BLACKBERRY

A three-day disruption to BlackBerry services spread to North America on Wednesday, frustrating users of the Research In Motion devices just two days before rival Apple's new iPhone 4S goes on sale.

Apple Inc. will be launching its top class operating system, iOS5, for its mobile phones, iPads and iPods on Wednesday afternoon.

Apple Inc.'s iOS 5 operating system, which will power iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 3rd generation, iPod touch 4th generation, iPad, iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, is going live from Wednesday.

Service was briefly restored on Tuesday for a few hours, but then disrupted once again.

Plagued by a second day of service outages spanning four continents, Research In Motion's (RIM) management is facing a precarious time in the days ahead. In early September, investor and merchant bank Jaguar Financial released a statement saying it was raising support amongst BlackBerry partners for the sale of a portion of the company or some other method of maximizing shareholder value.

On the third day of disrupted BlackBerry service, users of the device took to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to vent their anger and criticize Research in Motion.

Millions of BlackBerry users around the world were left without text communication services for a third day on Wednesday as Research in Motion struggled to fix what it said was a switching failure in its private network.

Apple's newest mobile Operating System, the iOS 5, launches Wednesday with an exhaustive list of 200-plus new features.

Millions of BlackBerry customers across four continents are without email, messaging and browsing service on their smartphones after a series of failures in Research In Motion's private network.

RIM said it had resolved its Blackberry outage late Monday, but Tuesday morning, millions of subscribers woke up to find service still disrupted. With problems like RIM's not happening with Apple's iPhone or Google's Android devices, it seems as if the Blackberry's popularity continues to plummet to the point where it will become close to completely stifled by its competition.

With Apple releasing the iMessage application for its iPhone Wednesday, analysts have mixed opinions about what that will mean for text messaging.

BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were suffering a second day of problems on Tuesday, just hours after Research In Motion Ltd, maker of the devices, said it had fixed a huge outage.

An activist Research In Motion investor says holders of at least 8 percent of the BlackBerry maker's stock back its call for a sale or a corporate shake-up at the struggling Canadian company.

Owners of nearly 12 percent of BlackBerry developer Research in Motion are demanding a shakeup or sale, Toronto activist investor Victor Alboini tells IBTimes.

A second day of outages plagues RIM. The initial server crash Monday morning at a data center just outside of London left millions of BlackBerry users across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa without BBM, Internet and email access. The outage occurred approximately 11:00 a.m. BST and still remaines unresolved nearly seven hours later.

Motorola taking aim at BlackBerry with device encryption and remote wipe capable software.

Ever since T-Mobile submitted an amicus brief in the Samsung-Apple patent lawsuit saying that it had a boatload of new products to unveil for the holiday season, customers have been trying to get a peek into the trunk of Santa's sleigh. Last week, blog TMo News announced that it had obtained a leaked roadmap of the devices mobile phone carrier T-Mobile is planning to roll out over the next month.

Research in Motion said on Tuesday it had restored BlackBerry services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, some 20 hours after users in EMEA and India first reported problems with email and BlackBerry Messenger.

BlackBerry users in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India suffered email outages for several hours on Monday, adding to the woes of struggling manufacturer Research in Motion, increasingly seen as a takeover target.

Ironically, RIMM shares are up 2.4 percent in New York trading.

Wireless carriers in the U.S., who are earning as much as 20 cents for sending and another 20 cents for receiving a text message, are worried that this profitable source of revenue will no longer be available to them, once Apple's new instant messaging application, iMessage, is released on Wednesday.