BlackBerry service bends, doesn't break
Users of Research In Motion's BlackBerry service reported some kinks in the system Wednesday, although the problems did not appear as serious as those of a week ago.
E-mail delivery to some BlackBerrys, like this Curve 8320, was spotty Wednesday morning.
(Credit: RIM)This time around, only customers of RIM's BlackBerry Internet Service appeared to be affected. These are individuals who have their e-mailed forwarded to their BlackBerrys, as opposed to corporate customers using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product. Last week, everyone was hosed when a server failed at RIM's network operations center, but this one wasn't quite so bad.
The company released a statement concerning the outage Wednesday afternoon. "RIM did perform regularly scheduled maintenance on BlackBerry Internet Service that took longer than originally expected, and some BlackBerry Internet Service customers may have experienced slower delivery of e-mail earlier today. The majority of customers would not have seen any impact."
Representatives from AT&T and Verizon said they hadn't received any complaints, but had heard about the issue with the BIS product. Forum users reported spotty deliveries of e-mail Wednesday morning that were expected to eventually resolve themselves as the queue emptied out.
So, no BlackBerry panic this time around.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
