Unlocking my Blackberry

I finally found a new home for my old Blackberry Bold 9000.  I originally stopped using it as I was running out of memory for music and videos and the trackball stopped working.  Well in the sense that i could scroll every direction but up, anyway :p.  After reading forum posts and talking to my friend i tried cleaning the trackball unsuccessfully.

Apparently, however; it was just my bad luck combined with my once trusty blackberry giving me a good excuse to upgrade as when i got the phone out of its box and charged it up the trackball worked perfectly.

I was a bit jaded at that.  It would be my luck that the trackball works as im selling the phone.

But that quickly subsided as my friend was in need of a phone upgrade (their old phones batter was nearly shot and their charging cable was frayed), so i was happy that the trackball was working for them.

Since she is a T-Mobile customer we hit a small snag in that my blackberry was locked to ATT's network, so i would need to unlock it in order for it to work on T-Mobiles network.

After looking around the internet at forums, i decided to go with BlackberryMEP.com.  Surprisingly, the process was easier than i had expected.

It was a simple matter of heading over to blackberrymep.com, clicking on the "Unlock Now" nav bar button, entering my blackberry's IMEI, my email address, and paying with paypal.  I received an email within 3 or so minutes informing me that I would also need to let them know the MEPs version of my 9000.  They handily included instructions, and after I provided them with that they were able to give me an unlock code.

I thought that the unlocking portion of getting her a new phone was going to be the most difficult.  I soon realized that transferring all her contacts, pictures, videos, and music from a non-smart and locked down Samsung Comeback to a blackberry that will happily send anything over Bluetooth but for some odd reason refuses to receive anything over Bluetooth.  To make matters more complicated, some of each item was stored on the phone memory and some on the SIM card.  Also she had so many contacts that it took several times of taking the battery out, swapping the SIM card, copying over another section of contacts, rinsing and repeating to transfer all her contacts.  Needless to say this ended up taking at least 45 minutes to do!

In the end though, we were able to get her all up and running.  After spending time playing around with the phone, she commented "I think you've created a monster."  A monster who does nothing but text constantly, that is ;-).