Well, today I decided to join the hand-held revolution; or truthfully to rejoin it after the death of my dearly beloved Psion Revo a few years ago. Being a classic early adopter I went for not an iPhone, nor a tablet…but a Blackberry 8900. (I thought they’d had a few years to get the bugs out).
Lovely bit of kit: palm sized, real keyboard, easy access through USB, previous user’s data all over it… No, the last one wasn’t expected or wanted.
I’d bought it at CEX for 20 pounds, so I disconnected it from the computer and dived back down to town. CEX weren’t happy, and to their credit immediately performed another factory reset and told me I could take it home while it completed. I hung around in-store just in case, checking messages as it reset. One did make me raise an eyebrow. Sure enough, after the reset I rebooted. All the old data reappeared.
I took it back up to the counter and showed them. The assistant looked a bit baffled, and paged through again so I asked:
“Could there be a storage card in this?”
Yep, when it rebooted, the screen had flashed up ‘storage media detected’. They cracked the case, fiddled with the insides and sure enough, there was a very old, green, and wonky looking micro-SD hidden in it. Every time they reset it, the Blackberry was restoring the data from back-up.
So, to make a long story short, SD out, contacts cleaned, factory reset again and this time it worked perfectly. How perfectly? I’ve written two short stories and this blog post on it.
I’ve even fixed the camera.
Next: A Challenge! How to get data off Memopad and onto a PC without Blackberry desktop.
