My Blackberry Torch is a POS
Today while i was at the doctors office my blackberry randomly shut off. It wasn’t low on battery. It was just sitting in my pocket, quietly checking for email. When i pulled my phone out i noticed it wouldn’t come on. Considering the Blackberry Torch is a POS i thought a simple battery pull would fix the problem. After all, it does this every other day.
HAH! Not a chance. From that point forward the POS Torch has been rebooting over and over again. It shows the Blackberry Logo and a little loading bar. It gets about 10% through the loading bar before the phone shuts itself off and starts over again. The little red LED at the top shows as well.
After much google;ing i found to fix to said problem. What is the fix you ask?
ERASE EVERYTHING REINSTALL THE OS.
Yepp. You lose everything off your phone. (Minus the sd card)
/facepalm
Anways, I’m not really sure if the fix works for everyone or if it just works on those POS Torches that aren’t fully up to date. From what I’ve read this fix will work even for phones that are fully updated. (Instead of updating the OS, it simply reloads the OS)
Anyways, here is what i did to fix my POS Torch:
Keep in mind this will erase everything on your phone…
- Go to RIMs blackberry support site and go to the software update section. Then click on the Blackberry 6 Update link. (http://us.blackberry.com/update/?iid=BB6_OSUpdate) From that page click on the “Check for Updates” button. (You will need to use one of those ancient crappy browsers for this to work. (IE or Firefox)) It will prompt you to install an active X. Allow it to do so. At this point you will need to plug your POS Torch into a USB port. Select your device from the drop down and enter your password or pin if you have one set.
- The software that pops up will check to see if there’s an update available for your POS phone. For me it found that I needed to update the bootloader before it could check for further updates. It downloaded the bootloader and proceeded to install said bootloader on my computer. Like all crappy software installers, I had to restart the computer when the install finished. Once your computer comes back up go back to the same update site again and click the “Check for Updates” button. The software will check for updates and this time find that your phone needs to be updated.
(Notice the grayed out “Back up device data” check box. Thank you RIM for dangling that handy feature over heads.) - Click Install Update and go do something useful for an hour or so. Mine only took about 15 minutes but in the past I’ve waited for 2+ hours. I guess it depends on how the POS Torch feels at the time. Once its finished the device will reboot. This process also also takes a while. So go back to doing something useful. Once the phone boots up you’re done.
So there you go. Have fun reconfiguring and installing all your apps again. If you’re lucky (like me) all your contacts, email, and calendar items are stored on a corporate email server via a BES server. So all you’ve really lost is time and SMS/MMS messages.
This is just another reason that RIM should stop making phones and focus on making email software for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. All other operating systems just suck.
Matt Keller
