I was helping a friend move into another House that was a total wreck. Apparently the previous tennents had been evicted. Anyway... among a mountain of junk was an original Blackberry. Now... amazingly it powers up and charged ok but heres the issue. It says invalid sim yet seems to show some custom settings from T-mobile. In addition there is no browser, no BBM and no app world. I'm not even sure it will work on something that old but I just thought i'd see how far I could get with it. Any Advice?

Try putting a working Tmobile SIM into it

it does. Its the same sim I use for my main phone

I remember those blackberrys. The battery would last for days

apparently it needs unlocking but i'm not going to waste money on that until I figure out why it has no browser. according to the specs it should have a very basic one

Go to the menu and perform a wipe and then see if you have a browser. Wi-Fi will work but you can't use BBM, App World etc without a BB tarriff.

Perhaps You are receiving this message because the blackberry is locked to T-Mobile. Contact the carrier. And your browser is not showing... Have you downloaded a "screen snapshot" app? If so, you'll have to delete it. One of my friend has same problem and he did the same and got its browser again.