Stuck or Sticky Track Ball on Blackberry
By: www.mountainviewcellphones.com 5/22/08, updated 2/2/2009.
One of the common failure points of the new Blackberries are the track balls. If too much pressured is applied to them, they will break. There is an interesting system of sensors and rollers that keep the mouse moving (up, down, left, right) and when pressing the button, executes a command. If pressed to hard the ball will actually break the sensor under it and it will cease to operate. Barring this extreme damage, sticky or balls that roll only in one or two directions are generally caused by the rollers getting dirty and not rolling anymore.
I don’t know what people put on their thumbs or get on their thumbs and then transfer to their Blackberries, but we see this problem many times in our service center. For certain, how you fix this problem is to clean the rollers and the track ball.
Our fix is to disassemble the device carefully, clean the rollers with some rubbing alcohol and cotton swabs, and then waiting for the alcohol to dry before reassembly. This has worked many times and has been a great solution for a simple problem. The newer Blackberries have several different parts to disassemble so be patient not to break the pieces. Just ensure you get the screws out with torque screw drivers before prying the plastic apart with guitar picks or another plastic tool.
You can also pop the trackball out from the keyboard but be careful. The plastic prongs that hold the chrome bezel in place are fragile and if broken will render the trackball assembly useless.
Of course, you can always bring your Blackberry to our service center and we can do this for you. The charge is only $15.00 for the cleaning and you can leave it with us and go get lunch and then come back and get the phone when you are done. If there is damage to the trackball assembly, we can sell you a track ball for $15.99 or we can repair the whole thing for $35.00 (parts and labor). We can do this for most Blackberries (Curve, Pearl, World Edition, 8800s, 8100s, 8300s).
On January 15th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Dear “Mountain View Cellphones”,
I have a blackberry curve. It appears that the click on track ball function is flakey. Sometimes won’t work, other times, stays on. The ball seems kind of loose, but works.
Does this mean that the click sensor is broken in the replaceable ball module, or is the mainboard sensor damaged?
Thank you for any information you can give.
Bill
On March 14th, 2009 at 5:30 am
I have to say, that I could not agree with you in 100%, but that’s just my opinion, which indeed could be wrong.
p.s. You have an awesome template for your blog. Where did you find it?
On March 25th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
I used Firefox-10 template and just modified the images to make it look better.
On May 25th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I tried this and it worked my blackberry is fixed…