Fixing trackball scrolling issues in phones

If you own a Nexus one or any other phone with a trackball (e.g. several models of Blackberrys) and are running into scrolling issues, you may want to try the following home cure before calling the customer support. The symptoms that the following cure may help with are trackball not scrolling in one or two directions, scrolling is jerky or the scrolling sometimes works and sometimes not.

Take a clean sheet of some soft paper e.g. a napkin, and keep your phone face down on it. Apply a small pressure so that the trackball is in the clicked position. Now drag the phone around on the paper, in this position, so that the trackball rolls beneath it. After a few tries this should get your trackball working.

Scrolling problems are likely due to dirt and grime being stuck below the ball and preventing the ball from transferring the motion to the sensors (Like it happens in good old ball mouses). The best thing would be to open up the phone and clean the area below the trackball properly or pop out the trackball and do the same. Other remedy is use of some spirit to do the cleaning. In absence of these options, above should provide immediate relief.