[stevew]

My girlfriend's 9900 bricked yesterday. As many others have described, the battery was in the red...with maybe minutes left, when she threw it into the charge dock on Saturday night.

When she awoke, it was already in the flashing red light syndrome, but I discovered a few things while trying to unbrick it today.

1) It would NOT respond to the RIM javaloader when I tried to wipe the device ("could not open port...").
2) I pulled the battery /SIM and media card out then plugged it into the PC - and after a minute or so, I got the "no battery" symbol showing up on the device screen. Great I thought, so on I went to load the latest firmware.
3) I ran loader.exe and it saw the device and PIN, all the while showing the "no battery" symbol on screen.
4) I then continued and ran the upgrade to .474
5) It went right through the "erasing applications" step and "loading software" phases successfully.
5) It could NOT get through the "reconnecting to JVM" / reading configuration phase. Needless to say, it couldn't get through the installing applications phases either. All I could get, no matter what, was a "retry / connect" error, but as I mentioned before, it did actually load the software and that's as far as it goes.

I can always get it to load the software, but it always errors out on step 5 above. It seems to have something to do with the device going into the red (very low battery). She basically kills the battery each time she uses the device to the point where the radio shuts off.

I tried 3 new fully charged batteries, before, during and after, all to no avail. It's on a BES so at least it's all backed up, save for messages, which I don't care about since I have a hard backup that's only a few days old.

I have 2 other 9900's that I use, but I never let them go under 15% battery remaining. Her phone and my phones are only a few ESN's apart.

FWIW. I tried the update through DM, but it died at the same place.

Spoke to a RIM level 2 tech and repeated the same procedure again to no avail. The device was sent out for repair or replacement today and she's on a 9700 loaner right now.

Man these 9900's seem to have this bricking issue more than previous BB's I've had - and at least I could always recover those.