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Research in Motion has announced that the $1.50 per share take over bid for Certicom that we mentioned the other day is no underway.

Waterloo, ON – Research In Motion Limited (“RIM”) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) announced today that a wholly-owned subsidiary of RIM has formally commenced its take-over bid (the “Offer”) for all of the outstanding common shares of Certicom Corp. (TSX: CIC) for CAD $1.50 in cash per share, subject to certain terms and conditions. The Offer will be open for acceptance until 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) on January 15, 2009 unless withdrawn or extended by RIM’s subsidiary.

You can read the full press release here…

In case anyone in the UK planning to buy the GSM-only BlackBerry Storm from Vodafone was wondering, the FCC has just cleared the device that so many AT&T and T-Mobile subscribers wish they could get.

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Mformation Technologies, a New Jersey based handset management software company, said Friday that they have sued Research in Motion for patent infringement.  The firm claims that RIM has infringed upon two patents related to “remote device management”.

“After refusing to license Mformation’s disclosed systems and software, RIM modified its BlackBerry software to include Mformation’s patented systems and methods of remote management,” Mformation said.

Mformation has not yet specified what remidies it is seeking.

[Reuters]

Research in Motion just reported 2nd quarter results for fiscal year 09 , and, to make a long story short, they had an “extraordinary” quarter.

Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2009 was $2.58 billion, up 15% from $2.24 billion in the previous quarter and up 88% from $1.37 billion in the same quarter of last year. The revenue breakdown for the quarter was approximately 82% for devices, 13% for service, 3% for software and 2% for other revenue. During the quarter, RIM shipped approximately 6.1 million devices.

Read the full press release here…

Australian telecommunication giant Telstra is the first carrier to offer the BlackBerry Bold in in the land “Down Under”. The Telstra BlackBerry Bold has a suggested retail price of $999 but will be subsidized significantly (some rumors say $0 up front) with a 2-year plan which starts at $89.95 per month.

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The BG does it again, this time getting his hands on the ‘08′ - ‘09′ Sprint roadmap which tells us the that a new iDEN bearing BlackBerry called the BlackBerry 8350i that supports Nextel Direct Connect will appear in Q4.

Krussel just put out a marketing release with the top-10 selling mobile phones and not a single BlackBerry made the list. This wasn’t completely unexpected as Research in Motion didn’t release any new BlackBerry devices in July.

I’ll bet you can guess which mobile phone topped this list. Here is the entire list in case you are wondering about 2 through 9…

1. (1) Apple Iphone
2. (5) Nokia 3109
3. (3) Nokia E51
4. (4) Nokia 6300
5. (-) Sony Ericsson C902
6. (-) Sony Ericsson C702
7. (7) Nokia N95 8 GB
8. (8) Sony Ericsson K810i
9. (9) Sony Ericsson K530i
10. (6) LG KU990
() = Last month’s position.

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NTT DoCoMo today announced that it will launch BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) in Japan on August 1st allowing individual BlackBerry users not connected to a corporate BlackBerry Enterprise Server to connect directly to the internet.

BlackBerry Internet Service will run NTT DoCoMo users about $30 per month.

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A Rogers BlackBerry Roadmap has made its way onto the web and we now have approximations as to when the BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry KickStart, and BlackBerry Javelin will hit the street.

We can only assume that these devices will hit American carriers around the same time. Time, however, will definitely tell…

It looks like we North Americans aren’t the only ones that think that employees should be compensated for BlackBerry use. 13,000 BT employees have banded together and decided to work only 36 hour weeks as well as turn off their BlackBerrys in a BlackBerry Strike of sorts after work hours in lieu of going on strike.

BT Connect users are seeking equal pay and changes to pay differentials, ranges, and progression and feel like they are being short changed when asked to user BlackBerry devices outside of regular business hours without compensation.

BT Connect members expect that their contracted 36-hour work weeks will end on Thursday. Union members will go home after they’ve worked their 36 hours as well as switch off their BlackBerrys in an effort to show BT just how much productivity is lost if employee doesn’t work outside contracted hours.

Source…

Dataoutages.com is reporting that Research in Motion is updating BIS 2.4 this coming weekend and there there will be two maintenance windows June 7th and June 8th between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m. EDT on both days. This outage will affect 100% North American BIS users, however, users should only be down for about an hour during this maintenance window.

Have you been following the whole Indian BlackBerry Ban debacle that has been going on for the passed few months. If you haven’t we will spare you all the details on this post and just tell you that it is over.

It looks like Research in Motion told the Indian government that the BlackBerry was designed so that third parties, including RIM, would not be able to read encrypted information sent on the devices.

The only question that we have is why did RIM dance around this so long?

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For those who didn’t know already, the BlackBerry was the number one selling smartphone in the world last year. Of the 1 billion total mobile phones sold, 1.4%, or about 14 million BlackBerrys allowed Research in Motion to claim the top spot for smartphone manufacturers.

1.4% of the market compared to overall top dog Nokia, who sold about 40% of all mobile phones last year, is pretty miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Good news for RIM, however, is that the smartphone market grew by over 50% from the previous year compared to just 11% for cell phones overall and is the fastest growing segment with in the industry.

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We learned last week that the Research in Motion was going to unveil their next generation device today. At around midnight this morning, the BlackBerry Bold press release went out and so far today, RIM’s stock price has shot up about 7%.

Not only is the stock price up today, some analysts believe that the BlackBerry Bold will boost quarterly BlackBerry shipments by 400,000 devices.

With the release of the CDMA BlackBerry Curve 8330 last week and the announcement of the BlackBerry Bold this week, it looks as though RIM is going to have one heck of a summer.

Following the lead of the $10 million Android Developer Challenge from Google and the $100 million iFund started by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr, Research in Motion, along with RBC and Thomson Reuters, have ponied up $150 million in venture capital to support the development of the next generation of mobile applications.

I am not going to recite the entire press release because you can just read it here. I do want to add, however, that this is a pretty cool idea and should lead to so very innovative applications for the BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.

This kind of reminds me of the the BlackBerry bounty Alex King set up for getting the BlackBerry 8700 to tether to a Mac but on a much much larger scale. Developers come up with pretty good ideas on their own, but, when you incentivise them with the thought of funding or prize money, the software and applications that they come up with can be quite spectacular.

The Indian Department of Telecommunications (DoT)is still telling Tata Teleservices no when it comes to rolling out BlackBerry service in India.

Just the other day Tata said that despite not getting a blessing from the DoT to role out BlackBerry services in India that they were going to do so anyway because the companies currently offering the BlackBerry service never asked for the governments permission. The DoT said however, “Non-compliance of instructions by any other operator in breach of terms and conditions of the licence cannot be a valid ground for according permission to offer Blackberry services.”

To make a long story short, the DoT said that just because they did it an are getting away with it doesn’t mean that you are going to.

We are sure that this is that last that we will here of this or the possible Indian BlackBerry ban.

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Jeff McDowell, Vice-President, Global Alliances and Edel Ebbs, Vice-President, Investor Relations at Research In Motion will present at the Merrill Lynch Technology Conference 2008 in New York, NY on Tuesday, May 6, 2008. The presentation, which is scheduled to begin at approximately 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time, will be available via live audio webcast on RIM’s website and can be accessed by logging on at www.rim.com/investors/events/index.shtml. A replay of the event will also be available on the website for two weeks following the event.

After several delays and HTML formated email support being pulled, the much hyped, much anticipated BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 Service Pack 5 has been released.

Just a few of the features include Free/Busy Lookup, BlackBerry Web Desktop Manager, BlackBerry Monitoring Service, and the ability to download and edit email attachments in their native file formats.

Get more information on BES 4.1 SP5 here…

So, it looks like unless RIM releases BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 Service Pack 5 in the next 30 minutes or so, it won’t make the April 17th date that was updated after it didn’t come out on April 15th, which as updated just after they decided to pull HTML and Rich Text formated email support.

We’re guessing that it will come out eventually. Sooner rather than later remains to be seen…

We just picked this up from BlackBerry Cool today, however, last week Verizon announced a worldwide deployment of 19,500 BlackBerrys to 56 or so Bureau field offices. The new devices will allow agents to access the Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) Mobility Program for the first time from handheld devices.

In addition to providing the devices Verizon is also conducting in-person training with agents and transferring phone book contacts to the new BlackBerry 8830s.

“The FBI works hard to provide our agents and professional staff with the technology needed to perform their job anywhere in the world,” said FBI Chief Information Officer Zalmai Azmi. “These devices allow FBI employee’s access not only to the internet, e-mail calendar and taskings, but also to applications critical to our mission such as the no-fly list, missing and kidnapped persons, crime alerts, etc.”

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According to Thomson Financial News, BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, is planning to open an R&D Lab in Europe, possibly Bochum, the western Germany city which will soon see it’s Nokia Oyj plant close this summer.

The location has not been confirmed, however, the new lab will add 300 jobs wherever it lands.

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Bell becomes the second North American carrier to launch the BlackBerry Curve 8330 and man, do they make you pay for it if you don’t go with a contract.

The Bell BlackBerry Curve 8830 starts at $549.95 with no contract and goes down from there to $249.95 if you sign your name on the dotted line.

We are still waiting for the BlackBerry Curve 8330 to make its debut down here in the States, however, rumor has it that Sprint may release their branded version as early as next week.

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We aren’t going to run through the complete play by play, however, to make a long story short, Research in Motion still hasn’t adequately addressed India’s department of telecommunications (DoT) concerns about security on the BlackBerry and thus faces a potential ban in the world’s second largest country.

The DoT wants a monitoring solution that will allow them to read the encrypted messages sent between BlackBerry devices. RIM’s solution addressed BlackBerry to Internet communication, however, BlackBerry to BlackBerry messages are still encrypted. RIM had been given a 15 day deadline to come up with a solution, however, RIM and the DoT failed to come a consensus. Both parties decided to reconvene again on April 21st.

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Well, it looks like BlackBerry users accross North America experienced a BIS outage today.  I’ve been away from the computer all day so I am just now hearing about this, however, there are many reports that the issues have been resolved.

Sad…

Are you one of those Nextel BlackBerry users who refuse to switch over to the Sprint side of the house or over to a reputable wireless company who actually has come out with new BlackBerrys in the passed 3 or 4 years? Well, if you are, we may have news for your ears.

This past Tuesday at CITA Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced that they are coming out with a new Wi-Fi enabled, iDen BlackBerry on the Nextel network later this year. I must have missed this earlier in the week, however, it may be just a little bit too late for this to have much impact.

I know that a lot of Nextel BlackBerry users waited as long as they could for a new iDen device to come out, however, it has been 3 years since the BlackBerry 7100i came out and around 5 since the BlackBerry 7520 came out.

Just think, since the BlackBerry 7100i came out, GSM and CDMA carriers have had the BlackBerry 8700, BlackBerry Pearl, the BlackBerry 8800, and the BlackBerry Curve devices come out in various configurations. Sprint has been saying for years that they weren’t going to come out with another Nextel BlackBerry and finally convinced their remaining BlackBerry users to switch.

The problem is that those Nextel BlackBerry users didn’t switch to Sprint. They switched to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. I guess that with all the trouble that Sprint/Nextel is having that they need to get those 37 remaining 7100i users some new gear for fear of losing them to another telecom as well.

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In case you haven’t heard, the Indian government said that they would put a ban on BlackBerrys (BlackBerry data that is) if Research in Motion didn’t provide Indian based telecoms that support the BlackBerry a means to monitor traffic being sent and received on RIM’s secure BlackBerry network. BlackBerry data is encrypted which prevents India’s Union Home Ministry from monitoring messages sent on the devices.

Research in Motion is, however, expected to provide a solution early next week, that will ease the concerns and meet the 15 day deadline set by the Indian government back in March.

“BlackBerry is cooperating and they are saying they will come up with a solution to the issue any day now”, said T.V. Ramachandran, director general of the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI). “I am hopeful of seeing a solution even before 9th, I mean some time early next week.”

India currently only has about 400,000 BlackBerry users, however, the country is one of the fastest growing emerging markets and the BlackBerry is poised to do very well there so long as RIM can address the governments security concerns.

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We’re not quite sure what took them so long, however, Research in Motion has launched the official BlackBerry Support Community Forums.

The forum looks like it was just started today as I cannot find any posts dated before April 1st. I do have to apologize because I cannot remember where I first heard about this. It may have been an email from a reader or the BlackBerry Connection Newsletter.

So far the BlackBerry Support Community Forums appear to be a hit. There are over 100 registered users and over 500 guest logged in as I write this post. There are already several dozen threads and a couple of hundred posts.

Since these forums are run by Research in Motion, I wonder if they will control the amount of leaked information that you can find on the threads. I was not able to use the name RIMarkable as my logon name when I created my account. I find that kind of interesting.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we talked about how India may ban the BlackBerry, then followed up a few days later and said the the ban appeared to be off? Well, the Indian ban on BlackBerrys is definitely not going to happen, however, BlackBerry email may still be if deadlines for RIM to give the Indian government algorithms needed to decrypt messages aren’t met..

Telecom companies supporting the BlackBerry have been give 15 days to enable monitoring of the content transmitted on BlackBerrys or they will be ordered to stop the service. There are about 400,000 BlackBerry users in India and the will no longer be able to send or receive email or PIN messages from their devices if the deadlines aren’t met.

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Remember the scheduled BlackBerry outage that Research in Motion was supposed to be having this passed Saturday morning? Well, thanks to “outstanding cooperation” on the part of RIM with Missouri’s emergency response community, the planned BlackBerry outage for database upgrades was postponed.

The request for not taking down BlackBerry service early Saturday morning didn’t come in from Homeland Security until late Friday afternoon. By RIM keeping the BlackBerry network up and running, emergency workers were able to communicate without missing a beat.

I know that I’ve said RIM didn’t have a clue as to how disruptive BlackBerry outages are. In this particular case, they clearly did, and, I applaud them.

Remember the other day when we said that India banned the BlackBerry? Well, Telecoms Secretary, Siddhartha Behura, told reporters at an industry conference that “There is no question of banning at this point.”

The department of telecoms will meet with the representatives of the four wireless providers that currently offer BlackBerry service in India.

“We are not interested that we say BlackBerry will not be used in this country”, said Behura. ”
We want operators to talk to BlackBerry people and put pressure on them to provide the necessary and satisfactory answers to security agencies. That is why we are talking to them.”

I guess it kind of sucks if you are Indian telecom Tata Teleservices. They were the company that had their application to offer BlackBerry service rejected, however, they weren’t invited to the meeting.

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A few of us have been trying to get our heads round some of the new updates to BES 4.1 SP5 this week. While we have covered the unknown territory that is HTML email, one of the other highly anticipated updates has been OTASL (Over The Air Software Loading).

For those that don’t know, this is the devices ability to receive firmware updates remotely rather than an IT department having to collect users devices to perform the upgrades centrally (as currently happens). According to RIM’s documentation you need to have Service Pack 5 on your BES and you need the latest 4.3/4.5 device firmware. What’s odd is that there’s nowhere on the BES to configure OTASL, leaving us wondering if this is purely an update which happens between the device and RIM’s own servers. Not ideal (unless you’re a BIS user) as this takes ownership away from the IT department, but it is early days and perhaps they’ll be a separate ‘device management’ console (as used to be in BES 4.0) to install which will deal with this. In the meantime, have a guess!

According to a ChangeWave Research survey, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry accounts for almost 3 of 4 smartphone purchases in the enterprise with 73% of the market. The survey also has the BlackBerry poised to pick up another 4 to 5 points.

Although the BlackBerry is, pretty much, crushing everyone, Apple’s iPhone is coming on strong. The iPhone currently has 5% of the enterprise market but ChangeWave predicts that it will pick up at least an additional 6% and could jump all the way to second place behind RIM if second place Palm at 18% and third place Motorola at 9% continue to free fall.

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(sarcasm)We know that last company that you would ever expect to be involved in a patent infringement lawsuit would be Research in Motion(/sarcasm), however, that is exactly what the BlackBerry maker is wrapped up in with Motorola.

Motorola is claiming that the way most BlackBerry 8xxx series devices store contact info in wireless emails and the ability to recognize incoming phone numbers infringes on their patents.

In a clever legal move often referred to as the “Whatever you can do we can also do“, RIM has filed their own claim against Motorola stating that the thumb keyboard is awfully similar to those found on BlackBerrys.

Word on the street is that a “routine” system upgrade is what caused most BlackBerry users to go without BlackBerry service Monday afternoon. I don’t know that I would call an upgrade that could cause most of North, Central, and South America not to be able to send and receive email routine, however, at least we have one more thing to check of the list of things Research in Motion will promise will never happen again when it comes to BlackBerry outages.

We didn’t want to title this post “Yet Another BlackBerry Outage” because we’ve done that two or three times already. I’ve got the same things to say about todays outage that I’ve had to say about the last 3 or 4 of them. Research in Motion flat out shouldn’t have these kind of outages.

I am sure that RIM will eventually release the reason why you and I weren’t able to get email all afternoon, but as my grandfather used to always tell me… “Excuses don’t explain and explanations never excuse.”

This problem major outages that Research in Motion has experienced over the last year and a half or so simply is inexcusable. RIM needs to pour whatever resources they need to into figuring out how to get passed having a single point of failure that takes down email for large parts, if not, most of North America in a singe swoop of the sword.

Zimbra, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Exchange that was acquired by Yahoo last September, now supports BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Zimbra joins the likes of Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise becoming only the fourth corporate email system to offer BES Support.

[Via TechCrunch]

An iPsos Reid study commissioned by Research in Motion finds that BlackBerry users save on average 60 minutes per.

The survey looked at tangible time saving and productivity benefits and found that the efficiency of mobile workers is increased, with the average BlackBerry smartphone user converting an average of 60 minutes downtime into productive time each day.

Do you think that BlackBerry users could convince their employers to allow them to work 7 hour days or 4 day weeks with this research?

Somehow, I don’t think so…

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According to the Inquirer.net, a fire in Canada damaged a communications link that has affected BlackBerry service of Smart Communications BlackBerry users in the Philippines.

I hate to say it, but, Research in Motion has been plagued by outages over the passed several months. One must begin to wonder if their network architecture as we know it today is scalable.

I was just reading a Business Standard interview with Research in Motion vice-president of customer accounts, Gregory Wade, and one thing (actually 4 or 5) really stood out.

RIM will announce another 4-5 models in 2008 and all of them will be packed with consumer-friendly applications and design.

Now, even though we can assume that 1 or 2 of these new models will be CDMA versions of the BlackBerry Curve, that still leaves room for 2 or 3 new BlackBerry releases.

It will be an exciting year to say the least.

After Reaching an all-time high a week or so ago, Research in Motions stock (symbol RIMM) has taken a bit of a dip over the passed few days.

Just yesterday RIM’s stock fell 6.3% and is down another 2.5% today at the time of this posting.

What do you think is causing the slide?

 
The countdown to the biggest BlackBerry conference of the year has begun. Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES 2008) will run May 13th through the 15th in Orlando.

WES is still over six months away and presenters are still being set. Two keynote speakers, however, have been confirmed so if you attend, you can expect to hear from the likes of James M. Kitts, former CEO of The Gillette Company and Ray Kurzweil, inventor, entrepreneur, author and futurist.

We haven’t been to a WES convention before but we are going to try our best to get down to Orlando this year.

Go Daddy, one of the biggest domain registrar on the net, recently announced that Go Daddy email now synchs with BlackBerry Internet Service.

That’s right boys and girls… Set your email up through GoDaddy.com it will automatically push messages to your BlackBerry.

Email messages sent from your BlackBerry will appear in the “Sent Items” folder in your web client. All Go Daddy needs to do now is offer IMAP.

 
Remember that free BlackBerry Technical Seminar that we told you about a few weeks ago? Well, Thursday, November 15th is fast approaching and we just wanted to remind you that you still have time to register and you can’t beat the price.

Sponsored By: Blackberry Ringtones Realtones of Today’s most popular music on your blackberry.

In the Inaugural Business Wireless Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study, J.D. Power and Associates rank the BlackBerry the highest in overall satisfaction.

RIM ranks highest in overall smartphone customer satisfaction with a score of 702 points on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in the operating system factor, which includes the speed of moving between applications and speed of sending/receiving e-mails. RIM also performs particularly well in battery aspects, including the length of battery life. Treo manufacturer Palm (698) and Samsung (698) tie to closely follow RIM in the ranking.

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UK based Omnifone and Research in Motion have announced a deal that will bring unlimited music downloads to Vodafone BlackBerry users in the UK via MusicStation, Omnifone’s mobile music download service.

MusicStation will set you back about 2 pounds, or, $4 per week and will allow you to download as many of the over one million available tunes that you like. This could be significantly less expensive then the per download cost of iTunes if you download over 4 songs per week. I wonder, however, if you could still listen do your downloaded music if you let your subscription to MusicStation lapse.

Source

Sponsored By: Blackberry Ringtones Realtones of Today’s most popular music on your blackberry.

When flying Air Canada within Canada or internationally on a flight departing from Canada, passengers that use their BlackBerrys as a paperless boarding pass when checking in. You could actually use any (supported) mobile device, however, BlackBerry Boarding Pass sounds much better than HTC Vox Boarding Pass or Motorola Q boarding pass.

Lise Fournel, the airline’s Senior Vice-President of E-Commerce and Chief Information Officer, commented: “Introduction of the mobile boarding pass is a key element in Air Canada’s initiatives to use the most recent and secure mobile and 2-D barcode technologies to simplify our customers’ travel experience.

In addition to the simplification of travel and business processes made possible by the replacement of paper with electronic documents, we’re particularly excited about the expanded application of 2-D barcode technology that gives our employees better tools to serve our customers more efficiently.”

I wonder how long it will take this to catch on with other airlines?

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To make a long story short, BlackBerry outages suck, and when you have your second major one in less than a years time, people start to think you suck.

RIM need not worry about about a mass exodus or anything like that. They do, however, need to start acting like the “big boy” service provider that they are. Two major outages in less than a year is simply not acceptable and no one would put up with this if it were from a wireless carrier.

I’m not saying that wireless carriers don’t have issues. They just don’t seem to affect as many people for as long a period of time as BlackBerry outages do.

Come on guys… Fix this. Build more data centers to distribute your risk. Do whatever you need to do to keep this from happening again.

For the second time this year as many as 50% of all BlackBerry users on all North American carriers are experiencing an outage. More specifically, they are experiencing a BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) outage.

T-Mobile and AT&T have confirmed that their BlackBerry users are affected and, although we haven’t had a confirmation from the other carriers, dozens of BlackBerry users on Sprint, Verizon, and even Alltell are reporting that they aren’t getting their email.

It hasn’t been officially determined if the BlackBerry outage is on the side of the carriers or RIM. The fact, however, that all carriers seem to be affected would lead one to speculate that the issue is with RIM. This doesn’t bode well because when this happened, not even five months ago, RIM said that it wouldn’t happen again.

Sponsored By: Blackberry Ringtones Realtones of Today’s most popular music on your blackberry.