Blackberry Pearl Voicemail “Invalid phone number”

I received a voicemail this morning and when I did the usual “push and hold 1″ to get into voicemail, I got a very non-descript error message that said “Invalid phone number”.  This has worked flawlessly for months, so I figured some update had happened overnight.  I called technical support.  The overly chipper CSR had me power-cycle the phone via battery removal and, after that didn’t work, told me to just dial 123 to access my voicemail.

I got off the phone with her slightly miffed that I didn’t have a better solution to that, so I dug around on the internet and found several people with the same problem.  One person suggested sending an OTA to the phone which seemed like a pretty good idea, so I called support back.  They put me into level 2 Blackberry support and the CSR sent me an OTA as requested.  It took a minute to come through, but it failed to solve the problem.  A few more attempts at changing the voicemail access number and some test calls led the CSR to believe that the phone’s software had somehow become corrupted, and that I needed to use the application loader to re-shove the settings onto the phone.

While I’m sure that would have worked, I ran across another post describing my very problem.  The solution was rather simple, albeit extremely non-obvious:

  1. Go into the Call Log
  2. Press Menu
  3. Go to View Speed Dial List
  4. Highlight the #1 entry and Delete it
  5. Power off the phone
  6. Remove the battery

As the phone comes back up, it will put the system voicemail setting back into the speed dial slot 1, and the problem goes away.