H.O.D 0 Report post Posted October 13, 2011 Checking my email on my blackberry is one of the first things that I do on a regular working day. There are at least a couple of emails that get delivered during the night, and they happen to be important emails pertaining to my business. I wake up everyday to see the little red light flashing on my phone. I've got used to this routine for quite a while now. So you can imagine what a shock it would be to suddenly wake up one day and realise the light wasn't flashing! I thought that perhaps I hadn't received any email. It didn't occur to me to check my inbox from the PC. But later in the day I found out that I had in fact received half-a-dozen emails in the night, and the reason I hadn't seen the red light flashing was that there was an "outage" in the blackberry servers, and this happened halfway across the world.At the time of writing this, the problem has been fixed and emails/messages are being delivered normally on blackberry handsets all around the world. But the 12-24 hours during which this incident took place was really scary. What if it had stayed like that for a few more days? A lot of blackberry users might have become angry with the company and moreover, they would lose a lot of important emails unless they decide to check their inbox on the PC! Blackberry is well known for its robust email delivery architecture, but the strength of the system has been its weakness too, and this is something to really worry about for a lot of people. Apple and Google (Android) are slowly but surely catching up with RIM (Blackberry) in terms of delivering/pushing emails. BB might still be the king of emails but the competition isn't slow either. A couple of my friends who own iPhones have told me that they receive emails quite as fast as I do on my BB. The BB outage has thankfully ended but I do get the doubt if such an incident can happen again, and if it does, will it be the end of blackberry? Except for email, no one is seriously using a BB for anything else! So it would be good if such outages were avoided in the near future, soon. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
yordan 10 Report post Posted October 13, 2011 they would lose a lot of important emails unless they decide to check their inbox on the PC!that's the point : you don't loose the mails, simply you can't read them on your usual device. That's the same problem as when you loose your phone network, because the antenna near your house is out of order for a couple of hours. No lost, simply you don't have the needed info at the needed moment.Of course, if you are at home and you really wait for an urgent mail, I guess you will accept to power up your PC as a help of diagnosis.Except for email, no one is seriously using a BB for anything else!Not quite true. Also for SMS, having a real keyboard is very useful. I prefer the BB keystokes mechanical "click" rather than the Iphone loudspeaker "blurp". Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mahesh2k 0 Report post Posted October 13, 2011 I have BB and i can tell you that sometimes ISP also makes mistakes with BB service. I recently got jailbreaked version of BB and not using BB messenger anymore. I am using opera mini on it and it is the application which is open 24x7. Also i have notifo software service enabled which lets me know if i get emails from particular clients and web services. For example, if any email comes from paypal i get notified in the SMS section. So that way i keep track of the services. This type of work may be hard to setup at first but it helps you make platform independent. I mean you don't have to worry about such service from blackberry and android app. I think this type of way could give you one option in case of outages. I can understand we buy blackberrry for taking care of all these hassles. But sometimes external service in pipe method gives much better and reliable option of doing work. This is what i think. Blackberry is useful for those who type a lot. Because touch screen based devices are really annoying and often not suitable for those who have big fingers and find it hard to type on touch screen. But i have to agree that blackberry is not entrainment device and lack of FM and bad speakers proves the point. But for the automation stuff, i think they have some serious tools in business and "get things category". For everything else there are always android, iphone and other devices. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
H.O.D 0 Report post Posted October 13, 2011 that's the point : you don't loose the mails, simply you can't read them on your usual device. That's the same problem as when you loose your phone network, because the antenna near your house is out of order for a couple of hours. No lost, simply you don't have the needed info at the needed moment.Of course, if you are at home and you really wait for an urgent mail, I guess you will accept to power up your PC as a help of diagnosis. Yes, that was actually a confusing choice of words on my part. Losing email just refers to not being able to access emails immediately. The losing factor comes into consideration especially when the user is unable to get near a computer to check the emails. This could happen while traveling (not necessarily) and when the only way of accessing email is through the phone. That would surely be a sticky situation; not being able to have access to emails on an important day, and not being able to get access to a PC could be very irritating. As I'm writing this, my emails/browsing services have been fully restored by BB and I'm very glad indeed. But I just hope there aren't any more such incidents again!Not quite true. Also for SMS, having a real keyboard is very useful. I prefer the BB keystokes mechanical "click" rather than the Iphone loudspeaker "blurp".SMS is okay, but I guess most people would miss BBM! I completely forgot about it because I do not use it. But as I was reading other articles on the net, I found that more than email, BB users were missing BBM Anyway, the service might be back in other areas also by now so here's hoping that the service does not die out again anytime soon. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
FirefoxRocks 0 Report post Posted October 24, 2011 I don't email on my BlackBerry (my data package only includes unlimited Facebook, Twitter and BBM) but the BBM outage really did make me wonder why my messages weren't being received. Some of my friends could send and can't receive messages in the later part of the outage, while I could receive but not send.This CNET writer feels rather betrayed and heartbroken by RIM after this BlackBerry outage: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/I'm really glad that I have most of my BBM contacts' phone numbers so I can text them in the event of an outage, which I did shortly after I figured out that the BlackBerry network was out, and it wasn't a provider or university-area specific thing. Also only a smaller portion of my friends use BlackBerrys or other smartphones, most of them still use regular cell phones. I preferred the keyboard on my LG slider phone over this BlackBerry Bold keyboard.From a business perspective for people who depend on their BlackBerrys for email then yes I would say that this was a significant issue.Also interesting is this: Joy of BlackBerry Outage: Fewer Arab car smashes Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
