Blackberry OS10 devices are end-of-life and Blackberry made no efforts to leave their products in a usable state after shutting down their servers. This means if you get want to reset a device, or otherwise get your hands on an unitialized device, that getting them into an usable state again is non-trivial.
A Blackberry Passport device I own also used "Blackberry Protect", an anti-theft measure that is (or rather was) coupled to the Blackberry Servers. When this feature is active then resetting the device is even more complicated then it already is.
The usual way to reset a Blackberry device is via "Settings -> Security -> Security Wipe". If your device has "Blackberry Protect" setup, then this won't work, though. To get around this a clean Blackberry 10 OS image can be flashed from a Windows PC. Follow these steps to do so:
- Download the Blackerry Window desktop software e.g. from here: https://gofile-3341543968.us6.quickconnect.to/fsdownload/tiDpVKXoH/BlackBerryDesktopSoftware_1.2.0.52_B59.exe
- You only need to install the USB device drivers for Blackberry devices
- You need to get an autoloader image file matching your device e.g. from here: https://archive.org/details/blackberry10-autoloaders
- Connect the device via USB to a Window PC with the Blackberry USB driver installed. Run the autoloader from a privileged cmd.exe shell to flash the device. You will need to provide your device password to complete this.
After doing this the device will have a freshly installed OS and will boot into the device setup. This will not be possible to complete and will be stuck in the "Connect to WiFi" step, because the Blackberry servers cannot be reached. To get around this, follow these steps:
- if "Blackberry Protect" is not active on the device the follow the instruction from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackberryPhoenix/comments/sw5mcj/ultimate_fix_for_devices_stuck_on_setup_including/
- otherwise it'll get more complicated. You'll need to follow these extra instructions: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackberryPhoenix/comments/1es1kpn/how_to_remove_blackberry_protect/
I had to play around a couple of times, enabling/disabling the speech assistant, shutting down the device three times and rebooting until the speech assisstant offered the option to skip the creation of a Blackberry ID. After that it still got stuck with a connection error a couple of screens later. Look at this guide to get around this: https://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-10-os-f269/fix-bb10-devices-stuck-setup-sideloading-issue-1193846/
If all that succeeds, after waiting a couple of minutes for the update check to time out you should have regular access to the reset device. Apps can be sideloaded by following various howtos and download URLs on the net.