Thoughts on Blackberry Fail

As most Blackberry users know, there was a large failure of the Blackberry network yesterday. I experienced it although it wasn't clear to me at first what was happening. The first sign was that my wife and kids were not responding to my messages on Blackberry messenger (we use it as our family's "batphone"). Then I stopped getting email on my phone. At dinner last night I could not checkin on Foursquare through the mobile web or socialscope. I couldn't get any access to the mobile web on my blackberry.

What this points out, and what this blog post is about, is that Blackberry took down all my data services, not just BBM and email. And I think that is nuts.

Somehow Blackberry took down mobile web access on T-Mobile, ATT, and other networks. I guess that means that Blackberry has some kind of overlay network on these carrier's data networks. I am sure that is well known to mobile phone geeks and has been true for a long while. I just never wrapped my head around it.

I don't think that is smart. In the perfect world, Blackberry makes hardware and software apps like their mail, calendar, contacts, BBM, browser (if only they could make a good one). T-Mobile, ATT, Sprint, Verizon, etc provide the voice and data service. And the two don't impact each other.

During this outage, I took the SIM card out of my Blackberry and put it into a phone I recently got as a gift under the condition that I can't blog about it. So I won't. But I will say that my T-Mobile SIM card with the Blackberry data plan wasn't working in this new phone. I couldn't even place calls on it.

Now the outage is over and the Blackberry network is back up and running, the T-Mobile SIM card works fine in my new phone. I'm not sure what that means or why it happened, but it did.

The point of all of this is the Blackberry approach to providing services via the carrier networks is not ideal. They are playing carrier, software provider, and hardware provider all in one. That's not good.

Readers of this blog know how much I love my Blackberry, but this new phone I can't blog about is very nice and can take a plain vanilla GSM sim card with data services on it. I started thinking a bit harder about that configuration last night.

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Comments (Archived):

  1. bfeld

    Let me guess – that new phone is – er – a Nexus One?

    1. fredwilson

      i promised not to talk about it so i won’t. but its a good guess and a good phone.

      1. ShanaC

        *giggling* That sounds like a…..Maybe

    2. Mark Essel

      Fred’s secret ties to Google revealed.

      1. ShanaC

        I think in the end, we should not bother him about the phone…it’s a mystery phone, and it may very well be that beyond the Nexus 1 in January, he could have something not google for feburary.

        1. Mark Essel

          If AVC is the colliseum, Fred is our Sparticus. He can handle our crowd jeering.If I emailed you hinting at a super secret that I couldn’t tell you, you know you’d be guessing and making fun of my secret at the same time ;).

          1. ShanaC

            Actually, no. Possibly due to gendering- I would be guessing and be a tad annoying, but I probably would not be teasing. Maybe concerned.

    3. Richard Jordan

      i think that has to be the first guess of everyone reading this, right…Fred, is it a limited time embargo and you’re allowed to share your thoughts soon?

  2. Jan Schultink

    Your blog is showing BlackBerry ads to me now 🙂

    1. kidmercury

      lol yeah i love that too

  3. gregorylent

    crippled sim cards is something i get irked by in asia .. both singapore and hong kong, with killer 3g, won’t sell prepaid sim cards with both data and voice .. have to buy two!, one of each, and have two phones … crikey ..and india and china, no problem, prepaid sim with data is easy ..have no idea about america .. i guess they just sell crippled phones, at least vz did last time i was there …

  4. Mark Essel

    If you caught Chris’ post yesterday there was a link to an older Spolsky article about commoditizing your compliments. I wonder if that force is at play here. I’m also curious how far it will drive down prices across the market.Since Blackberry sells hardware and software, I’m unsure of which compliment they are working to commoditize.Agree we need a much more modular mobile web Fred.

  5. kidmercury

    IMHO customer education is the real problem here. i have a tough time seeing a solution that is both fair to market participants and good for customers until customers have a better education of digital rights, and how it affects them. then i think customers will demand better, but until then i don’t see much of a solution. it is the same as the political envrionment in many way, which also illustrates how platforms and governance go hand in hand.

    1. Mark Essel

      Platforms and licensing are the defacto global government of the future? Great time for your suspected virtual currencies to rise in favor.”I’ll give you 1000 API calls for a freight train full of pork bellies”

  6. Filipe Moreira

    Hi Fred,The phone that you cannot talk about sounds a lot like the Google Nexus phone. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that and share your impressions on it. Without compromising you of course :).Great blog by the way…Filipe A de Assis Moreira

  7. chrisbook

    As I understand the architecture Blackberry Internet Services send all data requests to a RIM internet proxy environment that does things like adapting “normal” web pages to be optimised on the BB mobile. This is not nice as yesterdays outage shows.Its understandable that to provide services like Blackberry Messenger and push email then they use their own RIM infrastructure.But I think you are right that to provide access to other applications (twitter, facebook, google search etc) it should send apps and browser http traffic straight to the web via the network infrastructure of the operator you are using.The mobile operator infrastructure is their core business and have large capacity and resilient systems to cope (although as the telegraph article points out o2 have had some service affecting outages recently caused by high demand) so its those guys that should be used to connect your blackberry device to the web services you use that are not BB services.I wonder if a change is afoot at RIM? They were talking up the fact that new BB devices will come with a Webkit html5 browser as standard and I hope they no longer “require” the data traffic to go through their proxy systems. I hope someone from RIM sees this and answers.Good luck with using your new *SUXEN* phone 🙂

    1. fredwilson

      chris – thanks for the details on how the BIS architecture works. it makessense to me now. and reinforces to me why its suboptimal

      1. paulhart

        From a network perspective it may be suboptimal, but from a business plan perspective it’s crucial. RIM supplies the hardware to the carriers, but it also provides a huge amount of infrastructure so those carriers effectively outsource to RIM (and of course RIM charges a pretty penny for this).RIM has figured out a nice way to generate revenue on both sides of the deal, and the recurring revenue from each hardware sale is probably a lot more valuable than the subsidized hardware price. In fact, RIM is playing the carriers in the same way that the carriers play their end users. Given the prevalence of RIM handsets globally, the carriers love it.All the hardware manufacturers have some kind of carrier-side deal going on. Most of them are selling the infrastructure hardware. RIM is selling a service, which has that useful characteristic of non-linear growth potential.

        1. ShanaC

          But then you get this sort of situation. It leaves RIM high and dry for their own business plans- because you can’t blame the carriers when things go wrong (ala IPHONE and AT&T- turns out it is the phone…)

          1. ryan singer

            Not so sure if it’s the phone… I recently lost my iPhone and replaced it with a very basic $29 Go-Phone until my plan runs out.. My thinking was that at least I would be on a non data plan and would hopefully get better reception… NO! the network is awful no matter how you cut it. We need an LTE network rollout NOW!

          2. ShanaC

            My blackberry on sprint broke, and I am doing the same with the Go-Phone right now. It’s not having any problems at all.And while I agree Network coverage is not great (I’ve had amazing moments and terrible moments with both networks- better with AT&T by far though) we are definitely in need of a rollout of LTE- mostly because data will overtake voice, and will probably carry voice anyway…

          3. Mark Essel

            Totally agree Ryan, I want LTE for my home and mobile with one bill. In fact take my voice/sms and shove it, I just want big fat dumb pipes of sweet data. I’ll use VOIP, and Google Voice to simulate a phone.

      2. Craig Plunkett

        It may be suboptimal for the moment and possibly going forward, but as the first mover in the space, ( remember thumbwheels and before ) the architecture was optimal for a long time, especially having to conserve bandwidth in the absence of mobile broadband. This incident and recent others speak to operational execution rather than architecture. RIM needs to maintain backwards compatibility for a huge installed base while embracing new opportunities and challenges now that access to the mobile device environment is unlocked. As the “original” iPhone ( compelling enough hardware that carriers ceded the “deck” to ) it will be interesting to see if they can keep that goose laying golden eggs.

        1. ShanaC

          They’ll be interesting to watch, to be sure. Crackberry and all.

      3. rafer

        Even if RIM were to get out of the way on web (vs email) traffic, that traffic would still be channeled through a relatively small number of carrier IP gateways. Those gateways become the next bottleneck.The really interesting moment will be when a mobile carrier attaches a significant fraction of its mobile basestations directly to the public Internet without channeling the traffic via a central NOC. That carrier will be able to support local apps that the others won’t, will improve latency mightily, and may well save money.

        1. fredwilson

          Right. When mobile architecture starts to mirror internet architecture. It should happen

    2. ShanaC

      HTML5 compliant phones would be awesome.

    3. candice

      It is annoying; but, last night I was able to use the browser on my curve on my house’s wifi and that at least did work. No setting changes required.Nothing else.

    4. Ari Herzog

      I don’t know about RIM changes, but if you haven’t heard, Verizon and Bing are now sleeping with each other and all Verizon powered BlackBerries now have a Bing icon that was forced over out of the blue. I’ve since hidden the icon.

    5. A Reader

      Fred said: “my T-Mobile SIM card with the Blackberry data plan wasn’t working in this new phone. I couldn’t even place calls on it.”So it looks like even voice calls were disabled. Chris, any ideas on why routing all data through RIM’s proxy is also impacting voice calls? This is truly awful.

  8. OurielOhayon

    Fred, G phone? 🙂

  9. Druce

    Hazards of moving a corporate device to consumer. Historically everything ran over RIM network. Corporate customers told Blackberry they love that it can run inside the firewall, so that’s the way it gets Web. You get access to corporate intranet, other resources in a relatively secure way because it runs through the corporate Blackberry Enterprise server (BES). But if the BES – RIM connection is down you’re SOL.I think apps may be able to go direct to Internet subject to being allowed by corporate policy. Maybe someone else can shed some light.If the mobile networks depend on RIM data connection even for phones they sell direct to consumer and don’t use corporate BES, it’s likely due to legacy limitations of the corporate architecture. (today’s blinding glimpse of the obvious)

    1. Druce

      Friendly folks at Bloomberg told me for instance if you change your connection type to MDS it should work when RIM is out.Begs the question of why the carriers set it up to require RIM network, but must be some legacy reason.

      1. Ari Herzog

        Stop talking Greek, please? MDS?

        1. Druce

          Mobile Data Softwarehttp://na.blackberry.com/en…the point others explained better was, there are ways to make your application not depend on RIM network .the theory is, instead of pointing your device to your corporate server which uses RIM for secure wireless connection, point your device to the Bloomberg MDS server which is presumably on public Internet and uses its own security, and and then you shouldn’t need the RIM network.

  10. ShanaC

    Next time, say you have the worlds cheapest phone that only makes calls as a backup. You know they still sell those, and they are much harder to break, because they are so damn simple. It makes you seem much less suspicious in today’s environments, and a lot of people actually do that…Now everyone thinks you have the Nexus One..Back to RIM:Yes this is bad. It showsA) Why they are having development issues for people to make apps (now you can see you have to work around this weird proxy thingB) You now have to question the logic of the weird proxy thing. Maybe it was a good idea when the amount of data transfer was smaller. Now that it is getting larger, it would be much harder to hit phones as a security measure if all the security issues are decentralized. Make everyone in charge of their own data experience, the way big computers work now (with anti-virus)Command and control architecture might really hurt them at the scale people expect them to function in the next few years….stick to hardware RIM

  11. David Hauser

    The Blackberry BES/BIS architecture is part of the way they got messages to the device so quickly but now seems like a licensing control. Since everything flows through them carriers and most importantly people running a Blackbery Enterprise server cannot get away with out paying them.This does not help users like you and me. We have to be fair and look at the number of times they have had a major outage is not many but is magnified because of the number of users. I would not change away from a Blackberry because of this, but I am sure RIM can come up with a better way to get us email quickly. Just think about their scaling costs, wow.

  12. jarid

    Hmm… Fred has a phone he can’t blog about, and SAI has a “clandestine meeting with a source” to review the Nexus One. Coincidence? You decide. 😉

  13. kgutteridge

    Throwing a comment in the mix from a 3rd party dev point of view and includes a video from RIM that explains the 5 different ways of routing data for apps on Blackberries.3rd party development can sometimes be a little bit voodoo, little known is the magic strings for third party apps to enable routing over wifi so they do not have to go across the BIS/BESWhen opening a connection in Java use the following : “;interface=wifi”so in example String uri = “http://www.google.com;interface=wifi”;HttpConnection c = (HttpConnection) Connector.open(uri);Unfortunately this does not cascade gracefully to cellular data if the wifi is unavailable, so you need to check when coding. Useful video post on RIMs forums, that will explain morehttp://www.blackberry.com/DevMediaLibrary/view….http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Java-Dev…However there are unfortunately benefits to this seemingly weird way of routing data for end users and developers, particularly if a tie in has been made with a particular carrier, so its not particularly clean cut as the majority of time RIMs service is obviously up

    1. Jonathan Peterson

      wait. the developer has to HARD CODE the data interface layer and do error handling/graceful degradation himself?EPIC FAIL.at WORST, the device should have default graceful degradation that requires no effort on the part of the developer as an option (“http://www.google.com;interface=any”;).My G1 apps just work. Fastest if I’m on wifi (rarely bother), fast enough across 3G, moderately acceptable across edge if I’m outside the 3G range, and if I’m outside range completely the magic of google gears still allows me to work on email.dunno if blackberry sims are braindamaged, but my G1 sim is not. When when I dropped and killed the poor thing a few months ago, I pulled the sim out, stuck it in an old razr and still had voice and SMS until I got a replacement G1. the G1 data plan doesn’t give you WAP data on older phones, however.

      1. ShanaC

        Yup, that’s why people do not like coding for Blackberries… we’ve been through this issue before. Apparently it is a security thing involving this epic failure of BB that we saw…

      2. Mark Essel

        As a developer I love simple generic cross platform handling. Certainly graceful handling of unknown interfaces is a big perk (must have?), and a smooth loss in speed performance for lower bandwidth situations.

  14. Elie Seidman

    Yeah – not a super surprising single point of failure to those of us with telecom geek background. What’s interesting is that I have a friend who is an FBI agent. They are addicted to their blackberries for varying levels of agency work. No word yet as to whether they were also down (he’s actually in the process of rotating back from overseas so he may not have even been in the US last night). I’m guessing that they – and all the other agencies who depend on it – were down as well.

    1. Mark Essel

      I wonder what guaranteed performance is available to specific agencies. A multi-service card would be a good start (if service a fails, cut over to b, etc). Not sure if multi network cards are available.My preference would be a dumb wireless connection that just grabs the strongest/cheapest local signal but I’m unfamiliar with cellular data service beyond simple physics, and the ownership of the networks. Often wondered why a more distributed data flow architecture didn’t win out (between hand units as optional network channels). Basically a distributed wireless Internet that grew stronger the more units that were sold.

  15. schmiddi

    well, get a Nokia E72 and you won’t have the problem you can have outlook or any other kind of email access (with just as fast email delivery), you have a keyboard that is way better than at leas the Blackberry Curve, you have a phone that is not crippled by the operators or RIM for that you have great battery life, and lastly you have a phone that doesn’t look like a brick.There is more out there than Blackberries.

  16. BmoreWire

    Fred,Why don’t you use Zemanta bubbles? I know you did at one point. Did you decide you didn’t like it for one reason or another?

  17. eCommerceCircle

    I was able to access the mobile web on my BlackBerry with Opera Mini. Emails, BBM etc did not work at all.

  18. braker1nine

    It sounds to my like BIS is a little bit of an antiquated service on the users end. Knowledgeable users should be able to choose how their phone connects. If I want to go straight through the network, then I should be allowed to do that.

  19. billc124

    Fred, this is exactly why I will never own a Blackberry. This infrastructure goes back to when the Blackberry was really just a two way pager. In my mind, that is still all it is but with upgrades. I have an iPhone right now, but my other smartphones have all been Windows Mobile and my next one will probably be Android. Until Blackberry ditches the arcane way their system works I am not interested in any of their products. They do have great encryption and all that, but it is worth your entire phone not working for some security. Even on WiFi you still have to go through their infrastructure so that isn’t even an option to save you from an outage.

  20. cpopenoe

    I love my Blackberry too, but have wondered about the architecture. Chrisbook’s comment is helpful, and I agree troubling. As is the Blackberry OS itself. A few days ago I was discussing strategy with Ran Zilca, the developer of a series of new premium iPhone apps including ones by Deepak Chopra and Stephen Covey. The Stress Free Deepak app is 100 MB. Ran’s planning on porting it to Android, which he says will be simple, but there’s no way something that size could ever live on a Blackberry. Some of the apps I use work well, but only the ones which have been BB optimized. And the browser, as you mention, is far from optimal. Still, for email and the BB Messenger, it couldn’t be better – at least before the recent outages. Does anyone have intel on what, if anything, RIM might be doing to become more competitive with the new devices given how antique their underlying OS and architecture is?

    1. ShanaC

      It’s a pure hardware thing. They mastered the hardware. Most people don’t realize how difficult it is to master hardware.Someone needs to kick them soon though about software…or is it possible to clean out the chips completely and port something totally different on the hardware…Software should just be about bringing hardware to life, and it almost feels like the computing power in a blackberry might be dying in this event…

  21. Aviah Laor

    Off topic: the new DISQUS feature that shows a replied-to comment in a a pop-up dialog is great, but when the comment is long the dialog & the close button are partially hidden (using Chrome). Maybe they should slice the string or scale the dialog size.

  22. Morgan Warstler

    I’m interested in why a t-mobile sim card wouldn’t work in a google phone. I had no idea that sim cards were actually tied to BB devices.

    1. ShanaC

      SHHHHH….no assumptions. It’s unbloggable, remember.

  23. Adam Berkan

    You may want to avoid putting BB-sims into non-BB devices. BB can charge some outrageous fees to forward non-BB traffic over their network. Enjoy your new phone!

  24. boblozano

    According to a RIM statement this morning / last night bugs in a mobile update ended up putting pressure on databases within their infrastructure. Given the apparent age of their architecture for BIS, my guess is that this is simply another case of relational databases capping the “scale horizon” for a service (SaaS or otherwise).I think the comments about whether this is an optimal biz model are certainly fair, but in the end it’s only a reasonable possibility if RIM is able to provide a solid service.In any case, posted a few more thoughts here: http://thoughtsoncomputing….

    1. Mark Essel

      Groovy Bob, checking out your post. Thanks for sharing the link.Excellent post, well worth the read and of course just to entice other folks to check it out”any dependency that is not intrinsic to the actual problem, to the data itself, must be eliminated.”That quote alone should tell you what kind of blogger Bob is. Database expertise, but put in words that a relational layperson like myself can use.

  25. matt newberg

    I’m pretty sure if you connected apps directly through TCP under settings that it worked because it bypassed BIS. That doesn’t preclude the fact that RIM should reassess its architecture for its consumer/small business network.If apple can ship iPhones that link directly to Exchange servers w/o the middleman and push Gmail, why can’t RIM?

  26. smartone2

    Fred ready to give up the Iphone hate?

  27. Christian Brucculeri

    Fed, can you clarify on why this is not good? I’m not trying to be facetious, I just don’t understand. Does this model set them up to fail by putting too much responsibility on one company? Is it s strategy problem?UPDATE: Just read some comments. I get it now! 🙂

  28. Aaron Klein

    I agree with you 110% when it comes to SMS, mobile web, etc.That being said, I am perfectly fine with the NOC for e-mail. Apple has made fun of the BlackBerry NOC as a single point of failure before. But the NOC architecture for e-mail is precisely why BlackBerry e-mail is as good as it is. The NOC gets your message, and then manages the push of the message in pieces to the device, conserving bandwidth but more importantly delivering true push and instant delivery.It is true what druce said – many enterprise customers like having everything run through the NOC for firewall, etc., but they need to change the default and provide that option only for those that want it.But I will put up with 2-3 days a year of no BlackBerry e-mail as compared to iPhone e-mail sucking hard 365 days a year.

    1. Mark Essel

      I use Gmail through the web on my iphone but only check it in specific intervals (don’t use email as a real time/synchronous link). What kind of delay does Apple mail have. I’ll check Apple’s mail now…ok it took 3 seconds, is that abnormally slow? Seemed pretty real time Aaron.

      1. Aaron Klein

        Forgive me if I speak too strongly about it, but I hated iPhone Mail. I recently used it on my wife’s iPhone again and had the same experience. Maybe I just have bad luck.Here is my complaint list:1. It’s NOT simple or fast to send myself an e-mail message, which is my normal way to remember things. Way easy with BlackBerry. I can open and address a new message to myself in 4-5 seconds on the BlackBerry. Press end 2x, trackball to the far left, click, press enter, type “ak”, enter enter enter, start typing on the subject line. Works EVERY time fluidly.2. When I hit send on the iPhone, I always have to sit there and watch the message go out. When I have not done that, messages have disappeared entirely unsent, or they just sit there and won’t go out. I could never “trust” it or I was disappointed (and mad when I dropped the ball on important things). With BlackBerry, I see outbound messages in the inbox and know that it will be sitting in the inbox with a red “X” if it glitches. Then I hit resend and it goes out.3. When a message arrived on iPhone, about 50% of the time, I tapped the message and it displayed “loading” for 30 seconds while it negotiated with my mail server. About 20% of the time, it wouldn’t be able to reach my server and that message would permanently say “cannot be downloaded from server.” With BlackBerry, I’m ALWAYS (100% of the time) reading the message within 1-2 seconds of hearing the beep.4. The physicality of the phone was also a problem. I am addicted to the BlackBerry keyboard. I got pretty good on the iPhone keyboard but it was no match. The stats told the tale: I sent 7,000 e-mails on my BlackBerry the year before I got my iPhone…I sent 500 the year I had my BlackBerry. 14X the sending volume.Bottom line: BlackBerry e-mail is like IM with no “presence” or expectation of immediate response. Fast, immediate, zero delays. iPhone e-mail was always like running Outlook on a very slow PC. It would work, but it didn’t feel very good.(I will balance this out by making sure to say that the iPhone kicks BlackBerry all over the playground when it comes to surfing the web, playing media or handling conference calls. My ultimate device runs Android or WebOS with BlackBerry e-mail, a touch screen and a physical keyboard. It doesn’t exist yet.)

        1. Mark Essel

          1) ha, I do the same :D. There’s so many pearls I come across but don’t have the window to absorb them properly. Maybe I added myself as a contact so now it just auto completes when I start typing du (dude jones an old identity I created my gmail account with). It happens in a second or two so it’s fast.2) That’s a biggy, I see the send and receive email and it can take too long. The gmail direct interface doesn’t suffer from that, and I don’t notice it as much with 3G and wifi as opposed to 2G3) I have also noticed a delay when it’s loading. Another good reason to use gmails direct interface for me, thanks for reminding me4) I hear you on this one. I’ve adapted to the touchscreen typing. I blog every morning with it while exercising, and comment/tweet, etc with it. Still prefer tactileThe gmail direct interface may be more to your liking (when on your wife’s phone).It’s great to see your ideal device. Why not have a prototype built, I’m certain you’re not alone in desiring those features. HTC Hero or maybe Droid may be good fits in the meantime (HTC vs droid, and here’s a review of nexus although it has no keyboard)

          1. Aaron Klein

            I’ll have to try that out! thx for the links.

  29. Aaron Klein

    On another note, the reason your SIM didn’t work in the other plan is probably because you had the BlackBerry data plan on it. A call to your provider to switch it to a non-BlackBerry data plan would probably have rerouted your data directly to the web.On the other hand, it might also have extended your contract (tongue-in-cheek, I know you don’t have one). 😉

  30. Ric

    Without entering into a diatribe about phones locked to networks in general, I always resisted Blackberry (even in the corporate world when it was offered to me) because intuitively I felt that an additional layer over the phone network was an unnecessary complication, and probable point of failure. That was true when the business was running the server on its ow network … even more so on a public network.

  31. Steven Kane

    stormy weather in the cloud?

  32. S. Daniel Leon

    So I get it that you can’t blog about this new phone but… you didnt say you can’t comment on it.;) In which case, just one question (and a follow up if I may) does it have a keyboard and, to the follow up, a decent browser?

  33. Terry J. Leach

    I have been a Blackberry user for years, but I never used it on a corporate email network since I was a independent consultant. Over the last few years I’ve used Gmail, and all the Google apps on my Blackberry. With this latest outage effecting everything I think it’s time to switch phones. So I think I’ll go with the phone you can’t talk about.

  34. alan sanders

    I’ve had smartphones since they first came on to the market – about 10 years now. Had a BB for last 5 or so and just switched to a Droid – I love it. Maybe not as much as those people in the WSJ ads but it is a great device. The exchange set up was a breeze, there are lots of useful apps, voice search works well and the GPS saved me from having a mess of wires hanging off my dashboard. There’s a learning curve getting used to the keyboard and touch screen but after a few weeks … I wont say i prefer it to the BB keyboard but it gets the job done. And it all works on Verizon’s net work which I’ve always found to be reliable.

  35. 44thfloor

    what about wifi? my guess is your new phone is a google android, welcome to the future.

  36. Toxic

    “They are playing carrier, software provider, and hardware provider all in one. That’s not good.”No, it isn’t. It’s also quite likely what Google intends to do with the Nexus one.

  37. Mark Essel

    Good to be constantly aware in the semantic space- negative is just as important as positive corration