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RANT! RIM Needs To Put a Limit on Carrier Homescreen Shortcuts

by Ronen Halevy on Apr 21st, 2009 at 3:00 pm EST
28 Comments »
 

This has really started to get out of hand. A year ago when I registered a new BlackBerry on AT&T I received about 13 homescreen shortcuts promoting AT&T applications. Now a year later I just received yet another 10 homescreen shortcuts that I really could do without. At least this time AT&T had the decency to put 8 out of the 10 in the downloads folder but they are really starting to piss me off! You cannot delete these homescreen shortcuts without removing the service book which keeps coming back. You can hide them but if you un-hide in the future you will have to scroll through these unwanted links.

Just look at the latest 10 homescreen shortcuts AT&T has pushed out:

mediamall[1]

  1. AT&T Mall
  2. Brain Challenge Vol 2
  3. Make-UR-Tones
  4. MobiTV
  5. Music Videos
  6. My-Cast Weather
  7. PAC-MAN by Namco
  8. Scrabble
  9. Tetris
  10. WikiMobile

Seriously AT&T! Was this really necessary? This is on top of the 13 icons you have already pushed out to my device!

  1. AT&T Navigator
  2. Cellular Video
  3. Shop Applications
  4. Shop Games
  5. Shop Multimedia
  6. Shop Themes
  7. Shop Graphics
  8. Shop Tones
  9. Shop Music
  10. Music Apps
  11. MusicID
  12. XM Radio
  13. Yellow Pages.com Mobile

RIM really needs to get a handle on these homescreen shortcuts. Its bad enough that RIM promotes them so much but letting carriers just push out as many as they want and never expiring them is just getting ridiculous. I now have 23 hidden AT&T homescreen icons on my device! When will it end?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 and is filed under Rant.
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28 Comments to “RANT! RIM Needs To Put a Limit on Carrier Homescreen Shortcuts”

  1. Posted by: Paul
    April 21, 2009 at 3:08 pm EST

    I just hide them. They don’t take up much space.

  2. Posted by: David H
    April 21, 2009 at 3:24 pm EST

    I agree on that one. That is one of my biggest gripes about the blackberry. AT&T seems to be crazy about what is send out though. But I will take the links to the MobiTV and My-Cast Weather!

  3. Posted by: Nikolaus Walch
    April 21, 2009 at 3:41 pm EST

    I have had Sprint Treo and SamsungACE and Sprint does the same BS on them. I have had two T-Mo BlackBerrys and T-Mo does NOT do this BS. They have 2-3 Max of these, and you can just hide them. I prefer T-Mo’s 3 over AT&T’s 13 :P

  4. Posted by: KMan
    April 21, 2009 at 3:44 pm EST

    I totally agree. On Rogers, only a couple carrier-specific apps come down but even this is irritating.

    Overall, I don’t think that the carriers are good at adding value to blackberry services. They should leave this up to RIM (and 3rd party apps) and instead focus on certifying and publishing OS updates faster (is anyone from Telus listening?).

  5. Posted by: rand0m
    April 21, 2009 at 3:58 pm EST

    Ronen, check out maxmem for the blackberry. I’ve used it and removed up to 7mb of space. Might not clear out all of it, but it’ll help with some junk.

  7. Posted by: Jason "VerSe" Anderson
    April 21, 2009 at 4:01 pm EST

    SEEE I know I wasn’t the only one. Those exact icons out of no where popped up on my Bold one day and I was like what the hell lol

  8. Posted by: Zach
    April 21, 2009 at 4:04 pm EST

    Better than hiding them in my opinion would be to just move them to another folder…

  9. Posted by: Chris
    April 21, 2009 at 4:14 pm EST

    I agree! Sending these links to our phones is SPAM. Yes you can hide them (I put the all in one folder named ‘fuck spam’) but when you pay $500+ for a phone, plus the monthly services, you should have total control over it!

    Is their anyway we can complain to RIM? Apple does not allow At&t to send spam to the iphone.

  10. Posted by: A.J.
    April 21, 2009 at 4:29 pm EST

    I just put them all into folders to clean it up.

  11. Posted by: Luis Merlos
    April 21, 2009 at 4:37 pm EST

    Swith to tmobile haha I just hope they don’t follow on their steps that would suck all the icons I have from them is myfavs and tmobile web :)

  12. Posted by: lamar
    April 21, 2009 at 5:01 pm EST

    and they need to f2%King release the bb maps to all that damm crap

  13. Posted by: blake
    April 21, 2009 at 5:48 pm EST

    I’ve got AT&T, but the only one I’ve gotten since I got my BB is the yellow pages. (I’ve also got the shop and AT&T Navigator, Cellular Video, Music Apps, and MusicID icons). Why would I not get the new ones? Just curious, definitely not saying I want them!

  14. Posted by: dbltap
    April 21, 2009 at 5:50 pm EST

    I make up a folder called “AT&T CRAP” I move all these stupid shortcuts to this trash folder…. and then HIDE IT. Never have to see them again.

    • Posted by: Ronen Halevy
      April 21, 2009 at 5:57 pm EST

      The problem is that due to RIM’s brilliant design you cannot hide folders of crap… Nor can you put a folder into another folder… At least on my Bold.

      Now I put it in my applications folder and hide them. Problem is that I hide some other applications that I need only every blue moon like the search app. Then I have to dig through 23 icons of AT&T crap…

    • Posted by: alex
      April 21, 2009 at 7:16 pm EST

      that is exactly what i do.

  15. Posted by: Luciano
    April 21, 2009 at 10:26 pm EST

    Hiding doesn’t cut it. If you’re the type who changes themes often (Hi, Vicky) the folders, order of icons and hidden/unhidden stuff will get reset all the time. Nightmare!

    I’ve been with two Brazilian carriers and none of them does any of that. I’d be really mad if they began to push those stupid icons on me.

  16. Posted by: alb123
    April 22, 2009 at 12:38 am EST

    Does this only happen on Bold devices? I would be extremely pi$$ed, to say the least, if they were doing that to my memory challenged Curve. I’m on Verizon, thankfully, in this instance. I’ve not had to experience this spam. Unbelievable!

  17. Posted by: impak875
    April 22, 2009 at 2:30 am EST

    I feel a little shafted… I have the 13 on the bottom, but how in the world did you manage to grab those games??? I’ll take the Pacman, Scrabble, and Brain Challenge… LOL

    Does anyone know how I can get those games??? Will I need to reload my OS??

  18. Posted by: JerryD
    April 22, 2009 at 6:41 am EST

    Hey – have you looked at your Address Book lately? Try filtering it view the category “AT&T Services”.

    What’s that? You didn’t create that category? And you didn’t enter 9 entries – ALL WITH THE SAME NAME?

    What’s that? You have THREE COPIES of them?

    Talk about shoving it down!!!!

  19. Posted by: JerryD
    April 22, 2009 at 6:45 am EST

    BTW – I found hiding them to be almost as much of a pain as having them there. I created a FOLDER called Hidden and moved them all into there – along with the other icons I don’t need like all the email icons, Address Book, Calendar…

    Use Home Screen Shortcuts!
    http://forums.pinstack.com/blog.php?bt=2323

  20. Posted by: JoeA
    April 22, 2009 at 8:51 am EST

    When I got all these new icons, I called AT&T CS. They said it wasn’t them and it was impossible, I had to have d/l’ed them. Yeah, like I would d/l AT&T Mall! They connected me with RIM CS. They said the same thing and that I should do a master reset to get rid of them. Now I find out it IS them.

    Both Customer Services have no idea what they are doing. Regardless of who small they are, they take up vaulable space on MY phone and I can’t get rid of them. What did I spend all this money for?

  21. Posted by: Brandon
    April 22, 2009 at 11:09 am EST

    Completely agree. Definitely out of hand. Whenever I get a new theme, I end up with all of these annoying icons! I immediately create a folder called “AT&T Cr@p”, shove them all in there and hide the folder.

  22. Posted by: DavidB
    April 22, 2009 at 11:31 am EST

    I am glad Verizon doesn’t do this and sure hope they don’t follow ATT lead.
    100% agree this is spam.

  23. Posted by: Michael
    May 22, 2009 at 9:19 am EST

    I used to go to IU, and I have a story for you. 21(or so?) years ago, IU approached Borland, the people that made Ami Pro (word processor) and Quattro (spreadsheet) and some other office apps. They wanted free copies for the students to learn on.

    Borland said, “Oh, He||, no!”

    So IU went to Microsoft, and they said, “Here, free, spread them around.”

    Who knows? If Borland wasn’t so stingy, maybe the desktop standard would be Ami Pro and Quattro Pro.