This is not what you want to see when you’re travelling and thousands of miles away from a corporate helpdesk with the ability to swap out the device.

I’ve always stood by BlackBerry (and learnt to live with ridicule from my peers!). I want a device with a QWERTY keyboard and I still maintain that for business use,the BlackBerry can’t be beaten – it’s just not cool. And cool counts for a lot.

My principle concern was the potential loss of my personal content and photos (OK, hand’s up, I hadn’t backed it up for months). Luckily a colleague pointed me to some third-party work-arounds (big thanks to this post on Crackberry.com which worked like a charm), and I was able to save the device when I returned home the week later.

My 9900 has been robust and a trusted travel companion for a couple of years. It’s not always the fastest or slickest kid on the block, but always reliable. This issue was more than inconvenient and the result of some corrupted files (please, someone explain how a file spontaneously ‘corrupts’…..).

Has it knocked my [previoulsy] unwavering confidence in BlackBerry? Unfortunately yes.

However, given the fact that I had to use an Android [touchscreen] smartphone as a replacement for the remainder of the trip, I am more convinced than ever that I’ll always be a QWERTY keyboard fan!