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Being budget-minded (read tightwad) I was excited to hear about Boost Mobile’s $50 unlimited plan.  That’s unlimited voice, data, and text for $50/month.  The only drawback is that it is slow, using Nextel’s IDEN network, and not the more modern 3G, but it’s definetly usable.

Most of the phones available through Boost aren’t that great, but Boost is basically Nextel, and any Nextel phone can be used with Boost by only switching the SIM card.  So I got my hands on the Blackberry Curve 8350i.

Out of the box, you can make phone calls, but no data and no texting without a little work.  The iDEN network does not out of the box support texting, but Motorola has it’s own proprietary MMS protocol that works with their phones.  As far as data goes, Boost does not offer a Blackberry plan, so BIS and BES are out of the question; however, TCP works, so if you can get Opera mini installed and other apps that use a TCP connection and does not rely on BIS/BES than you’re fine.  But this means the Blackberry Browser does not work, and OTA downloads, even from Opera mini or the Bolt browser still need the Blackberry Browser to download and install.

The other feature that Blackberries are known for is their push email service.  Since BIS/BES don’t work, this also doesn’t work out of the box.

The answer to these problems is by using certain service books that have been hacked to allow the used of the Blackberry Browser either over Wifi or over the TCP network.  There’s also some service books available that fix the MMS problem.  Finally, ShangMail provides a free push email service that works with the Blackberry.

I’ve collected several service books that had all the hacks I needed to work and combined them into a single file located here.  In order to isntall it, download and unzip it first.  Then from your Blackberry go to Options->Advanced Options->Service Book.  Know hold down the Alt key and type S-B-E-B.  If you did this right you will get the message, “Legacy SB Restore Enabled.”  Now go the Blackberry Desktop Manager and go to Backup/Restore, then Advanced.  I would suggest doing a full backup before continuing.  I would also suggest you backup your service books seperately in case something goes wrong you can at least get back to where you were quickly.  Now open the file you extracted and install it to the Blackberry.  You may need to do a battery pull, but after that you should be able to use the Blackberry Browser and MMS should be working.  You may have to switch between the HotSpot Broswer and Browser inside the Browser settings as needed.

For Shangmail go to http://en.shangmail.com/ and sign up for a free account, then install their free software.  Now login to your new account and add up to 5 existing email accounts to have them pushed to your Boostberry.

That should be it.  Download whatever other apps you might want, either OTA or from your desktop.  I suggest the BOLT browser, WeatherEye, Google Maps, the MobiPocket E-Book Reader, and the Bible software from http://www.youversion.com.

Have fun!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 1st, 2009 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Church IT, HOWTO, Hardware, Just Plain Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.