After three days of annoying Blackberry data disruptions rending your Blackberry Smartphone into a mere dumbphone, Blacberry users worldwide can rejoice!
RIM held a 10:00AM conference call with investors and media, and in the conference call CO-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis said all services are back up and running. Currently backlog of messages are being “flushed” for some North American users.
The outage was caused by core-routing hardware in their network operation centres. When the initial problem occurred, it caused a snow ball effect resulting in the three day outage.
Balsille said RIM will work with carriers to compensate users, but have not come up with any difitive plans as their focus has been solely to get service back up and running.
As if RIM wasn’t losing market share to Android and Apple fast enough already merely because of their lack of innovation in the past half decade, here’s more gas to the fire.
For the third day in a row, Blackberry users are in the midst of a major Blackberry data outage rendering their Blackberry smartphones virtually useless. Sure you can still make calls and use text messaging feature on the Blackberry, but who buys a Blackberry merely for calling and texting? The bread and butter of a Blackberry, its messaging service, from e-mail to Blackberry Messenger are all unavailable due to the RIM data outage.
Blackberry users cannot access their internet browsers, use third party applications like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Instant Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, WhatsApp and etc…
After a decade of a near perfect track record for stability and reliabiliity without outages, RIM users have experienced nearly 10 outages in the last 2 years.
With the Apple iPhone coming out later this week, the Samsung Nexus Prime is rumoured to be released in a couple of weeks, and dozens of Android devices being released every year, it does not look good for RIM shares.
If you’re looking to get yourself the new Blackberry Torch 9800, here’s a great deal from Costco!
Wireless Wave locations in Costco stores are offering a $100 gift card for new subscribers activating a Blackberry Torch 9800 with Rogers, Bell or Virgin Mobile.
The 3 yr price is $179 (everywhere).
Only for new activations
You will have to sign a 3 yr contract with Voice + Data
As part of Telus’s “Go Pink” campaign, Telus will donate $25 to Breast Cancer research for every Pink Blackberry Peark 9100 and Pink Blackberry Curve 8530 sold.
The funds will go directly to purchase digital mammography machines for women in your local community.
The following hospitals are involved as partners in the campaign:
British Columbia’s Women’s Hospital & Health Centre Foundation
Alberta Cancer Foundation
Saskatchewan Cancer Agency
Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation (Toronto)
Ottawa Hospital Foundation
Segal Cancer Centre at the Jewish General Hospital (Montreal)
Research in Motion released a demo video of their upcoming operating system for the Blackberry Smartphone. Version 6.0 of the O.S. is poised to win back smartphone users who have switched to the iPhone over the past couple of years.
Some analyst say, it might be too little too late. With the debacle that was the Blackberry Storm (RIM’s first touch screen smartphone, self proclaimed iPhone killer) many users have very little confidence in RIM’s ability to make a smartphone aimed at the touch screen market.
RIM is hoping OS 6.0 will win-back some iPhone users.
Pictures of the upcoming version of Blackberry Desktop Manager were found on bbnews.pl a couple of days ago. From all indications, there aren’t sweeping changes in the functions or features of the software, but there are couple of nice additions. Two features stand out.
1. Podcast (No specific information as to what this does)
2. Media Card memory info (self explanatory)
I’d imagine version 6.0 of the Blackberry desktop software should be available to the public in the very near future.
Crackberry is reporting Blackberry’s native Twitter application “Twitter for Blackberry” will be available to the public on March 31st. Current the application is only available under a closed beta testing program.
It’s unclear as to how RIM’s twitter client will be better than existing clients such as Ubertwitter, TwitterBerry and TweetGenius just to name a few.
RIM announced today they’ve released the Blackberry Presenter to public. It’s available for sale and in-stock at Blackberry’s online store (ShopBlackberry.com) for $199 USD.
Now that we know it’s available for purchase, what exactly can we do with the Blackberry Presenter?
With the Blackberry Presenter, you do not need a laptop or a desktop computer to show a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.
Here’s a small snippet of the product description from Blackberry’s website,
… you simply plug it into a projector or monitor, and present Microsoft® PowerPoint® files wirelessly from your BlackBerry® smartphone. While presenting, view your speaker notes or loop slides when you’re at that big convention. And, when you need to reference information on a different slide to answer that critical question, you can easily freeze your presentation on the overhead display while you search through your deck on your BlackBerry smartphone…
It’s pretty neat, but how people will actually use this?
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