Requiem For A BlackBerry

Upon waking the other morning, I noticed that my BlackBerry Curve 8330 hadn’t received any messages overnight and my voicemail icon refused to go away. I turned the phone off and pulled out the battery to perform a hard reset. I waited for the phone to restart and the white screen to appear. Finally, the display lit up with a little line of text in the center, “JVM Error 102.” Below that ominous line was a clickable “Reset” button. I clicked “Reset,” fully expecting the BlackBerry to heal itself. It didn’t. No matter how many times I clicked “Reset” or pulled the battery, the Curve always returned to “JVM Error 102.” I searched ye ol’ intertubes and discovered that the error is due to a corrupt .cod file. While it doesn’t seem as prevalent as a Windows Blue Screen of Death, it’s happened to enough devices– regardless of model number, OS, or carrier– that BlackBerry has a solution for it on their support site. Basically, their solution is to completely wipe the phone and reinstall the OS using the desktop manager. Unfortunately, their instructions seemed like they were written for a previous version of the desktop manager.  I followed them as closely as possible, but my laptop refused to acknowledge the phone. I caved in and brought the BlackBerry to my local Sprint repair center. The guy there took one look at the screen and shook his head, “That’s a bad error.” An hour later, he pronounced my BlackBerry Curve 8330 dead and said, “It’s an issue BlackBerry is aware of and they will cover the cost of replacement. I’ve already ordered you a new one.” I’m waiting to hear back from BlackBerry about how often this error occurs, but in the meantime, has it happened to you? Were you able to fix it yourself?