I am writing to you with a feeling of great accomplishment following a successful surgery on my BlackBerry as I take yet another stride towards being technologically self sufficient.  The past few months have had some hairy moments as far as my BlackBerry is concerned and I decided that rather than just let my BB die a slow and horrible death, I would learn a bit more about how to do some upkeep, both with software and hardware, myself. 

This all started with the catastrophe that was the leak of BBM 5.0.  There I was minding my own business.  I had heard about the “leak” of BBM 5.0 and had made the decision that I wasn’t going to give in to all the hype.  I wanted to wait for RIM to release it "for real".  I firmly believe that “leaks” of software are not accidental.  A company like RIM will work on a piece of software and rather than spending a ton of testing time in their own labs, they release it to the masses “purely by accident” and let the thousands of guinea pigs sound off in forums and on message boards about what the love and hate.  This gives them the opportunity to fix whatever the general populous cant stand about the app and then in the end, when they release it for real, they look like the heroes.  I didn’t want their little test run to ruin my BB.  So I held out.  I managed to make it a couple of days before curiosity killed the cat.  At the time, I had 80+ friends on my BBM and every single one of them was talking up a storm about how great BBM 5.0 was.  That’s all I got for messages for days!  People wanting to know if I had tried it and what I thought.  One of my friends who had downloaded it finally talked me into it.  She said “it’s amazing and you wont regret it.  I’ve had it for days now and nothing has gone wrong with my phone!  And the upgrade carries over all your contacts”.  Well….

Greed won out.  I eagerly told her to send me the link.  I downloaded the app and waited with baited breath.  As I watched the progress bar creep across my screen, a little voice in my head said “no going back now, moron”.  I tried to shrug it off and let out a sigh of relief as the message on the screen read Application Installed Successfully.  Ha!  Stupid voices. 

As I do with all of my downloads, I rebooted just to give my BB a fresh start with the new app.  Excitement mounted.  I could not wait to check out this program!  The reboot finished and I quickly clicked the Menu button.  And....PANIC.  No BBM icon.  I figured maybe I just wasn't seeing it because, who knows, maybe the icon changed with the upgrade.  Crazier things have happened.  I searched all throughout my BB looking for a way into this program.  I found it in the applications list without any problem so I know it was there.  In the end, I had to do a mock upgrade with the desktop manager and fake it into reloading the BBM that I was supposed to have.  Turns out that the OS version I have isn't high enough for BBM 5.0 and according to RIM, I have the highest OS available for my device (which is a load of hooey seeing as my hubby has the same device as me and a much higher OS version). 

My punishment?  I lost every single contact I had on BBM.  I have been trying to get everyone back every since then.  It's my own fault for not adding BBM contacts to my address book but I lost people who were in the music business and I don’t even know how we got each other's PINS, let alone how to find them again.  That's the price I pay for being greedy.  Since then, I have been a little more careful about what I do on my BB with software.  I make sure I know what I am loading and I always double check to make sure my OS can handle it. 

As for physical upkeep, my travels down that road are compliments of my husband.  After much convincing of how great my BB is, he finally switched over to a BB from his Motorola Q.   Don’t get me wrong, the Q served him quite well.  For a while, we started to believe that the phone itself was indestructible.  He works in an industry that proves to be on the hazardous side when it comes to phones.  Since he and I have been together, I have watched him go through at least 5 or 6 cell phones and then when he switched to the Smartphone world, I thought that thing was doomed.  Well, it held up really well.  It was dropped in a bucket of water, ran over, dropped, smashed and anything else you can think of.  Even after all of that, the phone just kept on trucking.  After nearly two years of abuse, it finally gave in.  Somewhere in his bright green device was a loose connection.  All he had to do was bump the phone a teeny tiny bit and it would reboot all on its own.  Since he did EVERYTHING out of that phone, he couldn't afford to have it crashing on him.  He made the trip to his provider's local office to see about getting it fixed and ended up walking out with a brand new titanium colored BlackBerry.  I was so proud!  Knowing that the BB Curve is not the work horse that his Moto Q was, he took the steps to prevent damage.  He got himself a rubberized hard case and a sturdy screen protector to avoid as much destruction as possible. 

Approximately three weeks later, he came home and showed me his screen.  At some point throughout the day, he had his phone in his pocket, leaned on a kitchen counter or something and the lens over his LCD screen cracked all the way across.  We had spoke about getting it in for service but things were so busy with work that he just didn’t have time.  I decided to do a little poking around online and found a great online store for OEM BlackBerry parts at great prices – www.dealsishop.com.  They had the lens for less than $10 and the entire handy little tool kit for servicing your BB for around $6.00.  I ordered it on a Friday night and had it in hand by the following Wednesday and didn’t have to pay any special expedited shipping charges.  It took me less than 5 minutes and his BB was like new again. 

About a week after I fixed his device, I was thankful that I bought the tool kit I needed.  I was walking into work one morning and while rummaging through my giant purse for my proxy card, I found an unpleasant surprise.  A plum had exploded in my D&G purse!  I had gone into work the previous Saturday and had brought two plums with me to snack on.  One of them I ate on the drive in and the other I saved for later.  Apparently, I forgot about the one that I had saved for later and at some point over the next few days, it got squished.  This caused an awful mess in my beautiful purse that smelled like cheap wine.  I cleaned the purse and its contents as best I could.  Even though it made a mess of the purse itself, the contents really weren’t that bad off.  I noticed over the next day or so, that the keyboard on my BB wasn’t working correctly.  The whole bottom half of the keyboard was sticking badly.  The space bar was the worst.  Having had to replace my Curve twice before due to keyboard issues, I wasn’t very happy at the prospect of having to go to my provider over this yet again.  Upon further inspection, I found that I had plum remnants stuck in the cracks of my keyboard.  I had read somewhere that a great way to clean up your BB is by using rubbing alcohol as it will pretty much dissolve anything so I decided to take my chances and perform surgery.  I brought alcohol swabs, napkins, tweezers and my little tool kit with me to work and gave it a try first thing in the morning.  I had the phone apart, cleaned out and back together in less than 10 minutes and it works great!  The keyboard is like brand new again and I did it all myself.  No visit to Verizon required!  :) 

Now that I know how easy it is to disassemble and reassemble a BB without causing any harm, I am on a mission to customize mine a bit.  Verizon only offers the BB Curve in silver and pink. Since I could not bring myself to sport a pink BlackBerry so I went with the silver one and now I’m bored with it.  There are a million websites around with housing and replacements parts so I am going to see what I can come up with.  Wish me luck!

~Jena~