Some BlackBerry users have been without service since Monday, as Research in Motion works to upgrade software.  Don’t feel sympathy for BlackBerry users, though. They had options and they made the wrong choice.

According to the article on News.com:

Frustrated consumers started venting on BlackBerryForums.com on Monday, and were still recording problems with the service as of Wednesday afternoon. Several said they had not been given a time frame for the resumption of the service. It was not clear what percentage of overall BlackBerry users were affected by the outage.

Okay… lets go over this one more time for future potential customers:

BlackBerry service from RIM:
   1. Email arrives at your company or ISP email server. 
   2. A copy of your email is sent to a server run by RIM 
   3. A copy of that message is sent to your BlackBerry

SmartPhone Technology
   1. Email arrives at your company or ISP email server
   2. Your SmartPhone downloads a copy

Normally, I’m not one to shun a good business model, but from a consumer perspective it appears as though RIM customers have simply not done their research. Why pay a middleman so that you can suffer from their network and software problems?

W.S.