Blackberries have been out since approximately 3:30pm Monday. All carriers are affected since all Blackberry email is dependent upon RIM’s servers being operational for email to be received.

The whole model is a bit silly in my opinion and since this isn’t the first time this has happened, RIM should rethink their architecture a bit to allow fallback of some kind or at least have multiple redundant locations to allow service continuity.

I am glad I went with an iPhone instead of a Blackberry since iPhones aren’t tied to the manufacturer like the Blackberry is. Believe it or not, iPhone owners are on a much longer leash. There is not a single service on the iPhone that would become “Unavailable” if Apple were to have a network issue. Apple was smart enough to simply put a standard POP3/IMAP client on the phone that accesses the user’s mail server directly via WiFi or EDGE.

Companies, instead of investing HUGE (and I mean HUGE) amounts of money into the Blackberry Enterprise Server, should simply open up a secure IMAP port and allow users to retrieve their email from iPhones. Eventually Apple will probably update the mail.app to allow direct MAPI or RPC over HTTPS type connections to interface with corporate Microsoft Exchange Servers.

This is as simple as configuring a few services and opening/securing some ports whereas BlackBerry Enterprise Servers licenses cost as much as $60,000 for 1000 users and many tens of thousands for additional CALs. For a large company, the cost JUST for the licenses could cost > $100,000. That’s not including the cost of the administrators to install it, maintain it, and additional hardware to support it and lost productivity due to outages of the manufacturer’s infrastructure.

Just configure IMAP/MAPI, open some ports and buy an iPhone!