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The Blackberry outage that RIM does not want to talk about continues to affect people on both sides of the Atlantic with outages reported in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Some people have been without service for more than 24 hours.

The outage is a peculiar one, Data Outage News reports:

"Again, this is affecting devices on all North American carriers, BIS and BES, and it appears to be only devices on WiFi, wherein data works "sometimes" when connected via WiFi; no data when WiFi is disconnected."

The Blackberry just doesn't seem to have the luster it once did. Today, it had another nationwide outage.

According to Data Outage News:

"A number of users are reporting and an escalated RIM tech support call has confirmed data issues affecting WiFi devices NOT connected to a WiFi network. The outage is sporadic and issues are confirmed on at least on Verizon and T-Mobile on both US east and west coasts. Again, if you are connected to WiFi, you likely won't notice any problems until you are out of WiFi range. This is not affecting ALL WiFi users, the reports are sporadic, but across all carriers, BIS and BES included."

At the recent Mobile World Congress 2010, Dutch app store analytics firm Distimo presented their findings on the six largest mobile application stores in existence today: the iTunes App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. In their presentation, they analyzed everything including store size, store growth, the most popular applications and where you can find the best deal. They recently shared some of the highlights from that presentation by way of a slideshow embedded on their blog.

The Windows Phone 7 news kind of threw us a bit this week. It had almost no mention about how it would serve the enterprise. It almost seemed like Microsoft had given up.

Now we are starting to see some reports about how Windows Phone 7 would fit for the mobile enterprise. And it makes us wonder. Will the Windows Phone 7 better serve the enterprise than the iPhone?

Skype has announced today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has joined with Verizon Wireless and will be availble on a number of the company's phones.

The partnership brings Skype to both Blackberry and Android platforms on Verizon Wireless phones, which will be shipped beginning in March with Skype pre-installed. Skype over 3G will allow international call at rates unavailable over traditional wireless carriers.

We are still in the early days of location-based apps, but according to new data from Skyhook, there are now over 6,000 location-based iPhone apps, 900 Android apps and 300 BlackBerry apps. Skyhook, the company that allows non-GPS enabled devices to triangulate locations by using nearby WiFi signals, also found that only a small number of these location-based apps are currently available across the three major app stores. There are currently only 43 cross-platform location apps.

iPhone use has doubled in the enterprise since last summer when Apple released the 3GS. The big bump in sales helped Apple post $3.38 billion in profits this past quarter. More than 70% of Fortune 100 companies are now testing the iPhone as their smartphone of choice. A big driver is iPhone's support for Microsoft Exchange.

The news highlights why Google is planning to launch its next Nexus One as an enterprise device: The corporate market has smartphone fever.

At CES this past week, Google executive Andy Rubin said that the next version of the Nexus One phone will be for the enterprise. It could have a physical keyboard.

Our bet is that Google Apps will be tightly integrated into the Nexus One enterprise phone. Google syncs every Android phone to a Google account. The next step seems logical. Sync Google Apps with the Android.

According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform's app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora.

Blackberry users had a bit of a surprise this morning. Email was down. It came back up around 11 a.m. PST but in comparison to prior outages, this was a big one.

The Blackberry email outage spared most business users as enterprise servers were not affected. First problems were reported around 2:30 a.m. PST.

In what's become an annual tradition, over December ReadWriteWeb will present our 'best of' posts for 2009. These are a series of articles that will examine the top web products in categories ranging from consumer web apps to RSS and syndication platforms. Today, we're kicking off the series with a look at the top mobile web products of the past year. This is a subjective list of editorially selected products, but one which includes some of the biggest names in mobile web applications for 2009.

Thanksgiving is generally a horrible day for air travel, but tradition and the sweet smell of Thanksgiving turkey still makes millions of Americans forget the potential horror of being stuck in an airport. If you are one of them, or even if you are just heading to the airport to pick somebody up, here are some mobile applications and web sites than can help you make your Thanksgiving travel less stressful.

Google Apps is making it a bit more enticing for companies of all sizes to adopt its service for the Blackberry smart phone.

In a post this morning on the Google Enterprise blog, the group announced Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server has doubled the number of Blackberry phones it can support. This effectively allows larger enterprises to place more users on fewer servers.

Finally, it feels like the holy grail of mobile development is at hand. This problem has persisted since Microsoft released its Palm-sized PC operating system to compete with the Palm OS a decade ago: as a mobile developer, the cost of supporting multiple mobile platforms, each with a relatively small user base and massive development learning curve, has been huge. That finally seems to be changing.

At yesterday's Blackberry Developer Conference, several companies announced major updates to their applications and services designed for Blackberry smartphones. From Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) came new geolocation, advertising and push services in addition to other developer tools. Meanwhile, companies like Loopt, eBay, Xobni, and others took the opportunity to show off their latest Blackberry applications as well.

Are iPhone users really that bad? We're not buying it. It's odd that a consumer electronics shopping site would sponsor a study that paints such a lousy picture of iPhone owners, but that's exactly what Retrevo.com has done. For whatever reason, the results of their recent report on smartphone owners in the U.S. has returned some unflattering figures about those who own Apple's ubiquitous handheld, the iPhone, as compared to the more business-minded folks who choose a Blackberry instead.

A new report by ChangeWave Research provides yet more evidence of the surge in consumer interest in smartphones; and of Apple's iPhone in particular. Last week we reported statistics from AdMob stating that smartphones are now edging out feature phones as the device of choice for consumers. In the race for the highly lucrative consumer smartphone market, blackberry devices still hold the lead over iPhone - but ChangeWave's data shows that the gap is rapidly closing.

We predict that it won't be long until Apple overtakes RIM as the leader in this hotly contested (and vitally important, in context of the Web's shift from PC to phones) market.

Tomorrow at MAX, Adobe's worldwide developer conference, Adobe Systems
Incorporated will announce with partner Research In Motion (RIM) their progress in bringing Flash support to BlackBerry devices.

RIM, the company behind BlackBerry's wireless platform, including email and touchscreen technologies, is joining Adobe's Open Screen Project, a 50-organization-members-strong organization that aims to promote better apps for richer mobile, television, and desktop browsing experiences for users.

InMobi, which is the largest mobile ad network in Asia, Africa, and Indonesia, just released some interesting data regarding mobile web usage which shows that RIM's BlackBerry is leading the pack ahead of Apple's iPhone in Indonesia. Indonesia is one of the world's fastest growing mobile consumer markets and will become the third largest mobile market by 2010. Apple, however, is currently losing the race against BlackBerry in this market. While InMobi saw requests from BlackBerry devices increase by 842% in the first half of 2009, requests from iPhones only increased by 205%.

In the mobile world, it's been long established that applications are the key selling point for Apple's iPhone. At the end of June the company reported a record 5.2 million iPhones sold in its third quarter - a 600% increase over the same time frame a year earlier. Steve Jobs was proud to announce that more than 1.5 billion applications had been downloaded from the App Store. Unsurprisingly, according to a new survey released by Compete, 72% of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications to their devices. Meanwhile, in comparison only 27% of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or more applications.