Hasta La Gadget!

A flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger appears to be the cause of Tuesday night’s BlackBerry e-mail outage, Research in Motion said in a Wednesday morning statement.

“Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure,” according to RIM. “RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.”

RIM released a new version of BlackBerry Messenger (version 5.0.0.57) and encouraged any user who upgraded their Messenger since Dec. 14 to download the lastest version.

“RIM continues to monitor its systems to maintain normal service levels and apologizes for any inconvenience to customers,” the company said.

Fact: most phones last. Thing is, for us (and likely many of you), they last far longer than our clinically-diagnosed Gadget Attention Deficit Disorder would ever tolerate — but for your dad, your sister, your college buddy with the hand-me-down ZEOS Pantera running Windows 95, or anyone weary of re-upping a two-year commitment, a handset can easily become a serious long-term investment. That helps explain why Motorola’s venerable RAZR series remains staggeringly high on Nielsen’s latest US phone usage report — third place, to be exact, at 2.3 percent of all subscribers behind the iPhone 3G at 4 percent and RIM’s BlackBerry Curve line at 3.7 percent. Needless to say, that doesn’t mean the ancient V3 line is still in third place for sales — it’s more a testament to the staggeringly huge RAZR user base Moto managed to develop over the years, many of whom scored their phones at sub-$100 price points as an attractive, midrange value in the phone’s twilight and have no intention of upgrading any time soon if they don’t have to. Maybe the most interesting part of this is that two V3 variants are also topping 2009’s most-recycled list, so they’re definitely getting taken out of circulation — it just might take a few years yet before you don’t know anyone that uses one, that’s all.

Nielsen stats: a lot of iPhones out there, but also a lot of everything else originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look, BlackBerrys are always supposed to do a few things well: 1) grab your email in real time off an Exchange server; 2) make you look important; and 3) work. It seems, though, that we’re working on our third major North American outage here in less than a month, with reports flowing in that users connected to BIS are having trouble with Messenger, web browsing, and apps that consume data (though email is inexplicably unaffected). Anyone out there seeing problems?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

BlackBerry services down in North America yet again? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thinking about how your phone’s touchscreen operates, you might assume that the so-called optical pads that have been making appearances on recent BlackBerrys (among other devices) operate in a similar fashion — but you’d be wrong. RIM’s official BlackBerry blog is chiming in today to drop some knowledge on us dullards, and it turns out that “optical” isn’t just a cute nickname — the pads do actually operate in much the same way as modern desktop mice, using a low-res infrared camera to capture movement across the surface and translate it into movement. In practical terms, what this means is that you don’t need a conductive surface to operate the pad — you can use pretty much anything that the sensor can see, so a gloved hand (for instance) is theoretically good to go. That being said, don’t expect to be snapping photos with your “camera” any time soon — we’re literally talking about a handful of grayscale pixels here, which should make it only marginally better than the Droid’s cam.

RIM’s optical trackpads: they weren’t joking about the ‘optical’ part originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlackBerry customers in North America are seeing some delays in receiving e-mails on their devices, according to Research in Motion.

Users “may be currently experiencing delays receiving email” though calling services and PIN-to-PIN is not affected, according to the Wall Street Journal.

RIM did not provide any information on what caused the outage. Some reports say the problems started as early as 3:15 A.M..

UPDATE: “RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning. Some customers may still experience delays as email queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience.”