Infuriating!  After less than a month of owning my Blackberry Curve, the trackball stopped working.

Remember old school mechanical mice and how they could get clogged with lint? 

That is exactly what happens with the Blackberry, except that, in a stunning bit of bad design, the Blackberry was built without an easy way to clean the trackball. The problem is made worse by the fact that most phones live in pockets that attract lint and are handled directly by greasy fingers.

Pinstack.com suggests possible fixes.

As a first resort, you can try cleaning the trackball with an alcohol swap.

If that doesn’t work, you can carefully remove the plastic retaining rip around the trackball and take the entire trackball unit out for further alcohol cleaning.  That was enough to get things working for me.

If even that fails, you can disassemble the entire trackball unit for cleaning, but I was terrified by the prospect of working with such tiny, easily breakable parts. 

If you do have to replace the entire unit, this site has it for cheap ($12 plus shipping) compared with $50 and up elsewhere.  (I haven’t ordered from them so I can’t vouch directly for this site.)

But I digress. The Blackberry should never have been designed with an easily gummed part that can’t be cleaned.

Previous Blackberries I have owned have died premature deaths due to other avoidable design flaws; for example my last Blackberry died because the power socket on the phone plug became detached under the constant strain of being plugged and unplugged.

RIM really needs to get their design act together or customer will migrate to more durable phones!