Blackberry was a great little device in the past. People loved how easy it was to use email on a telephone. Keyboard was cited as the best feature. Even now, BB keyboard is a synonym for hard working business people who have to be online 24/7. We still use Blackberry but it’s usage is rapidly being replaced for Android and Apple phones. Partly, reason is that latest software is crap, people who loved BB before have hard times getting used to the new UI. Partly because of the problems with the first software version. Even now, usability and stability are not on par with other mobile operating systems.
Our CEO is one of the last BB users and it was quite funny when he approached me with a strange problem. When ever he received a call, only number of the caller was shown, even though before, a name of the caller was shown.
Symptoms: When you update your BB phone to the latest Blackberry update 10.2.1 your contacts are missing. When you examine your contacts you notice that most contacts are missing from the phone book. Usually one contact has many other missing contacts attached. (Blackberry has added a new feature in the latest version, smart links. This feature is so advanced that will automatically combine all contacts in to one)
Contacts affected are not related. They don’t have a common name, don’t share a country, don’t have a common number, common fb name, common company…. In fact they don’t have any denominator in common.
When you receive a call you only see a number or a name of the contact that all the contacts are linked to.
There is a bug (feature) in the most recent blackberry OS release.
Resolution1: You can try to unlink all the contacts. In some cases this works. After you unlink all the contacts you will have old contacts back.
If that wont’ work you can try the following.
Resolution 2:
Wipe blackberry account. Reactivate. I saw this work for a couple of users.
Confirmed solution:
You can fix linked accounts on your Blackberry phone with the following procedure:
Find a contact where all the contact have been linked. UnLink first contact and save. Repeat the following procedure for every contact in your Address book. It’s really important that you un-link one contact only and save and only then proceed to the next one, there is no shortcut to automate this solution and save your time.
That means that if you have 500 contacts that were linked to one contact, you will have a lot of work in front of you. But it does work and you will have your contacts back.
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