Bell crippling BlackBerry GPS to make more money?

Posted
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Kyle McInnes
on September 25, 2008, at 12:37 AM
in News
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Comments: 11 responses
11 Comments

Bell Crippling BlackBerry GPS

Bad news rumors are coming from BGR today, which is reporting that Bell Canada might follow the lead of Verizon Wireless and cripple GPS on select BlackBerrys. Here’s what BGR had to say:

Bell may be increasing the GPS lock time (2-10 minutes) and resolution (1-2.5KM) of Third Party applications while maintaining the speed (10-15s) and accuracy (10-25m) of their own GPS Nav program. These changes are presumably meant to force lure customers into using Bell’s crappy superior GPS Nav program instead of the built-in Blackberry Maps or the free Google Maps. You knew this was coming…

BGR states that the BlackBerry 8830, BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and BlackBerry Curve 8330 are the devices to be affected. Bell charges $10/month or $3.50/day for their GPS Navigation service, by the way. Thoughts?

(via BoyGeniusReport)

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  • Shane McKeever

    This is the MOST obnoxious thing about my 8830 with Verizon. I WILL NOT succomb to this nickel and dime tactic. The baiting of GPS in the phone description was a nice lure, but didn’t find out about this caniving issue until I got Viigo! You get ignorant hems and haws when asking a Verizon store rep why this would happen. They don’t have any idea what your talking about. I say we have all deny them of this and refuse their lowly Carrier supplied GPS services. Get with it Verizon. Open sourcing is the way!

  • Shane McKeever

    This is the MOST obnoxious thing about my 8830 with Verizon. I WILL NOT succomb to this nickel and dime tactic. The baiting of GPS in the phone description was a nice lure, but didn’t find out about this caniving issue until I got Viigo! You get ignorant hems and haws when asking a Verizon store rep why this would happen. They don’t have any idea what your talking about. I say we have all deny them of this and refuse their lowly Carrier supplied GPS services. Get with it Verizon. Open sourcing is the way!

  • http://rnickel.blogspot.com/ Ryan

    This is typical… they did the same thing with their internet. Throttled their P2P speed, then released their own online video download service. This really should be looked at by the government.

  • http://rnickel.blogspot.com/ Ryan

    This is typical… they did the same thing with their internet. Throttled their P2P speed, then released their own online video download service. This really should be looked at by the government.

  • http://rnickel.blogspot.com Ryan

    This is typical… they did the same thing with their internet. Throttled their P2P speed, then released their own online video download service. This really should be looked at by the government.

  • Pandu

    When I signed up with VZW, I asked if anything was disabled, and was told “No.” Think I’ll ever trust VZW again? No!

  • Pandu

    When I signed up with VZW, I asked if anything was disabled, and was told “No.” Think I’ll ever trust VZW again? No!

  • Richard F

    This is not really new, My 8830 on Bell here in Canada has had the GPS crippled since march of 2008. I have to have the run the “GPS Nav” before I can use anything else. Friends on telus with 8830′s have no problem using the GPS.

  • Richard F

    This is not really new, My 8830 on Bell here in Canada has had the GPS crippled since march of 2008. I have to have the run the “GPS Nav” before I can use anything else. Friends on telus with 8830′s have no problem using the GPS.

  • David

    it’s true, i updated my 8130 on bell to ver 4.5 and my accuracy went from 10 meters in seconds to 1500 meters

  • David

    it’s true, i updated my 8130 on bell to ver 4.5 and my accuracy went from 10 meters in seconds to 1500 meters