By: www.mountainviewcellphones.com  5/22/08

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.

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 and you can leave it with us and go get lunch and then come back and get the phone when you are done.

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