RIM Confirms BlackBerry e-mail

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.

Download BlackBerry e-mail User Guide here

Update Status in Facebook for BlackBerry User Guide

Let's face it. Unless you're rocking a touch-screen BlackBerry, you just don't have the real estate for the gargantuan app you would need to really appreciate Facebook. If you've ever seen Facebook on an iPhone, you'd see where you'd miss out with a hugely interactive interface, smooth swiping, pinch and zoom photos, and so on. Yet Facebook and RIM have made the best of it with this app. The newsfeed includes a status bar for your immediate updates, and tiny thumbnail photos smaller than your fingernail. You can sort the feed by news, updates, photos, and links, but you'll wait each time for the page to load anew. You'll also wait for a reload if you'd like to travel farther down the timeline.

There's commenting, liking, poking, writing on a friend's wall, and viewing your message in-box and friends. While the photo uploader makes it handy to scroll through your image collection, you can't upload videos from your BlackBerry. You're able to invite a friend via e-mail, but not search Facebook's site for pals who have already joined.

The app makes up for this in part with some integration into the BlackBerry environment. You can mash contacts (and their itty-bitty profile pictures) into your address book, and trigger a wall or private message or a poke from there. Facebook events might also wind up in your calendar, like birthday reminders. You'll also receive notifications of new Facebook messages if you've configured the app for that. While there's plenty of room for improvement, using Facebook for BlackBerry is the only tenable choice.

Download Facebook for BlackBerry User Guide here