electric relaxation

I love my Blackberry Pearl, save for one incredibly annoying usability issue: with my stock T-Mobile OS version, there’s no easy way to separate SMS messages from E-Mail, and since I have it hooked up to my office e-mail account and I don’t use server-side filters (only Outlook search folders), I never see SMS messages since they get lost amongst the thousands of VMware emails.

Apparently I’m not the only one complaining about this, and according to the Blackberry forums, this issue has been fixed in some of the newer OSes. I figured it would be useful to document the sequence of steps I followed in order to install the latest Blackberry OS (4.2.1.66, released for the Pearl in Australia by Telstra).

1. Make sure you have the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager release. These are loosely coupled to the OS releases, and you can always easily get them from blackberry.com.
2. Crawl the Blackberry Forums and look for the latest OS update posting. I’m not sure how these guys find out about new releases, other than the brute force polling approach which I wouldn’t put past some of these freaks.
3. Download the OS installer from blackberry.com. The Telstra release is here.
4. Go to %CommonProgramFiles%\Research In Motion\AppLoader and delete vendor.xml. You can back it up if you’re paranoid.
5. Optional: If you want to unlock all the themes, you need to know your Pearl’s vendor ID, which you can get with Alt, R, A, C, E at the home screen. The T-Mobile ID is “100″. Then, go to %CommonProgramFiles%\Research In Motion\Shared\Loader Files\ and edit blackberry.alx (it’s an XML file). Search for entries and you’ll see that they have VendorID masks. You can edit these masks and “|”-in your vendor ID. For example, the Cingular default theme entry looks like this:

      <!-- Cingular US filesets -->
      <fileset Colour="True" Java="1.0" series="8100" _vendorID="102">
         <files>
            net_rim_theme_102a_icon_240x260_b.cod
         </files>
      </fileset>
   

   You want to replace the “102″ for the _vendorID attribute with “100|102″.
   

6. Finally, just start up Desktop Manager and run the Application Loader. It will tell you a new upgrade is available. Follow instructions.