I tried to order a BB Bold from Orange this morning and was told that due to compatibility problems, it would be several weeks before they were available. I've gone with an 8820 instead with the offer of an upgrade later.

I tested the Bold for the carrier I work for a few weeks ago and after a morning's surfing the browser stopped responding to any clicks on URLs. Reboot didnt' help, had to do a master reset before it started working again.

I have my bold for almost one month and it works perfectly with the latest firmware available.

I do not have any video issues (I test it several times but I did not watch a full movie on it though).

Very good device.

I have had the Bold crash on o2 but it was while playing a game... on the first day! It was an interesting fault in that the screen started flashing on and off, and then the keys were non-responding so it was a drop the battery out job. Worrying, but not a big concern.... yet!

... On Orange and not a single software bug. Battery life is very good too despite heavy use every day.

Just spoke to my friend who runs a large city centre Orange shop and Orange have simply run out of stock in virtually all their stores and the RIM UK distributor appears to be diverting most new stock to the latest carrier roll out (Vodafaone). He wasn't aware of any major alarm bells over software or stock withdrawals because of it. Plus the Orange online shop is notoriously crap at managing it's stock and handset availability, let's not forget that fact.

Whether that is Orange not telling the whole truth to their store managers I can't say, but the mobile phone store business is very incestuous and the neighbouring Vodafone manager had bragged his company has gotten first dibs on the latest UK stocks of the Bold.

Whether those are the key facts and not those in the article I don't know. It's just what I was told. But it seems odd that I can't find a single Bold user with problems and there are about 25 in my organisation using Orange handsets. Me included.

...on my earlier comment about maybe it just been stock shortages. Looks like Orange do indeed have an official statement due for release about the withdrawal of the Bold due to quality issues.

It's not just Orange who are having problems with Bold - not a single US carrier has yet released the device, citing "testing issues".

And if this is happening with Bold, which is basically a 8800 with aircon and electric windows, what about the upcoming Storm, the first BB with touchscreen etc? I do hope RIM and carriers have done their homework, otherwise there'll be much crowing over in Cupertino.

I have the Bold on O2 and it works fine for normal use except the Sim Access Profile (SAP) which just will not work properly and RIM won't help and O2 can't as the phone is too new for them.

Let's hope that some new OS patches also fix the battery life as well.