Blackberry stuck in alt mode

August 31, 2006 1:01 PM

My hand-me-down blackberry 6710 is sick. It seems to be stuck in a partial Alt-mode.

Only a handful of keys on the keyboard are affected, but they are important keys:

"P" key scrolls down
DEL key does nothing
"Q" key does nothing
"A" key prints q
ALT key prints a or *

All of the remaining keys function normally.

Whenever I press any of these 5 keys, I see a capital A in the upper right corner. According to the documentation, that means Alt-mode. I can't find anything online or in documentation to get it out of Alt-mode. Here's what I've tried so far:

- Every conceivable combination of Alt + left-shift/right-shift/space/scroll wheel/escape key. Shift keys still enter shift-mode (except for the keys mentioned above)
- Removing battery - no affect
- Removing battery AND sim card. This restored the P and A buttons to normal functionality until I pressed the DEL key to correct a typo. After that, it was back to the partial Alt-mode described above.

posted by BigVACub to Technology (2 answers total)

probably alt key is stuck. try prying it out.
posted by Ironmouth at 1:25 PM on August 31, 2006

And, I'm told: firm-reset; take battery out, hold power switch on for 30 seconds, put battery back in.

This works on 7100s; dont know if it will work on yours.
posted by baylink at 10:12 AM on September 1, 2006