Blackberries...

Upon having aquired a blackberry recently, I had to familiarise myself with the way it works (what the dang is it?), connects and specifically; syncs to Outlook.
This meant getting to grips with Desktop manager, the bluetooth issues, IT policy issues and of course themes!

I found out that first I needed to remove all IT policies. A lot of searching on google showed me that I had to download a 'policy.bin' file and do a little registry hacking to get this profile to be loaded via the desktop manager. See here
This cleared the IT Policy and gave me back control of what was obviously a blackberry connected to a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) in it's prior life, which had restricted many options.
Now, as it blatantly wasn't connecting to the DM software (although it was paring with Windows no problem) I needed to somehow reset the services in the bluetooth options as there was no 'Desktop Connectivity' showing - not in the properties in Windows for the bluetooth device, nor in the bluetooth options on the BB. However resetting the IT Policy didnt do this!
So then after a lot more googling, I find that you can reset to factory defaults using a Java app - 'Jl_Cmder' (see here ), which i did. This gave me a completely free'ed up Blackberry, although not unlocked in terms of network, it was clean in erevery other way...(no little red padlocks!)
Then I just had to make sure that i wasn't using third party bluetooth stack as desktop manager only works with the native XP bluetooth drivers. This is the easy part. (Uninstall the bluetooth stack in Add/Remove programs in XP, and XP will automatically install the native drivers)

This done, I was synching over bluetooth no probs, and it had only take about a week of googling! lol.

Then I find you can download nice themes (not to mention ringtones, apps etc...) which are .alx & .cod files, and upload these via DM. Works fine.

Sufficient to say I am pretty happy now.

I also found a nice tip that by setting various categories on the contacts within different contacts folders from outlook (eg business / personal) you can then on the BB set the 'Filter' option (a quick 2 clicks in the phone book options) to display only these sets of contacts as you require.

Nice.