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.
"Yesterday, some BlackBerry subscribers in the EMEA region experienced delays with BlackBerry services. The issue was resolved and services are operating normally," RIM said in a statement at 0550 GMT.

On Wednesday, Amazon's Jeff Bezos introduced the Kindle Fire tablet. The Fire, priced at $199 and lacking many of the features of Apple's iPad, garnered a mixed response from analysts. On the one hand, they noted that Barnes and Noble and many of the Android-based competitor tablets should be worried. On the other hand, the consensus was strong among market observers that Apple should not be concerned at all and that it should keep on doing exactly what it's doing — making more powerful tablets. Many analysts believe that Amazon failed to unveil the iPad killer that many anticipated the Kindle Fire could be.After all, how could the Kindle Fire kill the iPad? It has no camera, no microphone, limited memory (8 GB), a dramatically smaller app pool, and no mobile broadband. The majority of market observers reckon there is no way that it could slay the giant.It is exactly this brand of thinking that is dead wrong when it comes to new product development and competitive strategy. It is this type of thinking that leaves venerable, high-performing companies — like Apple — open to the existential threats posed by competitors' disruptive innovations.

Why has the death of Steve Jobs caused such a huge outpouring of grief? Mainly, I think, because Jobs had an ability to make very human connections with people. He could do it in a commencement speech which barely mentions technology — but his greatest achievement was to do it with technology itself.In the speech, Jobs talks about how and why the Macintosh shipped with multiple proportionally spaced fonts. From his perspective, that was a matter of good design — part and parcel with his obsession over power buttons and USB ports. But something unprecedented happened when Apple’s beautifully designed technology fell into the hands of humans: The humans loved it. Literally.Other companies, once in a blue moon, make a much-admired piece of technology — the HP 12c, say, or the Nokia 3310. But from the day that Apple decided to literally put a smiley face on its computers every time they booted up, real people started treating its products as they would loved ones.

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple introduced its long-awaited new iPhone on Tuesday. But it wasn’t an iPhone 5. That will have to wait. Instead, the company unveiled something that looks an awful lot like an iPhone 4 on the outside, with an innovative feature that turns the device into a voice-activated mobile assistant for scheduling appointments and performing other tasks. It’s a measure of how Apple has habituated its legions of fans to regular, eye-catching design changes that the news about the latest version of the iPhone qualified as a disappointment for some. Grumbling about the announcement of the new phone, the iPhone 4S, spread on Twitter throughout the day and the company’s shares fell as much as 5 percent, though they regained most of those losses by the end of trading. “At the end of the day, there are still going to be long lines for this,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. “They could have been even longer if they’d changed the hardware more.”

The company on Tuesday unveiled an eagerly awaited new version of the device, the iPhone 4S, that comes with a “virtual assistant,” Siri, that recognizes voice commands by users to schedule appointments, dictate text messages and conduct Web searches. Although the new phone is virtually indistinguishable on the outside from its predecessor, the iPhone 4, the company says it is packed with better technical innards, including a more advanced camera. The phone also includes a more powerful chip known as the A5, the same microprocessor that acts as the brains inside the iPad. The company also said the new phone would run on two kinds of cellphone networks, GSM and CDMA, allowing its operation worldwide. “When you think about it, only Apple could make such amazing software, hardware and services and bring them together into such a powerful, yet integrated experience,” said Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, who introduced the new phone at an event here at the company’s headquarters.