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Do you have sensitive or confidential information on your BlackBerry? If so, you should really set up the device with a password. Take it from me, the guy who seems to misplace everything at one point or another. If you leave your BlackBerry in a cab or on the train, you never know who’s going to pick it up. If you don’t put a password on your device, they can gain instant access to all the information stored on it, including the memory card. If you want to protect your device against you losing or misplacing it, I’d recommend following these steps to password protect it.

As you might have guessed, you’re going to go to Options, then Security, then General Settings. The top option there is Password, and that’s what we’re going to deal with. You’ll change it from Disabled to Enabled. Yeah, that was tough, right? Of course, there’s a bit more that goes to this.

The next item under Password is Number of Password Attempts. This is, as the name suggests, the maximum number of times you can enter in a wrong password before the device wipes itself. The minimum is three, and the max is 10. If you’re the forgetful type, like yours truly, set it to 10. That means you can enter in 10 wrong passwords before your device goes back to the factory default.

I cannot emphasize this enough, so I will put it in italic font: If you exceed the Number of Password Attempts, your Blackberry will wipe itself. So be careful.

Under that you’ll see Security Timeout. By default it is set to two minutes, which means that after two minutes of inactivity your BlackBerry locks itself. This way, if you do misplace it and it was unlocked, it will lock itself and your data will be behind the password. You can set this at intervals from one minute to one hour.

Finally, you’ll see Prompt on Application Install. This means just what it says. If you set it to Yes, you’ll have to enter your password when you install a new application.

You might also be interested in the Lock Handheld Upon Holstering option. If you holster your BlackBerry and have a password on it, you might want to set this to no. It might be a pain to enter in a password every time you pull the phone out of the holster.

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