Blackberry curve 8900 app error 523 and os 5.x

Introduction

Yes, yes, yes, me also. Put my device into the charger for bedtime and what? nope, no clock screen, instead found some (blue)white screen replacement having the following message being right centered:

app error 523 / reset

Great! The following is a log of what i tried and what really helped and a short contemplation what actually saved my day in terms of phone settings, contacts, calendar, installed software and all this. That is, reinstalling (flashing) a device is just one side of the medal, going productive with contacts, phone log, web bookmarks and so on is quite another. By the way, i do not run that device in an enterprise environment, all the device management is up to me.

Crazy, that device booting up over and over, coming to print the error message and cycling into another bounce again. Tried a “safe boot” by holding the escape key pressed (felt for hours) but that does not help a lot. I was just able to see another (obviously not system but application) error message, saying Index 3 >=3?! Tried, according to the forums, to boot with/out battery, with/out phone card, with/out sd card, with leaving out the battery for more than 15 minutes (really!) and so on. Also tried to heat up the device to a human bodies temperature (no, no, no, that’s just a joke).

Restore story

Ok, to behave more technically. I swear i did not install anything for weeks! In fact, most people and blackberry are right in suspecting 3rd party themes of being responsible for the breakdown. Me, i indeed saw the order of the icons having changed on the home screen as long as i was able to see this screen at all for a very short time (after a safe boot up). However, there is no explanation why the problem appeared so unexpectedly. A lot of people recommend to safe boot the device and then connect to it with the blackberry desktop software, running the application module and finally removing the offending software / theme. Phew, me i did not manage to establish any connection to the device. This is probably due to the fact that i already run blackberry desktop software 6.x and most threads referenced application version 5.x or older.

Eventually, i decided to directly (none browser, none bb desktop) reflash the device from a pc application (loader) and after having been enlightened from somewhere outer space i entered “blackberry eplus download” into google and found the first hit was the golden one BlackBerry – Software Downloads 2 for my german eplus carrier. They offer the common os 4.6 as well as the new os 5 for the curve 8900. Since there was nothing left to loose i went for os 5, expecting any advancements with the new main release (see below). However, i did not expect a download can be that slow these days … from a major (communication) company … at a max of ~30kbit/s?!? But that’s a yesterday story.

Running the flash process is not much of a problem, only regard that you have to connect the device without the battery first (otherwise it will proceed to bounce boot) until it is recognized by the flash loader (usb interface). Then click next and so on. The flash process may take a while and will finally reboot the device for normal use. At this stage the blackberry desktop software gets into the game again when syncing back the phone settings (yeees, I in fact possesed had a valid backup). Did you know that the general phone settings backup also comprises the contact/calendar data? This is better than great because synching back this crude intellisync ascii data from blackberry desktop software did not work. Did you try ever?

This is also the step of the game where i needed to carve the other side of the medal (see above). First of all, it was extremely handy to find all those 3rd party apps that I have been using to be listed with my blackberry app world account. Doing another download / install, having all registration stuff nearby was a snap. One of those apps helped me further with my so far missing tasks and notes. It is DataBackup from nikkisoft, only a free beta so far, that restored all requested data from the sd card without any complain. The data was also very current because DataBackup does automated scheduled backups. Another app that delivered great experience was QuickLaunch (also nikkisoft). Because QuickLaunch also holds a settings backup on sd card that allows for a loss free re-installation. During on device management, you may need to do a lot of file operations and stuff. Two apps being very useful are FileScout and WifiFileTransfer. And last but not least, all these apps being known from the os 4.6 incarnation of the device also run perfectly on the new os 5 so far (as my other favourite apps logicmail, ActionPad, GoogleMapsFunambolSync do).

OS 5 experience

I’m not a guru in blackberry os development but the switch from os 4.6 to os 5 does not seem to make up a main release change really. The interface is more glossy now and found some detail rework with the music app, for example. Also the device does seem to run faster, which may be due to the wipe and reflash anyway. However, the rss / atom functionality of the browser is still a nightmare. I also can not figure out in any way, why there needs to be different browser incarnations for different connection types, at least for me as a non bb-server-user. So many 3rd party apps live quite well with automatic connect management but iff there is no hotspot around i still have to reconfigure my browser settings to wap manually … aarrgh! Ha, the new threaded short message layout is quite productive and shiny, though.

have fun!

Some days later update

The more and more i think about what would have been possible with os 5, the more things creep back into my mind what basic functionality the blackberry os and the system apps is missing or has been misdesigned. Remember, the blackberry is a business phone! I already mentioned this really crazy stoneage browser behaviour but there is more (at least for somebody who does not have a business plan – but – in fact I did buy a business phone for good money!):

• You cannot copy/duplicate an appointment to another date. Someone may argue that there is logic to let appointments recur on a daily, weekly etc. basis. I tell you life is not made up like so. Furthermore, iff it comes to synching your appointments to another software, see what happens to your recur-based logic.
• You cannot send a contact by sms or bluetooth to another person. Just by (blackberry) mail or, probably as a guru, from within your mms composition menue. On the other hand, you can send an appointment to another person by mms only! No mail here, no sms, no bluetooth either. What is this for? However, a task as well as a note can be sent by sms … These puzzling operation patterns have been designed for another galaxy!
• You can have categories on contacts, tasks and notes but not on appointments and the calendar?!? What easy and productive to have a calendar app with just some different categories and colors (away from the server calendar coloring)!
• You can upload pictures by bluetooth to your pc or wherever else only one at a time! It goes like this: get to the picture, press menue, scroll down *a lot* to the bluetooth entry, click again, select the target device … loop this until … forever. This spoils the party, really.