"BlackBerry blackouts" aim for life/work balance
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It may be wishful thinking, but a Canadian government ministry has sent out a directive to its employees urging them to relax and not to use their BlackBerry smartphones at night or on weekends and holidays.
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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.
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By The Record, Hackensack, N.J.  May 24--BYE BYE BLACKBERRY, SAY TELEFLIP AFICIONADOS: Do you have Blackberry envy?   If you're in business, you might.
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In the not-too-distant future, the U.S. government would like to be able to wake up residents in the middle of the night when a hurricane or tornado threatens, perhaps by sounding the alarm on a cellphone.
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Those who don't mind carrying a paperweight already have plenty of options for "smart" phones that do more than just make calls. The rest of us are stuck with a sad compromise between size and function.
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Although mobile phones have long been a part of the business community, they are quietly becoming entrenched in personal lives.
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What happens when it all goes wrong? When people get issued with their first mobile email device, they invariably get obsessed for a period of time with the novelty of the thing. A few, sadly, remain addicted and never move on from this phase, giving rise to the "CrackBerry" label among BlackBerry users, the occasional divorce, and perhaps the odd nervous breakdown.â¦
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Investor's Business Daily - Until recently, hearing aid wearers had to manually switch modes on their devices when they used a cell phone.
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The three-hour outage in Research in Motion's BlackBerry service has yet to be fully explained, but highlights two old stories: the problems with a single point of failure, and the CrackBerry.
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Using a mobile phone before going to bed could stop you getting a decent night's sleep, research suggests.
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[Technology India]: Washington, Nov 26 : How about a cellphone that can intelligently advise you on what or what not to do based on your track record?
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An analyst rants Opinion Let me begin with a warning that am about to get on one of my hobby horses. This one has to do with the notion that modern wireless and mobile technology is largely about enabling people to become more mobile in the way they live and work, as if they were previously chained to one location and magically liberated by the latest gadgetry and connectivity. The notion seems to be that having access to email and other applications while mobile means that people are getting out and about more.â¦
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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.
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Change a light bulb and stop a war. Build smarter homes and keep the seas from rising.
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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 ...
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NEW YORK, Sept 4  - Colleagues tapping away busily  on their BlackBerry, phone or laptop at the office might not be  as productive as they seem -- with one in four video gamers  admitting playing at work, even in meetings, according to an  online survey.
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Ziff Davis - This is a great time to have broadband. Also: Dual-connect mobile phones, life beyond iPod, multiple music sources, and cheap backup.&#149;Welcome to the Broadband World &#149;Wi-Fi Phones: A Natural Duo &#149;More Choices in Music Players... &#149;...And in Music Services &#149;Time to Back Up