Cell Phones : BlackBerry outage spreads to US and Canada, continues in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America

It's day three of RIM's BlackBerry service outage in much of the world, including Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Brazil and Chile. But now the problem appears to have spread into Canada -- RIM's home turf.

Cell Phones : BlackBerry Internet Service 4.1 coming October 8th, priming inboxes

To some it's just a point release, but to others it's much, much more. If the leaked documentation gathered by N4BB.com is correct, the 4.1 release of BlackBerry Internet Service is coming down the pike, due abroad on September 10th and in the US October 8th. As any BB aficionado would expect it brings a suite of improvements, bumping the maximum attachment size to eight megabytes, enhancing some security measures, and adding a delicious-sounding new feature called inbox priming. With this, the first 20 messages of a newly added account will be downloaded immediately, "instantly providing users with the reassurance that their email is setup and working." Suffering a bit of additional hypertension while waiting to see if those first few missives sync correctly? Your diuretic might just be inbound.