My BlackBerry 8703e came in today. I spent much of the afternoon and evening mucking around with it, trying to get it to work as a modem. Everything started rather encouragingly – the Sprint booklet includes a chapter on using the phone as a modem. Unfortunately, the steps did not work for me – I kept getting a #692 error.

I figured it would be easier to get it working in Boot Camp than in Parallels, so that is where I started. I got the Sprint Connection Manager software installed, and everything seemed to be set up properly, except I kept getting that #692 error. Several re-installs and reboots later, still no joy. I decided to see what I could get done in Parallels.

In Parallels, things were actually quite a bit worse. The BlackBerry shows up under Device Manager, but the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software would not connect to it. Without that connection, the Sprint Connection Manager software didn’t want to do anything.

In desperation, I went back to Boot Camp and after trying a few more things, finally called Sprint tech support. I got disconnected twice after waiting on hold, but the 3rd guy I spoke with was actually quite helpful. We went through a number of hoops, but no success. Finally, he ran across something that advised us to reinstall the phone OS software. I downloaded the 40MB installer from Sprint and ran it – it didn’t appear to do anything, but it must have.

When I tried using the Sprint Connection kit again, it worked! A speed test showed a 350kb connection – not bad. A 1MB file download took 24 seconds. 🙂

Now I’m uninstalling and reinstalling all the components in Parallels in the hopes I can get it working there. So far I can’t get the BlackBerry Desktop Manager to connect to the BlackBerry in Parallels – even though I can see it in the Device Manager. Not sure why that is, but it’s a show stopper. I’m not alone here, so I’m giving up for now. If you know what would make a device show up properly in XP but not be seen by the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software, please enlighten me.

Hopefully Daniel’s solution will be available soon and I can skip the “use Windows” hack altogether.