Chosen Solution
Hello! My name’s Kyle, I’m 11. I need to fix this problem on my blackberry bold 9930 (aka 9900 ) that my neighbor gave me. it won’t turn on after I replaced the battery, no red light, no signal on the screen. before without the battery it just had this red light thingy.
Don’t spend too much time on this phone - it’s a bum device. The 3G shutdown means it won’t get cellular service, and RIM has announced the legacy BlackBerries (non-Android, so PRIV is fine; the others are done) will no longer work reliably. They shut down the back end servers so the phones will lose just about all of their functionality. The reason this issue is so fatal for this BlackBerry is it was from a time when the carriers demanded the OEM handle services like eMail and internet and had an iron grip on how custom the phone was (yep, even down to if it was carrier hard locked, which Sprint and Verizon were infamous for in the US, or let us unlock the GSM half for “international use” but hard locked the phones in the US). They had to do this back then not only because of the carriers, but also corporate customers who demanded it (the gov’t users ABSOLUTELY demanded it, no questions). Fun fact: this is why a lot of them have no cameras, or an IT policy to block it. The consequence of all of this means these phones are also known to have residual IT policies which didn’t get removed (anyone know about buying a used iPhone with an iCloud lock? Deja-vu huh?). Granted, removal is easy (BDM or 3rd party tools as it was locally stored) but it doesn’t make sense today.Nowadays the carriers stay hands off on services beyond cellular service – to the point they dump the support problems on the OEM of the device, even if they sold it in the first place! Nowadays, buying a carrier locked phone isn’t worth it since you get the same device with branding and bloatware, as well as a permanently locked bootloader* unless it’s super cheap secondhand and easier unlocked, like some used prepaid phones. Since it’s the same price outright or financed, you’re usually better off buying the devices outright, owning it and taking it to the carrier. The landscape today is nothing like the days when these were still supported, and carriers also did effective troubleshooting (because they had to).*The Samsung U1 (factory unlocked) SKU retains the bootloader issue, since Samsung ships the same phone to carriers, outside of a subsidy lock and selling it as a “1U” device and carrier specific ROM.
