bboschecker.php – check BlackBerry device OS releases
Update: code has moved to Google Code, a full fledged project and a new version is out. Visit the project page here: BBOSChecker Project Page
As most new BlackBerry owners come to find out, you can run pretty much any operating system release from any carrier on your device without too many problems. This user-friendly aspect of the devices not only allows the early adopters to use new releases, but also allows the use of “known good / stable” releases that the community recommends as well as allowing the installation of different languages that may not be released by your carrier (for instance using Chinese on a T-Mobile USA device).
A small pain in the tuckus, though, is searching for OS releases from all the carriers for your device. Here’s a little bit of code you can run on your own PHP and cURL enabled webserver.
There’s not a whole lot of beauty to this type of code; it simply sucks in webpages, parses them for content, and sucks in more webpages based on that content – lather, rinse, repeat. All you need to really worry about is if your PHP is cURL-enabled or not; most modern linux distros are fine, but check yours.
Operation could not be simpler – bring up the main page and it will look something like this:
Simply enter your device model (the 8300 is shown above as an example) and Search. You will start to get output like so:
…and that’s it! If you see something you like, click on the provided link to that carrier and you’ll go through the normal download procedure.
NOTE: this code is sensitive to the HTML code used by RIM – should it change, this script will break a little.
The link to the code is dead. Do you still have this code?
basstech
2008-06-11 at 11:16
heya, yup! the code was moved to Google and a newer version is out, allowing filtering by network and region. You can visit the new project page here:
http://code.google.com/p/bboschecker/
…get the new code, etc. now.
rivviepop
2008-06-11 at 12:00