Caleb Hunt (.com)

This is the story of how a routine BlackBerry OS upgrade ended up being a total time vampire.

I decided to upgrade my Bold 9700′s OS the other day after an official update was issued for my phone by a UK provider. Considering it had been a while since I had done an upgrade, and the reviews were positive on this release, I decided to give it a go. When I got my 9700 back in December 2009, I was coming from an OS 5.0 BlackBerry Tour. I decided to give my new phone as fresh of a start as possible and did a selective restore of specific data (contacts, volume profiles, custom setting, etc…) and opted to re-download all my applications fresh to avoid any issues restoring from a backup file or using the device transfer wizard.

I use Google Sync to sync my contacts and calendar with my Gmail account, and have always had decent results – emphasis on the decent, because it hasn’t always been magical but I suppose that’s a whole other entry (why can Apple + iPhone + Google get it soooo right but RIM + Google = fail?). Anyway, for the OS upgrade I do a full backup and restore of everything exactly the way it was prior to the upgrade, but during the upgrade, for whatever reason (I think it’s the order in which things were re-installed), the ‘BlackBerry Messenger Group Calendar’ became set as the default calendar for my BlackBerry. Queue the headache… Why is this such a bad thing? Well, because then when Google Sync sync’s it’s default calendar (my Gmail calendar) it populates the Blackberry Messenger Group calendar by default. Extremely annoying and extremely frustrating. So now all my Calendar  updates are now visible to all my BBM Group buddies… Not what I wanted at all.

See, what happens is for every email address that you have on your BlackBerry (I have 3), there are service books on the device for mail and for calendar for each of the email address. Normally, I delete all but my primary Gmail calendar’s service books as the others are completely unnecessary. But for whatever reason, since BlackBerry messenger was upgraded to 5.0 and added in the feature of ‘Groups’, the BBM Group calendar can NOT  be deleted from your phone like the other calendars as there is no service book for it. I was only ever a part of one group that we used for communication between people at work, so while it was handy, it wasn’t entirely necessary. I notified everyone I was shutting down / deleting the group in an attempt to perhaps solve the issue… but – even after removing yourself from every BBM Group you were a part of, the Group Calendar still exists, and was still set as the default calendar.

With my Google Sync meltdown and hours of time down the tube, I said ‘screw this’ and decided to wipe my BlackBerry to rid myself of the headache. Needless to say, I’m back up and running now, but here’s how I prevented any recurrence of errors on the fresh install:

- During the OS reload / wipe I made sure that I unchecked  BBM from the list of applications to install to ensure it wasn’t on my phone by default
- Once the phone was back in action, I made sure that the BBM Groups calendar wasn’t still on the phone – and it isn’t.
- Restored my data
- Re-sent my service books & deleted the calendar service books for the email addresses I didn’t need

- Setup Google sync to sync with the email calendar I wanted
- Downloaded all my applications
- Downloaded BBM 5.0
- Swore to myself I’m never ever joining another BBM group until RIM fixes this issue.