December 15 & 16:
In the midst of my pozole making adventure, my daughter, technical goddess in training, thought she bricked her Blackberry by typing the wrong password too many times. I watched as she scoured the internet for the technical support number to see how she can fix it. She called technical support and they suggested she download the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager to restore her contacts. Unfortunately, she never synced her Blackberry to the desktop and since she uses Yahoo instead of Gmail, she lost everything on her phone except the pictures she saved to the microSD card.

After several calls to tech support and no success, she looked up the address to the cell phone store and asked if we can bring her phone in because only they would be able to restore the operating system. Her phone screen looked somewhat like the phone in the picture. The error message said something about the JVM and to reset it, if you select reset it just brings you back to this page. I told her I can fix her phone, so she left it behind for me to fix with a clear look of doubt in her eyes.

The day was consumed by making pozole so I didn’t get a chance to work on her phone until she got home. I downloaded the latest version of Blackberry Desktop Manager to my netbook. Once I launched Blackberry Desktop Manager, I plugged in her phone and selected the application loader. In about 5 minutes, I had her phone booting up and going through the setup process. The reason I didn’t help her until she asked was because I liked watching her take the initiative to fix her Blackberry on her own.I want her to get in the habit o taking the initiative to solve her own problems. It was also nice to see her try to solve the problem herself without asking for help until she exhausted all her options. My daughters’ most recent Facebook status, “well my mom is amazing! 😀 she fixed my phone!”. Didn’t she read my post about getting my Nextel Blackberry to work on Boost? 


I also told her she needed to get a Gmail account and use Google Sync to backup her contacts over the air or she would need to back her phone up to the computer so she doesn’t need to request all her contacts from her friends if that should happen to her phone again. If you lose your Blackberry OS in the future, here the instructions on how to get it back yourself.

To restore Blackberry OS:

1. Download Blackberry Desktop Manager (North America link)

• Select PC or Mac download

Plug in Blackberry using he USB cable which shipped with your phone

Select Application Loader

• This will check to see what is loaded on your Blackberry
• It will have checkmarks for the the bare minimum, I added Blackberry Messenger, Maps, etc.

Once it’s done loading the operating system and any additional application you’ve selected, it will bring you to the home page and let you go through the setup process like when you first got your phone out of the box.