Keeping Your BlackBerry Bold Safe

The folks at RIM take security seriously, and so should you. Always set up a password on your BlackBerry Bold. If your BlackBerry Bold hasn’t prompted you to set up a password, you should immediately do so. Here’s how it’s done:


1. From the BlackBerry Bold Home screen, select the Options (wrench) icon.
2. Select the Password option.
3. Highlight the Password field, and then select Enabled. All this does for now is enable the Password feature. You won’t be prompted to type a password until you save the changes you just made.
4. Click the Set Password button. At this time, you should be prompted to enter a new password.
If you have set a password before, the button will be called Change Password.
5. Type a password, and then type it again for verification.
From this point on, whenever you lock your BlackBerry Bold and want to use it again, you have to type the password. How do you lock your BlackBerry Bold? Good question. Keep reading.


When you set your password on a BlackBerry Bold, you must make sure that you know what letters your password uses and not just which keys you pressed. You need the same password if you link your BlackBerry Bold with BlackBerry Bold Desktop Manager for synchronization.


Setting up your password is a good first step, but just having a password won’t help much if you don’t take the further step of locking your BlackBerry Bold when you aren’t using it. (You don’t want people at the office or sitting at the next table at the coffee shop checking out your e-mails or phone history when you take a bathroom break, do you?) So, how do you lock your BlackBerry Bold? Let us count the ways. . . . we came up with two.


You can go the Autolock after Timeout (also known as Security Timeout) route by following these steps:


1. From the BlackBerry Bold Home screen, select the Options icon.
2. Select the Password option.
The Password screen appears.
3. Highlight the Security Timeout field, and then select the desired minutes.
The preset times range from 1 minute to 1 hour.
4. Press the Menu key, and then select Save.

If you’re more the hands-on kind of person, you can go the Manual Lockout route by scrolling to the keyboard Lock icon on your Home screen and pressing the trackball. (Pressing K while at the Home screen does the same thing.Make sure to turn off the Dial from Home Screen option.