'BlackBerry Blackouts' Urged for Work/Life Balance
13938
A Canadian agency tells employees to give their addictive handhelds a rest -- at least off business hours.
615399
Some people love their Research in Motion BlackBerrys. Some hate them. Still, countless federal employees think they must have one.
385729
Constantly talking on your cellphone is making you less independent and less able to experience your life as fully as you should.
365673
International wireless solutions manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) believes the days of disconnected PDAs are gone. The BlackBerry-maker said that users&#39; information is changing too rapidly for disconnected
735738
Executives who are longtime BlackBerry users will have to teach their right thumb some new tricks if they switch to a model introduced on Monday.
346045
E-mail service of Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones experienced a "critical severity outage" on Monday, the company told clients in an e-mail.
421436
NEW YORK -- BlackBerry smart phones have lost service across the United States, wireless carriers said Monday.
370044
People are becoming addicted to mobile phones, causing them to become stressed and irritable, psychologists say.
64077
With a new television season starting Monday, this is the time of year network executives go to sleep with visions of big hits in their heads &#151; and get a reality check when they wake before dawn to check the ratings on their Blackberrys.
265615
The second lengthy&#160;BlackBerry outage&#160;in less than a year has one consulting company advising clients not to rely solely on the popular smart phones for critical e-mail messages.Enterprises that really need e-mail responses in less than eight hours to run their businesses should have a backup for the BlackBerry, Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Tuesday, in the wake of a crash that lasted about three hours on Monday. They should also set up an independent system to notify them whether an important contact has received or replied to an e-mail message, Dulaney said.Late Tuesday, RIM said the outage was caused by a problem with an internal data routing system in the BlackBerry service infrastructure that had recently been upgraded. That upgrade was part of an ongoing expansion of the network, and this type of change had been done previously with no problems, it said.Monday&#39;s failure followed&#160;a longer outage in April 2007&#160;that RIM attributed to a problem with a minor software upgrade and a subsequent glitch in a failover process.There are about 12 million BlackBerry users worldwide, on a variety of mobile carriers. The crash Monday affected users throughout the U.S. and Canada, preventing them from sending or receiving e-mail or carrying out some other functions, though&#160;no messages were permanently lost, according to RIM.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney had harsh words for RIM, saying he had given the company a break after last year&#39;s failure.&quot;This does not appear to be a mission-critical system with the highest service-level agreements, and therefore, to entrust ... that a message will get to the end point is being a bit foolhardy,&quot; Dulaney said. He advises enterprises that are worried about dependability to ask RIM for details of its backup system and make their own decisions.After last year&#39;s outage, RIM said it would enhance aspects of its testing, monitoring and recovery processes.&quot;RIM has made significant investments to improve its system recovery infrastructure and processes over the last year, which enabled service levels to return to normal quickly,&quot; the company said Tuesday.&quot;They obviously didn&#39;t do as deep a dive as they needed to on disaster recovery issues,&quot; Dulaney said. But he acknowledged the failure could have been caused by something completely unexpected.The BlackBerry, which RIM introduced in 1999, quickly became the most popular tool for mobile &quot;push&quot; e-mail that automatically comes to a portable device with a wireless network connection. All current BlackBerry models are also phones, and the company now offers a wide variety of handsets with consumer-oriented features such as cameras, Web browsers and social-networking capabilities. But to get to and from the handhelds, e-mail messages traverse a complex system involving mobile operator networks, RIM&#39;s network operation centers and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers within companies.Adding consumer features and keeping up with rapid customer growth, such as adding 1.65 million users in the quarter ended last Dec. 1, have probably made it harder for RIM to keep its network running smoothly, said Albert Lin, an analyst at investment bank Sooner Cap. But users accept some level of risk if they want such complex services at reasonable prices, he said. The only truly reliable system is the public switched telephone network, and it has limited functionality, Lin said.&quot;When it comes to reliable push e-mail ... it&#39;s still hard to find a solution that works better than BlackBerry,&quot; Lin said.Gartner&#39;s Dulaney acknowledged that competitors, such as Visto and Good Technology (now owned by Motorola), are probably not significantly more dependable.It wouldn&#39;t be impossible to make the RIM network more reliable, the analysts said.&quot;They have the technical capability to spend more and make it more reliable, but is that what their owners and shareholders really want?&quot; Lin said.Google, for example, has a more highly distributed network, but that would take money and time, and many customers wouldn&#39;t want to pay for it, Dulaney said. In the future, RIM may choose to create a higher-end service with greater service assurances and a higher price, he said.
612391
BlackBerry users in North America experienced problems when the e-mail service shut down, delaying messages for a day.
498272
Research In Motion    said late on Tuesday that a problem with a routine upgrade of  an internal data-routing system appears to have caused the  massive outage that left BlackBerry users across the Americas  with spotty or nonexistent wireless e-mail service for three  hours on Monday.
736933
An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America.
445459
Do your employees have a "Crackberry" problem? Their compulsive BlackBerry monitoring could backfire on you: Checking e-mail via BlackBerry gives employees a sense of control but leads to more stress, according to a recent study from the MIT Sloan School of Management that examined BlackBerry use and organizational behavior. And this problem starts at the top.
63370
Because life's isn't just a bowl of BlackBerries Workshop roundup As mobility has entered the mainstream, most of the focus to date - at least in the media and among analysts - has been on connecting up mobile professionals via BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices and laptop data cards.â¦
728751
Achieving work-life balance is already a juggling act. Throw a second job into the mix, and it can become a lot harder to perform.
524978
MOBILE phone users left talking to themselves when their battery runs out in the middle of a call could soon see an end to their frustration as scientists perfect a way to recharge electrical equipment while on the move.