Friday, September 28, 2012

Playbook to PC connection is broken

This seems to be an "Elephant in the room"! Nobody on the Blackberry forums, including Crackberry, seem to come to this conclusion.

I know that I had this working before on many computers in the past, but when I tried to configure a new computer so that I could transfer video onto my Playbook for an upcoming trip, the PB refused to show up in Windows Explorer.

Before it was very simple. All I did was connect the PB to the computer using a USB cable and allowed the drivers and software to install. A drive automatically appeared in Windows Explorer. I quickly established THAT I DID NOT NEED BLACKBERRY DESKTOP SOFTWARE, all I needed was the BB Device Manager. This small (although I think fundamental fact) is ignored by all that I could find on the forums.

So how did I find a solution?

I did find one, on the Crackberry forum. The solution/workaround (I will not say it is the answer as I think that RIM have truly broken this!) was provided by Bronco26. The date of the post was 2 Sep 2012, which brings me to another pet peeve, in that when you search for a problem you are then faced with determining if the post is current and whether your problem is a new one. You can clearly see the date of this post. My work-around was in the mapping of the Playbook by determination of the network name and making a mapping in Windows Explorer manually. Bronco26 explains how to do this so I will not repeat it.

However, this is not the solution, the BB to PC connectivity is BROKEN! I cannot see how RIM (or anyone else) expects users to do this. I did not have to so this before and I certainly don't have these problems with my iPads.

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