[bedris]

90% of BlackBerry users will never change the battery on their device. 100% of BlackBerries have a stupid door on the back which allows you to remove the battery and eventually becomes very loose and slides off.

True, but it was sometimes the only way you could do a hard reboot on those things!

[georgespencer]

Oh god don't remind me. You'd hear a notification for a text message, unlock the device and you'd see

> JAVA MESSAGE ERROR

Which required removing the battery to do a hard reset (which took about 120 seconds).

[KeyBoardG]

I used to have an auto-reboot app that scheduled hard resets to free memory and reduce crashes. So glad to be off that platform now.

[eddieroger]

I thought there was an OS feature that did that. I remember scheduling a reboot nightly at 3am. I loved that phone at the time, but hate it in hindsight.

[hinathan]

So pulling the battery becomes a crutch for the RIM software team. No need to do a more elegant watchdog timer or properly trap Java errors. Just pull the battery!

[ConstantineXVI]

To be fair, that strategy worked pretty well for Unix:

>We went to lunch afterward, and I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'"[0]

[0]http://www.multicians.org/unix.html