BlackBerry Blackout
If you're addicted to BlackBerry, you may have had a painful few hours overnight: A service outage at BlackBerry manufacturer RIM affected an apparently large number of North American users, preventing them from getting their mobile e-mail.
To me, the interesting thing here is the fact that an issue at RIM could bring down service for large numbers of BlackBerry users, given that the BlackBerry service usually involves servers on corporate customers' own premises. It's a little like discovering that one glitch can bring down the northeast power grid--the best thing about BlackBerries is how rock-solidly reliable they usually are, and it's a shock to learn that there's anything the least bit fragile about 'em.
RIM isn't saying how many users have been affected, but I hope it comes clean and explains exactly what happened--and, assuming it's under the company's power, figure out how to prevent it from happening again.
I've been mostly a BlackBerry user for the past few months, but I escaped the outage: For the last week or so, I've been carrying a Palm Treo 750 instead. I've been having all kinds of problems with it, including the fact that Cingular's Xpress Mail hasn't been reliably getting me my messages. I'll blog about the hassles I've been experiences (as well as the Treo's virtues) at some point. But they're not RIM's fault....
If you tote a BlackBerry, this poll is for you:
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I haven't had a whole lot of experience with BlackBerry, so I don't have much to say there, but one cool thing about the Treo that I will mention is its ability to be used as a wireless music player. If you use the "M" app from Mercora through your Treo, you can access your digital music, and up to five friend's libraries (and all wirelessly). Very cool.