Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

My friend Tom gave me another interesting phone. It's a BlackBerry 7290. This 2004 model has a 240x160 pixel display and 32MB of ROM and 4MB of RAM. It does not have WLAN connectivity. I was surprised at first because it has Bluetooth. However, after some research, I discovered that the first phone with Wi-Fi was probably the C1250i, which was released in 2003. So it wasn't really common back then.



The good news is that there is no proprietary battery charger or data cable, as there used to be with most phones. It comes with a mini USB cable, which is great.

So I started discovering the system. It was really tricky for me. Tom only gave me one piece of advice, which was about the password. He gave me the password for the phone and warned me that after ten unsuccessful attempts, the phone would be wiped.

The first thing I discovered was that the controls are really tricky. The phone does not have a touchscreen, and there are no control arrows or joystick to control the cursor. There are, however, two controls on the side. A scroll wheel and a button. My first idea was that the scrolling wheel was used to move through the menu, which was correct, and I considered the button to be an "accept", "enter" or similar function. However, I was wrong. The button is "escape" or "back". This wasn't a big problem as the QWERTZ keyboard comes with an "Enter" key, which I was able to use in menus. For going back, I used the button on the side. It was really unintuitive, but it worked.

However, I then faced a problem. I launched the 'Arkanoid' game and the phone showed a tutorial screen. I got stuck there and the 'Enter' key did nothing. I could only shut the game down.

So I contacted Tom for a suggestion. He told me that he had played the game and that I should launch it using the button on the side, which I found was the 'back' button. After some further advice, he told me that the scroll wheel is also clickable. Then I was finally able to control everything more smoothly. I had no idea I could click it before.

After figuring out how to control it, I started thinking about additional software and how to install it. I also considered whether it was even possible.

So, briefly, I found out that sideloading is done using a computer and the BlackBerry Desktop Manager. It took me a couple of minutes to find that old software, but I had a working connection after a while. The phone doesn't support file transfers, even through that software, but I was able to sync my contacts, settings, and a few other things. What I wanted was the application manager. I opened it and found some game packages that were supposed to run on this phone.



However, I only encountered errors regarding missing files and some rather unintuitive warnings about compatibility, versioning and software conflicts.

So I searched the internet a bit more and found some packages for the same OS versions, but not exactly for that phone. I managed to install around 10 games from the archive of about 200 games. Not many, but still some. After a long journey, I had installed some apps. However, when I tried to run them, they all crashed and were rendered off-screen, making weird noises (they all had all of these symptoms together).

However, I managed to install the games and they came with the same installation data files. But I had to load them through a manifest that was missing from the game pack meant for this phone.

I started studying old datasheets and documentation, took the manifest from the 'installable' app and rewrote it for the apps meant to be installed on that phone. After some time, I finally managed to install one of these apps. I then repeated these steps for the remaining games and was able to install them all.



It took me a couple of hours, but now I have more games on my phone. They're nothing special, but they work, and I'm proud to have done it. I can imagine better ways to spend the time, though.

If anyone gets the same phone, feel free to ask me for the games archive. I made sure they all worked and put them in the archive to ensure I had a working backup.