Blackberry: Not so Smart Phone

I was making my usual holiday rounds, bar hopping from pub to club to see old friends and new in Boston. Bars around here can get pretty rowdy, especially when the Patriots game is on in Southie, so I rely on my trusty Blackberry texting and instant-messaging service to keep me in the loop. But Blackberry let me down this week. I missed a multitude of text messages and many more beers and cheers because of the Blackberry outage that took place on Tuesday night. Not cool to say the least. At its height, the eight hour outage hit "100 percent of North American users, with South America affected as well," according to CNN, impacting thousands of companies that run on the service, as well as the U.S. government, which is heavily reliant on Blackberry. That is cause for concern.

The second Blackberry outage in a week is an indicator that Research in Motion Ltd., maker of the leading smart phone, is struggling to stay ahead of stiff competition and a ballooning customer base. This week's shutdown appeared to be an unintended consequence of a software upgrade. But RIM provided little support or explanation for failure to users, wireless carriers and news media. The telecomm giant issued a brief statement that said new versions of its instant-messaging software caused "an unanticipated database issue within the Blackberry infrastructure.

Blackberry's strength and weakness lie in highly centralized data network. All information sent via Blackberry passes through one of RIM's three data centers. This means that messages traveling through the system are highly secure and allows RIM to minimize the system overloads that Apple's iPhone has done to AT&T's decentralized network. The downside is that any failure to the system can cut off millions of users immediately.

Blackberry users like myself are increasingly dependent on the device for email, gps, news, sports and many other apps. The disruption put users in an uproar - will it be enough to influence their purchasing behavior when buying their next smartphone? Wireless industry analysts assert that Blackberry is still the most reliable system on the market today. Dissatisfied users face a tough choice between the occasional outage or generally poor service.