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Monday, March 22, 2010

Black Berry Phones Powering Down - My Findings

I have worked in computer support for a combined 15 years so I am putting in the disclaimer here. My situation may not be the exact same as yours so you will have to do a little research to see if this will indeed work for you. When in doubt check with your carrier for more details... yadda.. yadda... yadda...

So here's the situation. I own a BlackBerry 8310 also known as a Curve. It has worked fairly well for me for over two years now, until recently. The issue I was having would be the unit powering itself off regardless of what the visual indicater stated was left of battery life.
  • Pressing the power button did nothing
  • Using a power adapter or charger would restart the phone when connected
  • The battery indicator would usually show a significant drain when the phone reinitialized.
What to do? It literally was at the point that if you pulled the battery and put it back in the phone would again power down a moment or two after booting yet the indicator still stated there was at least 1/4 of battery life left.

This was very frustrating. Nothing like being 100' from a geocache only to have the phone die and no way of getting it back up. That is also why I am mentioning this on my blog because it easily can be geocaching related. To The Internet!!!

The Internet gave many ways of potentially resolving the problem. Everything from reseating the battery to wiping your operating system and restoring. The problem is very common and you can find example after example all over the net. I had no problem doing a wipe of my phone but if there were any workable solutions before going through all of that I wanted to give a shot. So I did do the remove the battery for several minutes trick. It actually seemed to work for about 30 minutes before going back to bad habits. Then I read that you should replace your battery. Hmmmm, I thought. If I am going to spend the $50 for a new battery I better be able to return it if the phone insists on being uncooperative. So I made sure I kept the receipt before proceeding.

Needless to say I replaced the old battery with the new one and for the last week or so it has been working flawlessly. Well as much as a Black Berry can anyways. So if you are having troubles similar to mine I suggest you trade with a friend that has a new battery to see if it goes back to working correctly or go buy a new one like I did. For me it was the best solution and this time I did not have to reinstall all the software.

I hope this information proves useful to you.

-HHH


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2 comments:

AwesomeSoldSeparately said...

I support blackberries as part of my job on a regular basis. We've seen this happen fairly often... 2 years is about what I'd expect from a LiIon battery.

We usually replace them at the 2 year mark anyway if it starts to have problems. At 2 years the verizon contact it up and they will give us a knew phone for the line almost for free.

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