To be dead honest, I'm kind of pi$$ed off at my BlackBerry right now. Yesterday, for the second time in two weeks, my BlackBerry Bold 9900 nuked itself on me.  If you're not familiar with "nuking" (my term) or "bricking" (the more popular/standard term), it refers to the BlackBerry white screen of death. Instead of your BlackBerry booting up properly, something goes wrong. You might get a JVM or App Error message, the phone might go into an endless reboot cycle, or occassionally it'll just sit there blinking red lights with the display never really turning on. Whichever way it manifests itself, I consider it nuked or bricked. Until fixed, your BlackBerry is useless.

Continue reading article

CrackBerry explains how to restore a Nuked BlackBerry

Good Afternoon Class! I’ve been a bit slack in my BlackBerry 101 lectures as of late – I blame the Smartphone Round Robin, all the Contests we’ve been running on the site and the busy Holiday Season. My apologies! This will be the last 101 lecture of the year… but we’ll be back in 2008 bigger and better than ever.

Today’s lecture isn’t really a “newbie” topic, but it’s one that I wanted to cover because in the past three weeks I’ve gone through it half a dozen times and that is Reloading the Operating System on a BlackBerry that’s totally “Nuked”. I’m not sure if nuked is the technically appropriate word for it (I also use one that starts with an F and ends in an ED and has a CK in the middle), but it is how I refer to a BlackBerry that is stuck in a permanent reboot cycle and is completely, completely unusable. With a Nuked Berry, essentially the device turns on (red LED comes on for a few seconds), then you see the white screen with the hourglass of death, and then the display shuts off, the device shuts off, a few seconds go by and then it starts up and does the same thing again and again and again (it’ll do it for hours if you let it).

Over the past year I have arrived at this Nuked Berry scenario a few different ways: from installing a BlackBerry theme that wasn’t appropriate for my device/OS version; from installing beta software that was majorily glitchy; and one time during an OS upgrade the installation failed (I think I had too many apps installed and the device ran out of memory when trying to reload the backed-up apps). And while a “battery pull” works for solving most of little glitches that may occur when using your BlackBerry from day to day, that’s not the case with a Nuked BlackBerry.

The GOOD NEWS is that this problem likely won't affect you unless you're out and about looking for trouble and you can always fix a Nuked Berry (at least from my experience!). You just need to know a couple of little tricks and have 45 minutes of free time…

Continue reading article