BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America

iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'" This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.

Comments

iPhone reception issues have been addressed

[SuperKendall]

A) the antenna design is a slightly altered on that was introduced with the Verizon iPhone. The antenna design is actually very good, you get much better reception with the larger external antenna - the only downside was the gap you could touch to potentially drop a call (if reception was weak), which has been moved to where you can't hit it accidentally. It's also not like you cannot affect signal strength similarly with almost any phone, search for "HTC death grip" and see what I mean. Your meaty hand does a great job of reducing signal strength when you wrap it around any phone tightly.

B) You can opt for Verizon or Sprint for voice service, which have better call quality - but slower data feeds. With the 4s at least you can still roam in GSM countries even if you have Verizon, which is nice. That stopped me from leaving AT&T before.

The annoying thing though, is that you cannot buy an unlocked iPhone to use with anything but a GSM carrier. I was hoping to buy an unlocked hone and try Sprint for a while... so be aware if you wanted to get an unlocked phone for international travel you'll be using AT&T.