We have all had that bad day where we run our mobile phone battery deep into the red zone. It is pretty much inevitable that you will get an important call right right before you recharge it, usually while on your way back to power.  It is at this moment you witness the final exhausted effort of your battery before violently powers your phone off and puts you into a panic wondering how quickly you can  resume the call. On my BlackBerry Storm I have had the battery die on many occasions… call it failure to plan or a bad set of events.

To make things worse, RIM seems to want to punish BlackBerry users who let their batteries go completely dead.  Why does a BlackBerry plugged into a power source require the battery to get some level of an initial charge before you can start to use it again?  Every time it happens I imagined Mike Lazaridis (RIM Co-CEO) shaking his finger at me saying, “Go sit in timeout and next time don’t let your battery run down so low!”

Here is my thing, I have no issue that the phone powers off when the battery dies. This is an earned result of my failure to charge in a timely fashion. My issue, however,  is that once I plug my BlackBerry in it, it refuses to power on.  It makes me wait until the batter reaches a minimum level of charge first.  Keep in mind we are talking about the slowest booting mobile phone known to man. No other phone that I have owned refuses to boot when plugged in to power because the battery is too low.

I assume there is a logical reason to require the battery to reach a specific charge level prior to power on, but, why is the BlackBerry the only smartphone that seems like it hasn’t gotten past this hurdle?  Regardless of the situation, on any other phone, you can quickly get to a power source, power on, and return the call if your battery dies.  The pain and frustration of having my BlackBerry refusing, like a whinny bit##, to power on is enough to ignite your temper. But, to add insult to injury, the slow boot time on the BlackBerry assures a 15 min break in your important call pushing you over the edge.

I know, I know… I should just break down and buy a  portable battery pack.  There really is no reason, though, that your BlackBerry won’t power on as soon as you plug it it.