"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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An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America.
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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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Battery backups can save your butt during a blackout, but they're usually pretty pricey. Best Buy has one on sale for $29.99.
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When work deadlines loom or the pressure of office life is turned up a notch itâs not uncommon for many of us to sit at our desks and stare at our computer screens for hours at a time without a break.
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By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Feb. 25--Every night after the kids have gone to bed and the house grows quiet, I go upstairs and enter a digital world. I'm a sick man.   I start my computer and get to work.
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Technology workers who donât see themselves as passionate, creative professionals, and who lack commitment to their work, will inevitably occupy the lower strata of the future job market. Iâve said that before. My new corollary to that is that all working people are consumers even on company time. We need to feel impressed and inspired by the tools and materials weâre given.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!
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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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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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Blog: How is a city of professional line-standers and BlackBerry addicts responding to the much-hyped new gadget?
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The company behind the BlackBerry, the wireless email service many Americans now cannot live without, unveiled Tuesday plans for a new version of the device for workaholic Japan.
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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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By DAVID BAUDER  NEW YORK - 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 - and get a reality check when they wake before dawn to check the ratings on their Blackberrys.
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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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The second lengthy BlackBerry outage 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.
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The upcoming BlackBerry 8820 with support for cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity is intriguing, but it won't have much of an impact on enterprises, experts claim.
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By ANICK JESDANUN Associated Press  I've never wanted a BlackBerry and the 24-hour access to e-mail it provides. I figure I ought to enjoy my time away from a computer to read, think or listen to podcasts on my iPod.