Like Apple, RIM offers not just the hardware but the software and services that run on top of it; RIM does Apple one better by also selling back-end servers that companies install to manage their workers' email. Microsoft is in that same business, but it's not as good as tying everything together as RIM is. The speculation is that RIM shares would have to drop to $40 or so, at which point Microsoft might bid $50 a share, or $28 billion for the company. This much is not speculation: RIM would be a better buy than Yahoo.

The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

If the main reason you have a BlackBerry is to check your email across multiple accounts (let’s say work & personal), don’t even think about switching. You will be disappointed.

The iPhone is clearly a 2-handed device. I got pretty good at getting around my BlackBerry with one hand…don’t see that happening any time soon on the iPhone.

Long time BlackBerry users know you can also hold down on a letter to capitalize it and configure multiple dictionaries and shortcuts (so if you type a word or phrase often you can enter it into the dictionary to autocomplete). Someone please come up with a way to port TextExpander to the iPhone and you can name your price.

The BlackBerry will always have better battery management simply because said battery can be removed. Afraid of losing juice? Just carry an extra battery.

Smartphones running Symbian, Linux and Palm OS all fall behind Apple's iPhone. This is ever more stunning because the iPhone is only available via one carrier, in contrast, the other platforms can be procured from various cellular networks. This dramatically increases their market penetration. From the perspective of a business model, these figures are simply astronomical. Who's running scared? Apparently, Symbian is:

Every year, Symbian publishes detailed figures demonstrating how they are the biggest, baddest platform in the world. Guess what? This year, they didn't release the detailed figures on their Symbian Fast Facts webpage. Why not? Take a look at the image—the numbers are no longer working in their favor.

All in all, things aren't looking too perky for Apple's competitors. Sure, RIM may be flying high at the moment, but if this growth continues even at a fraction of the rate it is currently, RIM won't be high and dry for long. Android, in you we trust. For a fantastic run through the figures, and a more detailed look at the likely ramifications of Apple's impending dominance, checkout the full report by hitting the link. [Roughly Drafted Magazine]

Because an unspecified product didn't meet with a carrier's approval. Palm blames the misstep for a $30 million hit to this quarter's projected revenues). Rubinstein's influence may take years to find its way into actual phones. No consolation for those without jobs in the short term.

• First post: "Everyone knows the POSIX standard for time_t leaves timezone translation to the application developer. Therefore it is not surprising to me that I missed my Monday status meeting by an hour and have been demoted to desktop support."
• Second post: "You fail to mention that the BlackBerry can be easily upgraded to handle the new DST rules correctly. Simply download patch 08MAR424.7 from RIM's FTP server. Then, using a #12 Torx wrench and a standard size 000 sprotchel, replace the JPROM chip with an unlocked black-market model readily available on eBay despite the fascists at the FCC. The entire process takes less than three hours."
• Third: "My iPhone works just fine. Valleywag ignores the Apple community at its own peril."

So expect delays as RIM sends out your messages in batches so the whole system doesn't collapse again. Which means you should probably get on GMail or something else to get your emailing done. Fun. – Jason Chen

Exclusive: Massive System Failure Affects Blackberry Users [WNBC]

The little heiress who said "The Sidekick is way better than the BlackBerry" in 2004 is now back on the crackberry. Maybe she needed the bluetooth support to sync her business e-mail; maybe she needed to read Gawker blogs on Mobileplay.

New game: Party like Paris Hilton on cell phones [Yahoo News]
Paris Hilton says: "The Sidekick is way better than the BlackBerry" [Engadget]