Wireless

Research In Motion has pushed out new software to correct a problem that left some BlackBerry users high and dry Tuesday.

Blame BlackBerry Messenger for Tuesday's data service outage.

(Credit: RIM)

A new version of BlackBerry Messenger is available that apparently fixes the problems experienced by BlackBerry customers, according to a report by BusinessWeek. For several hours on Tuesday, BlackBerry users were unable to use the data services on their phones, preventing e-mails from being received and applications from working correctly.

In a statement provided to CNET, RIM said the "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. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

BlackBerry Messenger version 5.0.0.57 is the one to install, if you're currently running either version described above, and that should be available through the phone's browser or in BlackBerry App World. Tuesday's outage follows another one last week shorter in duration.

BlackBerry Bold

(Credit: Research in Motion)

For the second time in less than a week, BlackBerry smartphone users across the country and beyond are reporting problems accessing e-mail.

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion confirmed Tuesday night that some users of the smartphone in the Americas are experiencing delays in message delivery.

"Technical teams are actively working to resolve the issue for those impacted. RIM apologizes for any inconvenience experienced by customers," read an e-mailed statement from company spokesperson Jamie Ernst. Ernst declined to elaborate, however, on the cause or extent of the outage, and offered no estimated time of repair.

This, of course, comes on the heels of similar short-lived outage on Thursday, which happened to be the same day the company announced it beat analyst expectations in the fiscal third quarter of 2009 with strong sales of its BlackBerrys.

The quality and speed of the browser is an essential feature for smartphones these days. And it's here that the BlackBerry Storm 2 has some catching up to do vis-a-vis rivals such as the iPhone 3GS.

The Storm 2 is an underrated smartphone in many respects. The interface is clean and easy to navigate, the standard software feature set competitive, and the ability to integrate all email accounts into one screen convenient.

But unbelievably--to me, at least--RIM failed to improve the browser on the Storm 2. Or let me put it this way: RIM failed to make perceptible improvements. (See RIM statement below.)

This is no small oversight. The key reason why the Motorola Droid has been a hit is because it couples a big screen with a high-quality, fast browser--making it the only premium smartphone to date in the U.S. to approach the status of the iPhone.

Which brings us to the gold standard of smartphone browsers: the Safari browser on the iPhone 3GS. This is nothing short of phenomenal. It's the closest a smartphone user can get to the full-fledged browsing on a laptop.

And the browser will only become more important as the smartphone screen size creep continues, from the 3.5-inch diagonal screen on the iPhone 3GS to the 3.7-inch screen on the Droid to the 4.1-inch display on the Toshiba TG01 (sold in Europe).

So, what was RIM thinking? The Storm 2's browser (like its predecessor's--which I had previously been using) can be glacially slow when loading Web sites. So slow that many Storm users opt for downloading the Opera Mini or Bolt browsers. But these browsers have shortcomings of their own, so they don't necessarily serve as satisfactory replacements for the Storm's built-in browser. (The Bolt browser does not zoom and Opera Mini--though blazingly fast--has trouble rendering some Web sites.)

As shown in the embedded videos, which demonstrate the load times for the CNET News page and the zoom features of the two phones, respectively, the iPhone 3GS (bottom) beats the Storm handily.

It is important to note that the Storm 2's built-in browser will speed up significantly if you turn off (uncheck) "Support javascript" in the "Browser Configuration" settings. And in the side-by-side page load-time comparisons with the iPhone 3GS (embedded videos), support for javascript is turned off.

But RIM needs to hurry up and match the competition. A fast, high-quality browser is ... Read more

Updated 3:01 p.m. PDT with information from the conference call.

On the day that Research In Motion suffered another nationwide mobile e-mail outage, it announced it beat analyst expectations in the fiscal third quarter of 2009 with strong sales of its BlackBerry smartphones.

BlackBerry Bold

(Credit: Research In Motion)

The company's earnings were up 59 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. For the period that ended November 30, the company reported earnings of $628.4 million, or $1.10 per share, compared to $396.3 million, or 69 cents a share, for the fiscal third quarter last year.

Analysts had expected the company to report earnings of $1.04 per share on revenue around $3.78 billion.

The company said it shipped 10.1 million smartphones during the quarter. And it added about 4.4 million new subscribers. Analysts were expecting shipments of 9.5 million with 4.1 million new subscribers.

Some industry watchers have wondered if the new Motorola Droid that uses Google's Android operating system would hurt BlackBerry sales. The Droid is one of two Android devices being sold for Verizon Wireless, and it is the closest competitor offered on Verizon's network to the Apple iPhone, which is sold exclusively in the U.S. for AT&T's wireless network.

Strong sales on RIM's part indicate that the Droid and other Android devices introduced during RIM's fiscal third quarter did not present a major threat to the smartphone maker.

Still, Verizon is spending more money marketing the Droid than it has on any other phone that it has sold on its network. But RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie said that Verizon continues to be an important strategic partner. And he said that the market is growing so fast that there is enough business to go around.

"The proportion of smartphones to the total market is crossing 50 percent," he said. "And we see that going to 100 percent. It's just a question of when. The overall market is growing for smartphones and we have a very important place to play in that."

But he admitted that RIM can't afford to rest on its laurels. The company's devices are favorites among corporate customers.

"At the end of the day, you can't force love," he said. "You have to earn it every day. There is no free ride in this. But we have a good sense of what we are doing in this quarter and we feel we create value everyday."

RIM's strong earnings report comes on the same day the company experienced a nationwide e-mail outage for consumers using its BlackBerry devices. Earlier Thursday before the company reported results, RIM confirmed that some BlackBerry customers were unable to get Web-based e-mail. Users getting e-mail through corporate servers were not affected, though, and phone service and text messaging were also not affected by the outage.

The problem seemed to affect customers across all major carrier networks, including Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint Nextel. AT&T would not comment and referred questions to RIM, but several AT&T customers in California and in other parts of the country said they had problems as well.

RIM said it has resolved the e-mail service problems, though e-mail may be slow to come back to some customers. The company is still looking into what caused the outage.

"RIM has isolated and resolved the issue that was impacting some BlackBerry customers earlier this morning," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail. "Some customers may still experience delays as e-mail queues are processed. RIM is continuing to investigate the cause of the issue and apologizes for any inconvenience."

Talk about unfortunate timing. Research In Motion (RIMM) has confirmed reports that Blackberry users across North America have been experiencing e-mail problems this morning. Evidently, the outage is affecting all BlackBerry users who rely on RIM's Internet-based e-mail service instead of corporate servers, regardless of carrier.

This, just hours before the company is to release its third-quarter results.

In a statement, RIM said customers "may be currently experiencing delays receiving email" but phone services and PIN-to-PIN messaging are working just fine. If offered no explanation for the service interruption, but said it engineers are doing all they can to resolve it.

Story Copyright (c) 2009 AllThingsD. All rights reserved.

As Research In Motion opens up the BlackBerry platform, it is providing new features and integration between third-party apps and core BlackBerry apps.

Alan Brenner, RIM

(Credit: RIM)

ZDNet UK spoke to Alan Brenner, a RIM senior vice president and general manager for the platform. Brenner was asked how BlackBerry competes in the crowded smartphone app market, how the handset manufacturer expects to work with developers, and what the key challenges are for the company's mobile platform.

Q: Where do you think the new APIs and the integration into core BlackBerry apps put the BlackBerry as a platform, compared with other smartphones?
Brenner: The important point is that we're different; we have a different approach from what you're seeing elsewhere in the market. This notion of enabling deep integration is distinctive, and it speaks to our traditional strength as BlackBerry.

Read more of "BlackBerry goes with the flow for developers at ZDNet UK.

I'm sure you've heard of Apple's App Store for the iPhone. But have you ever heard of an independent mobile app store called GetJar?

No? Well, that's not surprising. The tiny company now based in Silicon Valley has done virtually no marketing. And yet in the nearly five years it's been around, the company has managed to build the second largest application store front for mobile phones in the world, likely making it the biggest mobile app store you've never heard of.

The privately held Getjar claims it has nearly 57,000 applications in its store, making it second only to Apple in terms of total applications. Apple just announced this week that it now has more than 100,000 applications in its store.

Google's Android Market, which launched earlier this year has more than 10,000 applications. Research in Motion's BlackBerry App World has just more than 2,000 applications available today, according to estimates.

Since Getjar's virtual store went live in early 2005, about 650 million applications have been downloaded. And momentum has been growing. For the month of October, Getjar executives say the company saw its users download 55 million applications, which is a 267 percent increase over the same month a year ago when 15 million mobile applications were downloaded. And the company says that it has more than 300,000 registered developers uploading applications to its site.

Meanwhile, Apple's much-hyped and heavily marketed iTunes App Store, which is nearly twice the size of Getjar, as of September had more than 2 billion app downloads since the store was launched in July 2008. And executives at Apple recently said the company had 125,000 developers on its roster. By comparison, the Android Market has had an estimated 40 million downloads since it went live earlier this year.

GetJar got its start not as an application store but as a beta testing Web site for mobile developers. GetJar founder and CEO Ilja Laurs had started the site to allow developers a way to test their applications on a variety of handsets.

"Originally, we were trying to help developers who couldn't get access to certain phones for testing," he said. "But then developers came to us and asked if they could use the site to also distribute their applications."

And so the GetJar application store was born in early 2005. At first, the site attracted mostly hard-core mobile application fans. But over the years, word of the site has spread, and users all over the world come to GetJar to download different applications.

Unlike most of the other application stores that have been announced recently, GetJar's store offers mobile applications for almost any phone.

"With the GetJar store, consumers don't have to worry about whether they have an Android phone or a Java phone," said Patrick Mork, vice president of marketing for GetJar. "They don't need to know which model Nokia they have. We take the fragmentation out of the equation by auto-detecting what apps can run on which phones and offering consumers those applications."

The way it works is that GetJar is able to detect the type of phone a wireless subscriber is using when they connect to the GetJar mobile Web site. It can also detect the type of phone used from the regular Web site using a wireless subscriber's phone number.

A screen shot of a GetJar download page for the Facebook shortcut link.

(Credit: GetJar)

Based on this information, GetJar is able to direct app shoppers to the applications that will work on their phones.

"If there is a BlackBerry app available and you are using a BlackBerry you will get that application," Mork said. "But if you're on a feature phone, you'll likely get a shortcut link."

This is yet another important differentiator for GetJar. Unlike device or operating system specific app stores, such as Apple's App Store or Android Market, GetJar also provides millions of consumers using basic feature phones an app-like experience, even if a specific application hasn't been developed for their particular phone.

For example, GetJar has worked with Facebook to provide a downloadable shortcut link that leads to the Facebook mobile Web site for wireless subscribers who are not using a smartphone for which a special Facebook application has been developed.

While the link is not really a native application for that specific device, the link appears on the phone's menu and provides access via the phone's browser to a mobile Web site. For consumers, the experience is very similar to that of a native application that has been downloaded to a smartphone.

"Facebook didn't have a strategy for developing applications for Motorola Razrs and Samsung Instincts" Mork said. "So they teamed up with us to get around that problem by providing short cut links. It's really not an app. But the beauty of it is that it allows any company to play in the app game from a shortcut."

And for brands, such as Facebook, the shortcut increases their mobile presence. Before it started working with GetJar, Facebook would get between 100,000 and 150,000 downloads per week from its mobile site. After the shortcut, links were available on the GetJar site and on Facebook's site, Facebook started to see 1.5 million mobile downloads per week, Mork said.

But GetJar does have some limitations. One major limitation for consumers in the U.S. is that GetJar cannot offer applications to most phones operating on Verizon Wireless's network. The reason is that Verizon uses a closed platform called BREW on many of its phones. And there is no way for third-party application developers to create applications for these devices without going through Verizon's BREW approval process. But BREW is a legacy platform for Verizon, and newer smartphones on Verizon, such as BlackBerry devices and the new Android phones, will be able to access applications from GetJar.

GetJar also doesn't explicitly serve apps to iPhone users, again because the iPhone platform is closed. But iPhone users can use the GetJar store to discover new applications and GetJar can redirect those users to the Apple App Store, where they can download the applications.

Yet another limitation is that GetJar does not offer developers the ability to charge for applications. The company has not yet figured out how to bill for these applications. Instead, application developers can monetize their applications by incorporating advertising into the application or using the app on GetJar to up-sell consumers to a more robust application in a different application store.

But GetJar does allow developers to promote their applications, and the company has developed a marketplace so that developers can bid for top promotional spots on the Web site. GetJar gets paid based on how many users download these applications. Most other application stores today do not offer developers a way to promote their applications, which makes it difficult for smaller developers to get their applications noticed.

While there is no question that Apple dominates the mobile application market today, Mork admits that Apple's push into applications has been a boon for GetJar, and likely for other app stores.

"It's undeniable that Apple has had a positive effect on our business, especially in the U.S.," he said. "But we don't really compete with Apple. Still, it's clear that the mass market is just starting to catch on. And that is largely thanks to the success of Apple and its App Store."

The creator of PhoneSnoop shows how the free spyware app works in a video on his blog.

(Credit: Chirashi Security)

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned BlackBerry users on Tuesday about a new program called PhoneSnoop that allows someone to remotely eavesdrop on phone conversations.

The PhoneSnoop application must be installed on the phone by someone who has physical access to it or by tricking the user into downloading it, the CERT advisory said.

The author of the app, Sheran Gunasekera, director of security for Hermis Consulting in Jakarta, Indonesia, says it wasn't written to do any actual harm, but rather to warn of the dangers that still exist with the BlackBerry.

The application can be used by anyone to spy on any BlackBerry user's phone. However, Gunasekera says it is not hidden on the device after it's installed, so users should be able to easily see it.

"My intention was to raise awareness that even though the BlackBerry is one of the more secure platforms, there are still means where its users can be spied upon," Gunasekera wrote in an e-mail on Tuesday. "I wanted to highlight that even with such technical security controls, the human element can be exploited through social engineering."

To aid BlackBerry users who asked him how they could protect themselves from being snooped on, he said he released on Tuesday another free tool called "Kisses" that will detect and display hidden programs on the device.

On his blog, Gunasekera explains how PhoneSnoop works.

"PhoneSnoop sets up a PhoneListener and waits for an incoming call from a specific number. Once it detects a call from that specific number, it automatically answers the victims' phone and puts the phone into SpeakerPhone mode," he writes.

US-CERT said BlackBerry users should only download applications from trusted sources and password protect and lock the devices to prevent someone from installing unwanted software.

The issue of BlackBerry snooping made headlines this summer when Etisalat, a carrier in the United Arab Emirates, sent SMS messages to BlackBerry subscribers encouraging them to download a patch that security experts said was spyware.

SMobile Systems did a technical analysis of the software and concluded that the "true nature of the spyware is to intercept BlackBerry users' email messages and forward the messages to a monitoring agent inside the Etisalat network," according to the BlackBerry Cool blog.

Vonage Mobile for the iPhone, iPod Touch.

(Credit: Vonage)

Voice over Internet Protocol service provider Vonage on Monday announced that it has launched its first mobile apps for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry devices.

Dubbed Vonage Mobile, the company's free VoIP app enables users to place international calls from their mobile devices. iPod Touch owners can do so by placing calls through Wi-Fi. BlackBerry owners will transmit calls over the cellular network only. iPhone owners will be able to place calls from Wi-Fi or through AT&T's network.

According to Vonage, its app will help users save up to 50 percent on international calling charges levied by carriers. After downloading the app, users need to enter an international number. They can also select a call recipient from their existing iPhone or BlackBerry contacts list. Those who receive calls will see the user's cell phone number on their caller IDs. Charges will be taken against the user's credit card, which they need to input when they first start using the app.

For now, Vonage is offering per-minute rates. The company said in a statement that by the end of the year, it will offer the Vonage World plan to users. Vonage World for home users currently allows them to make calls to more than 60 countries for $24.99 per month.

Vonage's app launch comes on the heels of controversy over whether Google's similar Voice app should have been denied access to Apple's App Store. The debate still rages on.

Vonage's new mobile app is available now in Apple's App Store and Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World. Both versions are free.