I'm find BlackBerry 10 to be really, really hard to use on a day to day basis. So many of the things I loved about BlackBerry just aren't in BlackBerry 10 and I'm finding the UX to be…klunky.

I went out of town this weekend to hang out with some friends. I have a BlackBerry Z30 device, and it has a HUGE battery, so I expected to get a whole day's use out of it, but no go. Around 7 PM, after starting the day with a full charge, the battery was on its last legs.

Fortunately for me, the folks at Adobe gave me a free USB battery at PhoneGap Day 2013, so I pulled it out in order to give myself a boost. I only got a few minutes out of the battery, but that's not what I'm here to talk to you about.

As the battery started to lose its charge, the warning shown in the figure below started to appear. Not a big deal, I like being notified that I'm running low on juice. The problem is that I couldn't get the darn thing to go away.

Here's what happened, I was trying to charge the device, but my USB battery was out of juice itself. So, the BlackBerry knew it was connected to a power source of some kind, but since it wasn't getting any juice itself, it threw up that warning. It would display for a while, go away for a few seconds then immediately come back – over and over again. The problem is that it's really hard to use the device with this message constantly popping up and going away. The touch screen is essentially unusable as long as this behavior continues.

I was trying to meet some friends and my battery dying and this stupid continuous warning was really annoying. I finally figured out that when I unplugged the USB battery, the message would go away and I could again use the device. Ugh.

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