Switching Blackberry devices can be harder than you would think
by Volker Weber
I told you last week that I would be switching from a 7290 to a 8700. Yesterday was the day. It was much harder than anticipated and I have learned a lot that I can tell you now. I apologize for this being a very long post.
First of all I have to explain my setup. There are two ways to use a Blackberry service. There is Blackberry Enterprise Service (BES), where your company has their own middleware server, which pushes mail from your Exchange/Domino/Groupwise server to the device. And there is Blackberry Internet Service (BIS), where you sign up for a new webmail account (with an IMAP backend) and you get your email from there.
I am using BIS, and the setup is quite simple. You receive your device from the operator, you go to a website, create an account and enter your IMEI and PIN. Once you have done this, the device receives all email from that account. I have tied my BIS account into my own IMAP server so it receives a copy of my incoming mail, and for those messages that I send from the Blackberry, my IMAP server gets a copy and files it into sent mail. Replies to Blackberry mails are directed to my main mail account via reply-to headers, so that all email goes through my own server. All nice and dandy so far.
Upgrading to a new device is also very straightforward. You visit the BIS site, log in, go to your profile and tell the server to switch to a different device, enter IMEI and PIN and you are done.
The difficulties start if the device is not brand new. If somebody has already registered it to a BIS account, you cannot let it go from there. The only option is to register a different device. It won't give you the option "do not send mail to my device any more". When would you want to do that? For instance when you lose the device. Or when you want to register it to a different account.
Let's make an example: My 7290 was registered to an account called "vowe", the 8700 to "test". Log in as vowe, try to switch to the 8700 and the BIS will tell you that this device is already registered. How do you resolve this? You call the operator, in this case Vodafone. "All of our operators are currently busy ..." After 3 minutes of muzak I got booted of the queue. "Please try again later." If I would have been able to reach the operator, then (s)he could have killed the test account, the 8700 would have been unregistered and free to be attached to the vowe account.
As Vodafone was busy doing other things I needed a workaround. Sent a message to Marco, who had one of his people assist me. Enrico called and I suggested he should give me the PIN and IMEI of an old Blackberry device no longer being used. The plan was to register this device with the test account to free up the 8700. The first PIN/IMEI did not work, the second pair did. The 8700 was free and I could register it with the vowe account and thus freed up the 7290. I could now register the 7290 with the test account, which I did not, since an unregistered 7290 is more valuable than the old beaten device we used as a switch gear. Lesson learned: You cannot switch two Blackberry devices between two BIS accounts without a third device as switch gear.
Why didn't the first PIN/IMEI pair work? That is an interesting tale. I don't have to explain the IMEI part, since every GSM phone has this identifier. A PIN however is Blackberry-specific. Each and every Blackberry device has a PIN and this is the identifier used on the network to route messages. There are messages routed through the Network Information Center like regular emails, but there are also peer-to-peer messages that are sent from one device to the other using the PIN of the recipient. Blackberry Instant Messenger uses PIN messages. If you are using Blackberry Connect as a software on a handheld not made by RIM, your PIN will be derived from the IMEI of your phone. Why doesn't Blackberry use the IMEI instead of the PIN? There are non-GSM devices on the service.
The first PIN/IMEI pair failed since the switch gear was not a Vodafone device. This is another case of customer lock-in as used with prepaid SIM-locked phones. The PIN is tied to your operator which makes it really hard not only to switch devices but also hard to switch operators. Another lesson learned.
Last lesson learned from yesterday: Device activations are the currency in the Blackberry world. For each device activated the operator pays RIM. Partners are compensated for device activations. The more, the merrier.
Time to call the Vodafone hotline again and kill that test account.
Comments
Yeah, I went through all that when I inherited my Blackberry. I only had to call Vodafone 3 times to get it worked out. At least they never put me in the Muzak queue.
I finally reached the Vodafone hotline. They won't help me since the device had been registered with a Debitel/Vodafone SIM card. I think I will let Blackberry people handle this. The account is on their servers anyway.
Can you please elaborate the thing a little more. I had a similar problem and would like to solve it real soon.
Where can I possibly be more elaborate? Tell me what your problem is and we may be able to work it out.
That's fun. When reading your post I thought: well, the "do not send mail to my device any more" option is just login to your BIS account and delete it. Then after some minutes searching on mobileemail.vodafone.de I must admit there's no such option to cancel the service - or I'm to damn stupid to find it.
This looks like a bug in the vodafone web frontend to me. No, lets say: BlackBerry is so cool nobody ever will want to cancel the service....
BTW it's not completely impossible to move with your BB to an other carrier, no matter if you use a BES or BIS account. But you must convince the new carrier to enter the PIN/IMEI in his provisioning system. And as pointed out, the carrier has to pay for each provisioned hanheld. So, be prepared for some resistance.
The BIS frontend leaves a lot to be desired. Like browser support. And the front ends are all the same; they only have a different wallpaper matching the operator's branding. It is not Vodafone that forgot to put in the "Delete this account" option.
Ok have an email server running imap but on port 993 not 143 993 is SSL Blackbury does not supoport such any ideas
